CONSUMED
Grass-fed beef: A nutritional correctness dilemma
Posted on Thu, May. 29, 2008
By ENRIQUE FERNANDEZ
URUGUAY STEAKS
A grass-fed Uruguay steer from a company run by Ken Fields, a Miami Beach resident.
The romance of the cowboy cuts deep in American culture and in all the cattle cultures of the world. From the South American pampas to the bull country of La Camargue in France, cowboys ride the range, driving cattle, roping and branding steers, tending herds in endless plains of grass.
But there's another side to the business of raising cattle that is not romantic but repugnant: The feedlot.
Toward the end of its short life, the steer is cooped up and fattened with grain to produce those prized, fork-tender, well-marbled cuts. Trouble is, cows are meant to eat grass, not grain. Worse, feedlot steers are fed all kinds of other stuff, including beef by-products. Herbivores are turned into cannibals.
That -- and hygienic conditions that could instantly turn a steak lover into a vegan -- makes the cattle sick enough that they're given antibiotics. They're also given hormones so they'll grow bigger.
It is these monstrous, chemically enhanced creatures that we grill and eat. We are what we eat, and what we eat is not so nice.
Don't misunderstand me. Despite knowing all this, I still salivate over a rib-eye charred outside and red in the middle. Can I eat my steak and keep from poisoning myself too?
The answer is grass-fed beef. Ironically, there's a limited market for beef from cows that eat what cows should eat. In the food market, the unnatural is the most desirable, the most easily available and the most reasonably priced.
I admit my tastes are in line with the mainstream. Could they change?
Last year, I tasted my first grass-fed beef, courtesy of La Cense, a company that sells beef from Montana online (www.lacensebeef.com). The package contained a sample of cuts, from New York steaks to hamburger. I cooked them on a stovetop cast-iron ridged grill and fed them to family members of all ages. I also grilled some regular supermarket steaks.
Results were mixed, with most diners preferring the supermarket beef. The grass-fed beef seemed dry and lacking in that carnivore kick we crave from steaks. Curiously, the youngest in the crowd, a 13-year-old, pronounced the grass-fed beef superior.
This year I sampled grass-fed beef from a second business, Uruguay Steaks (www.uruguaysteaks.com), run by Ken Fields, a Miami Beach resident. Fields got interested in packaging grass-fed beef for the American market from his best friend, who was from a cattle family in Uruguay, and from trips to that country.
He too had a sample shipped to me, which, like La Cense, arrived frozen. The flavor was rich, the meat juicy, the carnivore kick there. The only catch was the tenderness factor. A filet was fine, but nowhere near the fork-tender texture of grain-fed. Other cuts, like strip sirloin, were chewy, though certainly flavorful. And the skirt steak I simply could not chew my way through.
Possibly I, like most Americans, am conditioned to the marbled (i.e. full of fat) quality of the steaks I've been eating all my life. Even though -- like most foodie snobs -- I favor a stringy but wonderfully flavored onglet over a butter-soft but bland filet mignon, grass-fed beef is a challenge.
I remembered a lunch at a steakhouse in Baja California, where the steaks were not thick porterhouses, but what we call here fajitas, very thin strips that were tender with an excellent flavor. Perhaps thick American cuts need standard American feedlot beef. To do right by nutritional correctness, I need to reorient my tastes. I don't know if I will.
The beef conundrum is one of many I face as a moderately educated consumer. Last time I went to a car dealer, my mind gravitated toward the hybrid, but my heart went to the model with a hot engine, sports suspension and a sweet acceleration. My heart won. What can I say? I'm a city kid who always wanted to be a cowboy.
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