>It's possible to find grain-fed beef that was not fattened at the last
>minute in feed lots. My grandfather used to raise them, and when I was a
>kid my family would by a whole butchered steer from him every use.
>Delicious. Don't know about Oz, but I've heard the grass-fed beef in
>Argentina can be quite tender and tasty. My experience of it in Brazil was
>less good (of course this was 1988 and I was in NE Brazil eating on the
>cheap). Growing up in Kansas City, you eat a lot of steak. It would take
>some convincing to get me to believe that grass-fed beef can compete with a
>really fine, grain-fed, aged rib-eye. Oh damn, now I'm getting hungry....
Likewise, it would take some convincing to get me to believe that beef that is raised in feed lots is worth the extra money.
Let me tell you about the best beef I have eaten. This was butchered on the farm by a mobile butcher, who came around to the farm it was grown on, killed it in the paddock where it had been for several months. (That instantly improves the quality. Stress the animal for hours or days by loading it into a truck and carting it to an abbattoir and you pay the price in quality.)
But this was also a young beef steer that I had picked out and purchased from the farmer several months earlier. The farmer isolated it in a paddock next to his house with just one other steer. This paddock was fairly big for just two steers and had heaps lush green grass. Then, fortuitiously, the mobile butcher took over three months to actually turn up. So these two steers just got fatter and fatter for three months.
The amount of fat on the meat was stupendous. But it was incredibly tender and unbelievably tasty.
Probably uneconomic to raise beef like that for sale. But if you were considering raising them for your own consumption, I'd recmomend it.
The better farmers around here will often finish off lambs by feeding them grain for a week, to fatten them up for the saleyards. Maybe some beef farmers do the same. But it really is uneconomic here to grow beef and lamb entirely on grain. The feed=lot cattle are mostly exported overseas, to people with more money than sense. Like the Japanese and Americans.
Mind you, there's more to beef than grilled steak anyhow. Some of the toughest cuts are also the tastiest. There's nothing wrong with a good old=fashioned stew, or steak and kidney with dumplings. Beef curry. Not to mention beef chilli, which is my favourite. (I have a recipe to kill for.) Ground beef patties, I love them. All the way down to your spicy spaghetti bolognaise. The list goes on, there's plenty of delicious ways to eat the tougher cuts.
It wouldn't be the end of the world by a long shot if the supply of tender beef ended.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas
>morbidsymptoms
>
>On Tue, Apr 7, 2009 at 6:41 AM, Bill Bartlett <billbartlett at aapt.net.au>wrote:
>
> > At 11:25 AM -0500 6/4/09, Carrol Cox wrote:
>>
>> Grass-fattened cattle or other meat animals will of course be
>>> considerably less tender -- good-bye sooner or later to tender steaks.
>>>
>>
>> That is not true at all. Trust me, I've never eaten anything but
>> grass-fattened cattle. Feed lot cattle are reputed be be very delicious too
>> of course, but correctly managed grass fed cattle are quite good too. So
>> good that I've never really had much desire to try the more expensive
>> feed-lot beef.
>>
>> Anyhow, I suspect that feed lot beef is probably very high in fat and
>> hormone and of course anti-biotic content. the latter because of the
>> appalling sanitary conditions in crowded feed-lots.
>>
>> Bill Bartlett
>> Bracknell Tas
>>
>>
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