Raising your own beef for consumption....

[DaveMN]

we buy about 100# of ground beef from a friend who butchers a couple of steers each year. I think the meat is sweeter and it is very lean. cooks up so well and do not have to drain the fat from it. I will admit that i do purchase ground beef from the store to mix into my lean ground beef when we will be making lots of hamburgers on the grill. I am not sure if the store bought is ground finer or if the fat in it, but the burgers stay together better when grilled.

 

[rjv_piper]

My family hunts alot, mainly deer and elk. I love that meat. It is the best. We butcher the animals ourselves so we don't have to pay. It's really easy actually... just hang it up, and cut off the slabs. That way you know how big you want the pieces or how much fat you want on there.

 

[Their Other Mother]

Quote:
Now that you mention it, we would have the butcher add in some fat to the ground beef. I always thought it was because we butchered a leaner dairy breed not a beef breed.

 

[greyfields]

Quote:
No breed of cow tastes very (if at all) different from another. How they are raised and fed is the biggest factor. We do our beef grass fed and grass finished, so they get no grain (except for the occassional nibble when we need them to behave for vacinations). It makes all the difference when your beef is not coming from a feedlot.

 

[greyfields]

Quote:
I am very skeptical of the whole "eat lean meat" health advice. Since those guidelines came out, obesity and heart disease are at an all time high despite retail cuts of meats becoming leaner and leaner.

It's not fat that's the problem. It's what's **in** the fat. Grain fed ruminants have bad proportions of omega fatty acids and saturated fats compared with grass fed. These are all known to lead to heart disease and weight gain. Coincidence?

We raise meats for sale through the farmer's market here, and most our customers are "foodies". They went every scrap of bone and fat they can get on the cuts, so they can then elect how to prepare the meat and how to deal with the trimmings. I remember having the conversation with my doctor one time and he admitted that there really isn't enough cholesterol in an egg or red meat to affect your cholestorl blood levels by more than a point or two... and that was if you ate them every single day. Something werid is going on where the way we are allegedly supposed to eat doesn't match up with the reality of our bodies.

 

[Jolyn]

Quote:
I've been looking on Craigslist and there are a ton of freezers for sale....however renting a meat locker would be a great idea if it was available.

Also good idea to have the steer picked up. Oh and i was talking about "me" getting attached....not just my kids.

 

[wynedot55]

the types of feed control the amount of fat on a steer as well as the breed of steer.as well as how you feed the steer.the breed doesnt make the meat leaner or fatter.its how the calf is fed that controls that.

 

[mullers3acers]

We have been wanting to raise our own beef for years and we finally got our first steers about three weeks ago. They are like big puppies once they get use to you getting close to them. So will see how the beef taste. The guy that sold them to us says that we can butcher in December. My dh thinks in the spring.

 

[Their Other Mother]

Quote:
I've been looking on Craigslist and there are a ton of freezers for sale....however renting a meat locker would be a great idea if it was available.

Also good idea to have the steer picked up. Oh and i was talking about "me" getting attached....not just my kids.

I know!! The older I get the wimpier I get. I'm trying to talk my sister into getting a calf so we can split it. But I want her to keep it at her house & I'll just give her feed money and trade her my eggs. I know how attached I am to these silly chickens.

 

[hazelton farms]

Quote:
From what I understand, the dairy breeds DO taste differently from the beef breeds, and the jerseys in particular, from what I understand (giving some lee-way here since I've not tried any yet!) jersey meat tastes very diff. I'll know soon as we are raising both a jersey steer and a black bladie steer for our freezers in the same field and on the same feed and are currently almost exactly the same age. It might have something to do with the leaness of the animal, one not having the same ability to put on the fat as the other, however. I can ONLY go by what I read however.

Stacy