Beef, It Ain't Gonna Be the Same

If you buy a beef from the same farmer, at the same time, eating the same feed, the same breed, every year, you should get beef that tastes exactly the same, right?

Not necessarily.   It's probably giving the cows a little too much credit, but they all behave a little differently, and any number of factors can affect how your cut of meat or hamburger tastes even down to the individual animal's personality (I'd like half a beef from a cow that practices yoga at least once a day, please?).  When you start adding in other factors like grass finished (what they ate the last three months before slaughter) vs. grain finished, what part of the country the animals were finished in (or for Montana, which part of the state or even county), you end up with the perfect recipe for variability in the texture, and in a significantly greater measure, the flavor of the beef.    

Grain finished animals will probably have the most consistency, overall, because they're fed massive amounts of grain (with a much smaller portion of locally raised forage or trucked-in forage to keep their rumens working properly) to get the animals "on the gain" and finished as soon as possible.  This is the human equivalent to feeding a teenage boy a box of donuts and half a dozen of your grandma's favorite butter cookies every day and sitting around watching TV all day.  You will gain weight and you'll gain it fast.

Grass finished animals are fed forage consisting of grass, hay or silage, or stockpiled grass (grass saved for the purpose of grazing later in the year).  This is the equivalent of feeding that same teenage boy dried cabbage, broccoli, and celery and telling him to put on enough weight to be a lineman on the highschool football team.  They will gain weight slowly and they'll likely be eating many different forages to try to get there.

The grass finished animals have far greater probability of having inconsistent taste, especially if the two animals you're comparing are butchered at different times of the year.   Why?   Because different forage is available at different times of the year and whatever that particular animal has been eating before its slaughtered will influence how it tastes.  Even coming from the same herd, from the same farmer, even from the same mother cow, it will be at least slightly inconsistent and could be significantly different.

I personally have had meat from several of my animals that varied widely in flavor and tenderness.  The best to date was probably Rowdy, who had an incredibly intense flavor (who a grain-finished fan probably wouldn't have liked, to be honest), was a short, stocky little steer, and always was the first to find the holes in the fences.  I recently tried a steak from #309, which had a much milder flavor than Rowdy and was less fatty, but he was almost 150 lb heavier than Rowdy was when Rowdy was slaughtered.  

Why the difference?   I have no idea.  Maybe Rowdy liked the weeds better than #309, which gave him a stronger flavor.  Maybe #309 ate more salt?   Tough to say.

So why did I write this blog?   I wanted folks to know that they're getting what they paid for, but they're also getting some baked-in variability in what flavor of beef they're going to get as well.    We do our best at KD Farms to provide a consistent product, but even the absolute best controlled environment will still produce animals with some variability in the flavor.

Well, it's nine degrees below zero right now and the cows aren't going to get the 4255 started and feed themselves.  I had better get cracking!

Be blessed! 

-Kenny