Steak!

One of the hardest parts of our job is taste testing steaks from other farmers we are considering including in our subscription.  Today after a long day's work of doing chores and building chicken houses, we continued to slog away by eating a perfectly cooked sample steak, some homemade sweet potato fries with from scratch aioli and homebrewed IPA.  You can be sure that this dinner will be featured in our newsletter later this summer...  Some parts of our job are pretty sweet!

Tonight we sampled a steak from a new farm that specializes in slow growth, small framed cows. We both were in love with this particular steak.  It was so tender that we almost wished that it was a little tougher so that we could have eaten it slower!  Each bite was a buttery luxurious beefy unforgettable moment in our lives...  Ok, that might be a little over the top, but it really was quite good. 

One thing that was interesting was that even though the steak was so rich with plenty of marbling, it really tasted wholesome and healthy.  Other rich dinners we've had sometimes feel a little more like dessert, but it was clear that this steak was healthy and nourishing for us...  the contrast of such a rich butter flavor and the sense of being good for us was really quite profound and interesting to observe.

Needless to say, we're going to include this farm's beef in our subscription.  The beef is all pasture raised and 100% grass fed.  The hay the cows are fed in the winter comes from the same farm, so there isn't any transporting of nutrients from farm to farm.  Our steak tonight was missing something compared with supermarket beef: It didn't have any residual growth hormones that have been proven to stimulate human breast cancer or cause early onset of puberty in adolescents.  Instead these lucky steers are healthy and don't need antibiotics or other unnatural treatments.  Our country is the only industrialized country that allows the cancer growing hormone Zeranol to be injected into beef, pork and lamb.   For citations and more information about this chemical used in our meat supply, visit our website and click under products. 

We are really happy about the beef farmers we are working with for our subscriptions.  It has taken a lot of time and hard work taste testing, but we think the effort was worth it!  Each of our partner farms have a unique take on beef and we are excited to showcase the results from different types of cattle raised with different management styles. 

For those of you who are interested in learning more about the not so subtle nuances of raising high quality beef and how to taste test, check out the book Steak linked on our website.  It is a funny short book, well worth anyone's time.