Our steers are raised and grazed on 100% USDA certified organic pasture.
Our grass-fed beef price for this year is $3.70 per pound (same price as last year) hanging weight for the beef, your total cost with slaughter and processing is explained below. All figures are approximate since we won’t know the exact weights until time of processing.
Slaughter is $50.00 and cut and wrap is $.75 per pound based on hanging weight. The wrapping is in cryovac, which will keep your beef for up to two years.
Assume 1,000 lbs. on the hoof for figuring purposes, it may weight up to 1,200 lbs. or as little as 900 lbs.
55% of live weight on rail = 550 lbs. x $3.70 = $2035 + (.75 x 550) $412 = $2447 + $50 = $2,497
Cut and wrapped meat = 75% x 550 = 412 lbs. (plus soup bones & sausage) (sausage is optional)
$2,497 / 412 lbs. = $6.06 (This average will run from $6.50 to $6.75) per pound for your organic pasture grazed, grass-fed beef. This is about the price of one pound of ground grass-fed beef at a Farmer’s Market or at Whole Foods Market. This is clearly the most economical way to feed your family with all the health benefits of grass-fed beef.
For half a beef the cost is just that, one half of the above cost of a whole beef.
We like to dry age our beef in the cold storage from 14-21 days, so add this time to the slaughter date to determine your pickup date. We deliver your steer to the locker plant and you pick it up, unless other arrangements are made with us in advance.
Category: Food
👓 What are beef cheeks? | Gourmet Traveller
What exactly are beef 'cheeks'? Gourmet Traveller breaks down what beef cheeks are, how to cook them, and what to pair them with when you introduce them into your kitchen.
Spoils from a cow party
Thirteen of the “partners” got together at 11:30am to draw lots to form a line to take turns choosing individual cuts from the cow. Though it was just one entire cow, the butcher threw in some additional tongues, testicles, and other additional offal for us to select from as well.
Here’s what was included in my 18 turns:
1.2 lb New York steak, bone in
1.0 lb New York steak, bone in
1.2 New York steak, bone in
1.4 lb Ribeye, bone in
0.5 lb top sirloin steak
0.5 lb top sirloin steak
2.4 lb bottom round roast
2.5 lb beef tritip large
0.4 lb top sirloin steak
1.9 lb beef short ribs
1.1 lb stew beef
1.1 lb stew beef
1.1 lb stew beef
1.2 lb beef cheek
1.4 lb beef oxtails
0.9 lb beef oxtails
1.4 lb beef testicles
1.3 lb beef fat
Everyone also went home with an additional box of ground beef. Mine contained 16 packages of 1lb each of ground meat as well as 2.2lbs of beef ground with heart and 0.9lbs of beef ground with liver.
This comes out to 41.6 pounds of meat in all and price of roughly $11.78 per pound.
Sadly I missed out on some nice shoulder cuts, some tongue, and I had tried to get some tripe instead of the testicles, but alas, there were apparently other menudo fans in our group.
My freezer is chock full of some serious meat for a while. Most of the cuts are fairly straightforward and I’ve already got a good idea of what I’m going to do with them. I will have to take a peek at what I ought to do for the Rocky Mountain Oysters. I’m leaning toward turning them into some delicious tacos, but I’ll take any suggestions from those who’ve done other variations before.
I do want to make an inventory of the price per pound for individual cuts versus typical markets to see how the pricing works out, as I suspect that some likely did better than others within the “lottery” system this set up. The tough part will be finding local markets that purvey this high a quality of meat for a reasonable comparison.
👓 Why Most of America Is Terrible at Making Biscuits | The Atlantic
There’s a scientific reason no one outside the South can nail them.
👓 Mama Lu’s in Monterey Park Busted For Selling Bootleg Dumplings | Eater LA
Plus Hippo’s new happy hour, and Melisse’s dinner deal
👓 Old School Knife Sharpening Meet Peripatetic Knife Sharpener Julio Toruno | Pasadena Now
Julio Toruno is intimately involved with knives everyday. But he’s not a survivalist, a knife collector, nor a cutlery dealer. He doesn’t live in a remote compound, and he’s never heard of all the TV survivor actors. Toruno is a quiet man who’s found his peace through the art of knife-sharpening. Many times a week, he sets up temporary shop from the back of his truck, mostly at farmer’s markets, and not far from Sierra Madre. “Have stone, will sharpen,” seems to be his motto.
🔖 Urban Appetites: Food and Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York by Cindy R. Lobel (University of Chicago Press, 2014)
Glossy magazines write about them, celebrities give their names to them, and you’d better believe there’s an app (or ten) committed to finding you the right one. They are New York City restaurants and food shops. And their journey to international notoriety is a captivating one. The now-booming food capital was once a small seaport city, home to a mere six municipal food markets that were stocked by farmers, fishermen, and hunters who lived in the area. By 1890, however, the city’s population had grown to more than one million, and residents could dine in thousands of restaurants with a greater abundance and variety of options than any other place in the United States. Historians, sociologists, and foodies alike will devour the story of the origins of New York City’s food industry in Urban Appetites. Cindy R. Lobel focuses on the rise of New York as both a metropolis and a food capital, opening a new window onto the intersection of the cultural, social, political, and economic transformations of the nineteenth century. She offers wonderfully detailed accounts of public markets and private food shops; basement restaurants and immigrant diners serving favorites from the old country; cake and coffee shops; and high-end, French-inspired eating houses made for being seen in society as much as for dining. But as the food and the population became increasingly cosmopolitan, corruption, contamination, and undeniably inequitable conditions escalated. Urban Appetites serves up a complete picture of the evolution of the city, its politics, and its foodways.
📺 “Cooks Country” Spaghetti House Classics | PBS
Test cook Christie Morrison makes host Julia Collin Davison the perfect Hearty Beef Lasagna. Then, tasting expert Jack Bishop challenges host Bridget Lancaster to a tasting of block mozzarella. And finally, test cook Lan Lam makes Bridget a new weeknight favorite—Chicken Scarpariello.
👓 A few words about Cindy Lobel | Recode
She was part of the Recode family, and her tragic death last week leaves a hole in our lives.
👓 Cindy R. Lobel, Who Studied New York’s History Through Food, Dies at 48 | New York Times
Professor Lobel was among the first historians to explore the economic and social elements of city life in the 19th century through the lens of eating.
I’ll have to bookmark her book to check out. With any luck, friends and colleagues will finish the book she’s currently working on.
History cannot tell us the origin of wheat
History celebrates the battlefields whereon we meet our death, but scorns to speak of the ploughed fields whereby we thrive; it knows the names of king's bastards, but cannot tell us the origin of wheat. That is the way of human folly.
Hat tip: Jeremy Cherfas’s excellent Eat This Podcast
Photo credit: poppy in wheat field flickr photo by Grey World shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
🎧 “Risen” | Our Daily Bread | Eat This Podcast
August 15th is Ferragosto, a big-time holiday in Italy that harks back to the Emperor Augustus and represents a well-earned rest after the harvest. It is also the Feast Day of the Assumption, the day on which, Catholics believe, the Virgin Mary was taken, body and soul, into heaven.
Is there a connection between them? And what does it have do with wheat?
Apologies to listeners in the southern hemisphere; this may not reflect your experience.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 5:01 — 4.1MB)
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It hasn’t gotten past me how much brilliance and thought went into the wonderful dense rich crumb that is the title of this episode. The audio is excellent as always, but I also notice there’s some fantastically overlaid background music that some may miss because it’s so subtly done. This is my favorite episode of the series so far.
The more I think about these episodes, which I like to listen to when I can devote my full attention rather than as background noise while I’m commuting or doing something else, I think they could be easily strung together to make a fantastic documentary.
🎧 “The inside story” | Our Daily Bread | Eat This Podcast
That kernel of wheat isn’t actually a seed or a berry, at least not to a botanist. I have no intention of getting into the whole pointless is it a fruit or a vegetable debate, so lets just agree that no matter what you call it, the wheat thing is made up of three major parts: bran, endosperm and germ. In this episode, a little about each of those parts and what they do for wheat.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 4:01 — 3.3MB)
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📺 Will Food GO BAD in a Vacuum Chamber? | YouTube
Today we're seeing if putting different types of food in vacuum chambers can keep them from going bad after a month!
👓 When basil has gone to seed: contemplative pesto | Mark A. Matienzo
We are growing three kinds of basil in our garden: “regular” basil, purple basil, and Magic Mountain basil. The regular basil and Magic Mountain basil have been thriving quite a bit; the purple basil, less so, as it is growing at the base of the regular basil plant. But the other two, my goodness. The regular old basil was going to seed, though, much to the chagrin of my partner. I’d promised for weeks on end to do something with all that basil, as the stems grew woodier, and as the flowers turned from brilliant white to the brown of kraft paper. Meanwhile, the Magic Mountain basil also grew tall and bushy, went to flower, but only because that’s what it’s supposed to do. I’ve been reading Edward Espe Brown’s No Recipe: Cooking as Spiritual Practice, slowly, after picking it up on a personal retreat a few weeks ago. I have found it to help ground me in the practice of cooking, something I love to do when I have time (as I do right now, in the midst of time off from work), but loathe when I’m too busy. Standing outside, next to our raised bed, with garden shears in hand, I finally felt myself reconnect back to these lush and marvelous green and purple wonders growing in our raised beds. I felt the sunlight envelop me, and I saw how absolutely blissful the pollinators were amidst our basil plants: not just bees, but spiders, ants, and other bugs, too. And with all that basil, there’s but one thing to do: make lots and lots of pesto. One of the things I’ve learned over time is that there’s no wrong way to make a pesto. Yes, there are wrong ways to make pistou, or pesto alla genovese, but that’s beside the point. With a good blender or food processor, you can do just about anything. With a mortar and pestle, it’s harder but you can appreciate the effort. But you don’t need a recipe to make pesto. Sure, there are proportions you have to get “right,” but that’s all a matter of preference, too. So here’s a recipe, lovingly imprecise, in the spirit of Ed Brown, based on how I make it. It might or might not work. It’s up to you to figure it out. pesto about four parts green stuff (herbs, greens, arugula, carrot tops, what have you) one part fat (oil, lard, butter i guess) one to one and a half parts umami/textural stuff (shredded hard cheese, nuts, breadcrumbs, maybe some dried mushrooms if you wanna get wild) some alliums (garlic if you’re a traditionalist, could get wild with some scapes or shallots) Chop how you’d like, as much as you’d like. Mix it together in some kind of bowl or vessel. Add salt, pepper, or anything else you like. Taste it; if you don’t like it, add what feels like it might be missing. If you make a lot, stick some in the freezer as a nice surprise. If you want to make a spread out of it, add some yogurt, or sour cream, or coconut milk.