Tag Archives: Meat

Beef Drought Sale – September 2018

Custom Beef Drought Sale

We’re offering a one-time special prior to September 10 on custom-processed bulk beef to lighten the burden on our pastures during this increasing drought situation in East Texas.

Our beef is 100% grass-fed and grass-finished, and is fat, marbled, and excellent quality. No tubs, no cubes, no grains, no licks–just rotational grazing, good breeding, good minerals, and plenty of finishing time!

Grass-fed Beef by the Half

Halves are expected to hang at 250-275 pounds. Take-home poundage (excluding fat/organs) expected to be about 160-185 pounds.

Price is $4.50/lb hanging for a half (does not include processing).

Processing typically runs about $1/lb before extra charges (for sausage, etc).

Payments are to be made in 3 parts:

Deposit to reserve is $300, paid online prior to September 10. Space is limited–first come, first served!
Balance to be paid via mailed check after hanging weight is determined. (To pay online, add 3% convenience fee.)
Processing to be paid upon pickup—ready in early October.

Pickup can be either at the butcher in Carthage, at the ranch in Jefferson, or via our next drop point of your choice in Tyler, Longview, Marshall, or Shreveport after beef is picked up from butcher. We will work with you on this once an exact pickup date is known.

Save 10% if you want the whole animal! Only $4.05/lb (plus processing) for a whole. Get with friends to reserve a whole cow!

What to Expect

This batch of steers is young and fat and will make excellent beef. Your price is based on the carcass or “hanging” weight of the animal after the entrails, hide, and hooves/head are removed. The carcass is then aged to improve flavor and tenderness, and will shrink a bit during this time due to moisture loss. Then, when surplus fat and edges are cut away and various muscles are deboned, the yield is reduced to an approximate 66% of the hanging weight, depending on your cutting preferences. So if your side hung at 250 pounds, you can expect to get approximately 66% of that back as “cuts,” or a final take-home yield of 165 pounds.

We’ll walk you through the cutting process if you are not familiar with how it works, and we can make recommendations specific to our animals that will ensure your satisfaction!

Here’s a very rough breakdown of what you will receive with typical cutting:

Steaks (Strip, Filet, Ribeye, Sirloin, Fajita): 15% of cuts yield
Roasts (Chuck, Arm, Shank, Round, Rump): 30% of cuts yield (but highly customizable)
Burger, Round Steak, Stew Meat: 40% of cuts yield (highly customizable)
Other cuts (Ribs, Brisket): 10% of cuts yield
Liver, Organs, Bones: 5% of cuts yield

**These numbers are estimates only and will vary based on the anatomy of your animal and on your cutting requests.

How Much Freezer Space Will It Take?

We find that planning for 1 cubic foot per 25 pounds of meat works well to be able to navigate your freezer inventory reasonably easily. According to this estimate, you will need at least 7 cubic feet to store a typical half beef, or 1 mid-size home chest freezer. But in case the animals run a little larger, it never hurts to plan for extra freezer space!

How to Get Started

Ready to sign up for your half of beef for the winter? Hop over to our online reservation site: https://squareup.com/store/shady-grove-ranch/

After you place your deposit, we’ll get in touch to complete your cutting orders. Thanks for supporting our work!

Why Meats?

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I have some food for thought for you to ponder as we begin to answer some of the Big Questions that surround what we, the Cadmans, do and why we do it here at Shady Grove Ranch.

I’m going to do a series of brief articles that will hopefully build your foundation of understanding your food sources and also that encourage you to continue your commitment to supporting locally, naturally-raised foods.

I’ll keep it concise, and it won’t be research-paper-worthy (my researchy engineering inner self is protesting!), but I will provide a few sources to back up my claims. If you really care about the truth about food, I encourage you to dig deeper also.

So the first question is… when we started looking for healthier foods to heal Matt’s autoimmune gut disease (ulcerative colitis), why didn’t we start with vegetables?

Veggies were, after all, a little easier to come by in those days before the organic hype was reborn (this was back in 2006), and certainly they were cheaper than the “natural meats” we could find at that time. But when we ultimately took the plunge into farming, we focused primarily on animal products (beef, pork, milk, eggs, chicken, etc), in spite of the fact that they were more costly and difficult to begin with compared to vegetable production.

Now that’s not to say that we didn’t eat/buy any veggies (because we did a personal-size garden even before farming), and it’s not to say that it’s not important to choose organically-raised produce over conventional. And finally, that’s not to say that we’ll never have veggies as a farm product–in fact, we have grand plans to the contrary! (OK, enough with the disclaimers…)

2013-jerica-shevi-axl-garden

But fresh, organic produce wasn’t the focus of our healing strategy. Why not?

One of the biggest influences on our eating choices was the work of Dr. Weston A. Price. Dr. Price traveled the globe during the beginning of globalization, but while there were still a significant number of people groups that continued to consume their ancestral diets. He studied groups like the Inuit, Celtic peoples, Polynesians, Aborigines, Masai, and indigenous Swiss.

Dr. Price looked primarily at dental health, fertility, and disease resistance as health indicators, and found that, though the peoples he studied ate quite a variety of foods, the common denominator was that the healthiest ones did not eat any refined westernized foods (like canned goods and processed sugars and grains), but they did eat at least some animal products from wild or sustainably-farmed sources, and they especially prized foods rich in fats and minerals, and fermented products.

Price-esque foods that Americans might be familiar with and have access to today would be things like bone broth, lacto-fermented vegetables, grass-fed butter and raw milk, pasture-raised eggs, grass-fed beef, pastured pork and chicken… Sound familiar? 🙂

P1020720

Meats, or more correctly, animal products (milk, eggs, broth, fats, as well as protein), are key to nourishing and healing a struggling body. Vegetables are lovely and certainly bring something significant to the table, but Matt never could have made his recovery on just those.

Careful cuts make it go together easily.

We began with things like whole pasture-raised chickens, homemade yogurt, lots of bone broth, and plenty of fat. And sure enough, Matt slowly got well and remains so as long as he sticks with his diet rich in animal fat, homemade broth, fermented foods, and minimal processed junk. I can’t tell you how revolutionary it was to be told that foods like butter and bacon were good for us, after a life of feeling guilt for eating those foods because of those “artery-clogging saturated fats.” That phrase was probably ingrained into you growing up, too!

Challenge: Try to find some real saturated fat at today’s typical grocery store. It’s only in a handful of foods! Even the meats are finely trimmed and practically devoid of fat. Clearly we have effectively eliminated saturated fat (be careful to distinguish that from hydrogenated vegetable fat) from the standard American diet, and yet our general health as a nation continues to deteriorate. Animal fat is not the problem. I believe it is our lack of nutrient-dense foods and the bewildering presence of additives, chemicals, preservatives, and drugs that are taking their toll on our health as a nation.

bacon

This is a glimpse at the beginning of our journey and the reason we started farming with animal foods instead of vegetables. Animal products, even conventional ones, are the most nutrient-dense and contain nutrients that cannot be found anywhere else, despite what a lot of vegetarian hype may suggest. I don’t write that to offend–I was once a vegetarian, too! But when I really began to study, I began to understand that we need animal foods. And our soils need animal pressure. But both need the right kinds.

Next time we’ll talk more about what the right kinds of animal products are and how to distinguish them from mainstream marketing ploys.

Thanks for reading! Hope to hear from you soon!

Chicken Backs for Soup

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Question: What are chicken backs?

Answer: “Chicken backs” are the core of the chicken that is left after the breast, wings, and legs have been cut away for parts.

Our chicken backs are fairly meaty and are typically used to make broth and to harvest the remaining meat. 2013 is the first year we have been able to offer this cut, and we are excited to share the results with you.

9 Chicken Backs in a 16-quart stock pot, ready for cooking!

I (Jerica) love making huge batches of broth as opposed to small ones, since it is a time-intensive process, and adding more bones and water simply increases the yield, but not really the work. In this case, I decided to make about a half batch in my 16-quart pot just so I could document what I did easily. I used 3 bags of chicken backs, which have 3 carcasses each, so 9 total. It was about 13 lb of chicken backs, and would have cost me roughly $35 if I had bought them from myself at farmers’ market.

I took the thawed chicken backs overnight and placed them in the pot and covered them with water. I put it on medium-high and brought it to a boil, then reduced the heat to low to keep the broth at a visible simmer.

Let ‘dem bones simmer for at least 20 hours, removing the meat from the bones after the first hour. Add a little apple cider vinegar to improve the mineral extraction.

After an hour*, I removed the backs to a platter, let them cool for 20 minutes, and then picked off the meat from under the shoulder blades, along the back and neck, and what remained on the breast.

*The cooking time for meat-on cuts is important. If you cook it more than an hour, the bones will begin to fall apart and the meat will turn tough and stringy. It is best to pick off the meat after an hour of simmering, then return the bones to the pot to continue simmering.

The grand finale–cooked chicken meat gathered about an hour into the cooking process. This will be used for soup, tacos, or some other quick meal calling for cooked, boneless chicken.

With moderate thriftiness (aka no, I didn’t get every tiny scrap of meat, but I did try to get most of it), I was able to collect about ½ cup of meat per carcass, or about 1.5 cups per package of 3 backs. I tossed the bones back into the pot, put the meat into the fridge, and kept cooking the bones for another 20 hours or so.

When the time came, I poured the broth through a colander into a large metal bowl (careful—it’s HOT!). I got about 4 quarts of broth which was not terribly golden because I had neither used vegetables nor roasted the backs, which are nice touches but not necessary. I usually use broth in things like rice or as a soup base to which I will add veggies anyway, so I don’t worry about adding the flavor during the broth-making process. It comes later.
I was pretty happy with the yield. The leftover meat is great for tacos, casseroles, BBQ sandwiches, or even to throw into soup that you make with all that broth.

So for $35 and some elbow grease, I got 4 quarts of broth and 4.5 cups of meat. That’s about 2 lb of meat. If we assign a price to that, say $8/lb, that leaves about $19 for the broth, or about $5 per quart. I have no idea what the going rate is for store-bought broth or ground chicken, but I can tell you that this stuff is the best quality you can get. Homemade bone broth is rich in minerals and gelatin (that’s why it gels in the fridge and the commercial stuff doesn’t!). And it is an excellent way to get additional value from parts of your meat that you otherwise might have just thrown in the trash.

In this case, I’d say the chicken backs are wonderful if your primary goal is to get loads of broth plus a little meat if you don’t mind the work. If you want the golden chicken broth color right off the bat, you’ll need to add bouquet to this, such as herbs, carrots, celery, and onion. I usually opt to wait to add the veggies and use them as part of the meal for frugality’s sake, but I frequently add scraps that I have saved in the freezer, such as potato peels, carrot tops, celery leaves, onion roots, etc, in order to improve the flavor, and again, make something out of nothing that is extremely nutritious.

So from chicken backs you get two things: broth AND meat, which is perfect for making chicken tacos. Check out Jerica’s real lard-made flour tortilla recipe here.

Or you can read about how to make homemade broth and soup in more detail.