Buyer Beware Beef

Last night I made a classic beef stew of red wine, potato and carrots. It would have been a fine stew, a good stew, had the beef not been dreadful. This meat we’ve been choking down for about a year has the texture and flavor of cardboard—flat cardboard, not the corrugated kind, which might have been an improvement.

A few years ago, friends who live in the Central Valley knew a rancher who wanted to sell a steer. We bought a quarter of the carcass, negotiated among the other buyers which cuts we’d take, and brought it home. It wasn’t the meat you’d find in a steakhouse, but it made for decent steaks and good hamburgers. And the price was great.

Soon after we finished the freezer-full, the rancher asked if we’d be interested in buying another ungulate. We decided to go for a half steer this time. My husband, son and I set out for the valley with a car full of coolers, paid our $400 and returned home with a stand-alone freezer’s worth of steaks, ground beef, stew meat, roasts, ribs and soup bones.

Our first taste of the meat—T-bone steaks, grilled—left us woefully disappointed yet optimistic that other cuts would prove more satisfying. After all, the last animal had been edible. But after trying each cut, we gave up hope and dejectedly chewed our way through the rest of the sorry beast. Spices helped its lack of flavor, but nothing—not even long, slow stewing—improved the texture.

The steer was 19 months old, grass-fed and corn finished; the meat was aged two to three weeks. According to common wisdom of animal husbandry, the time of slaughter, feeding schedule and aging were correct. So what went wrong? When we asked the rancher, he wrote in a long, apologetic e-mail that perhaps the animal had been slaughtered too young, before the meat had a chance to become marbled with enough fat. He was aiming, he said, for meat that was lean (before it had marbled too much) yet still tender (because of its youth).

I asked Shannon Kelly of the California Beef Council what would render the meat of a young steer so unappetizing. She suggested that perhaps the animal could have benefited from more time on the corn lot. “The more corn they eat, the more intramuscular fat they have,” she explained, adding that more marbling makes the meat tender. In addition, poor packaging can cause freezing to draw out the moisture, she said.

We bought the half steer because we wanted to support a local rancher, and we loved the price. It was also great to have a freezer filled with months’ worth of dinners. For now though, we’re buying our beef at the store.