Is better meat worth the price?

Yeah I wish I held on to my old chest freezer.  I gave it away when we bought a new fridge and moved the old fridge to the basement.  It does make me a little nervous because if it failed I don't think I would know until we noticed the smell upstairs.  We don't rotate things in and out everyday.  Right now it has $250 worth of SRF meat.  Off to Amazon to price out alarms...

Biggreenpharmacist said:

Ladeback69 said:

My wife has a person that she calls on for work that raise beef in Kansas and has offered us a chance to by meat from them at no more then $2 per lb.  The cows are grass feed them finished on gain and oats before butchering.  This reminds me we need to look into this.  You can buy a whole car, a half or just 100 lbs.  I think it would be worth it.

I'm not sure I'd buy beef from a car salesman. 

Darn fat fingers again.  I think you know I meant cow. 

  

Now I will not buy from the guys with the freezer in the back of there trucks at all and Omaha Steaks are over priced for what you get.  

nolaegghead said:

ksmyrl said:

Agree with most of what was said. It's mainly about what are you willing to sacrifice? Money, or the meat? I try to buy the highest quality available and buy all my beef, pork, and chicken from the local butcher. But I don't know his suppliers. I've been threatening to buy a 1/2 cow from a local (1 hr away) grass fed place that gets rave reviews. I really should do it, but I'm worried my freezer will die and I'll be out several hundred dollars. That is just me being paranoid. For special occasions I buy the high grade stuff and can definitely tell a difference.

You can buy a freezer alarm for about $15.  Freezers are one of the most reliable appliances in the home.  If it does fail, you have plenty of time to start the egg and organize a party.

I like the way you think... It's totally just me being paranoid. Our freezer has been awesome for years now. Only issue, was a tripped breaker, most likely due to a thunderstorm, while we were on vacation some years ago. Lost everything in there, and it was a lot. Imagine coming home to 7 day old room temp meat and all that goes with that...uggh. Took a month to get the freezer deodorized. Thank goodness it's in the basement.

Ladeback69 said:

Biggreenpharmacist said:

Ladeback69 said:

My wife has a person that she calls on for work that raise beef in Kansas and has offered us a chance to by meat from them at no more then $2 per lb.  The cows are grass feed them finished on gain and oats before butchering.  This reminds me we need to look into this.  You can buy a whole car, a half or just 100 lbs.  I think it would be worth it.

I'm not sure I'd buy beef from a car salesman. 

Darn fat fingers again.  I think you know I meant cow. 

  

Now I will not buy from the guys with the freezer in the back of there trucks at all and Omaha Steaks are over priced for what you get.  

Yeah. I havent bought much beef in nearly a year. I traded my uncle for a couple calves and a friend and I fed them out on his small pasture for a while before finishing them out with grain and protein. Ended up with a whole cow in the freezer. Store bought meat doesnt even compare. 

TN_Sister_State said:

The farm I found also sales individual cuts and delivers to our local farmers  market. Here is the site I found them on.

http://www.localharvest.org/

The Farm I use.

http://www.peacefulpastures.com/

I spent quite some time looking over loacalharverst when trying to find nearby sources. It a good site. Seeing the link you posted, I decided to make a quick visit, and see there is now another interesting farm selling in my vicinity.

The thing I really like is that the farm, like others, is continuing to raise breeds no longer deemed suitable for commerce. Its unfortunate that most everything raised for food is not raised for the best taste or nutrition. The situation w. pork is pretty sad. Tamworths were once the "bacon" hog. Mulefoot, the "ham" hog, from Europe, the Mangalitsa, the "lard" hog. I was extraordinary fortunate to have some Ossabaw Island hog last summer. Really unbelievable. The Ossabaw are direct descendants of the original Iberico Black Hog, but mutated to become the fastest fat producers of all. Pretty much feral, and hard to manage, very fast runners. Sigh. The fellow raising them went out of business. He was able to sell off the piglets, but I don't know where they went.

The moral of the story is this. If you want animal species to survive, if they are edible, raise them and sell thr meat for a premium. Humans have this rather self satisfying quality that equates to "If its good to eat, keep them alive and healthy."

The answer is sometimes.

I've cooked a few prime graded full packer briskets, then needed to do another for a family get together and couldn't find anything better than a select.  After trimming and cooking I couldn't tell the difference.  You may not have to trim a prime quite as much so I dunno, but the end product was no different.

On the other hand the butcher shop I buy most of my meat from is "Angus certified" whatever that means.  His steaks are noticeably better tasting and he has better cuts than the grocery stores, so it's definitely worth going there.  He usually cheaper on full racks of spare ribs too and overall he's probably competitive on a cost basis.

Ragtop99 said:

ksmyrl said:

... I've been threatening to buy a 1/2 cow from a local (1 hr away) grass fed place that gets rave reviews. I really should do it, but I'm worried my freezer will die and I'll be out several hundred dollars. That is just me being paranoid. For special occasions I buy the high grade stuff and can definitely tell a difference.

Are frozen high grade meats better than never frozen lesser grade?  Steaks that I've had to freeze and use later never seem as good as fresh, but maybe that's because its a frost free freezer and not a stand-alone unit like a chest.  We've gotten out of the habit of buying and freezing most meat.

From what I've read, blast freezing, which seems to be standard, is a good way of preserving quality. The meat freezes fast enough that the ice crystals will be small enough to not pierce the muscle cell walls. This assumes the frozen meat is well packaged and not subjected to dehydration.

I had read some years ago that more modern facilities use flash freezing w. liquid nitrogen. I don't know how common that is. But in that case, the  fluids between the cells have more water than that in the cells. So, not only are the ice crystals very small, but the cells do not rupture because the fluid between them is already hard.

Unless you are freezing w. dry ice and a brine solution, home freezing will not produce results comparable to blast freezing. That is, most commercially frozen meat should be very good quality, perhaps indistinguishable from unfrozen, assuming they never had a chance to thaw.