4/8/2010

This whole grass fed beef thing has me pissed off!

I typed "why does grass fed beef taste like shit?" into Google and got 1,610,000 hits.  I am not alone in finding the taste "off putting" to say the least.

As I dug deeper looking for the reason so many of us don't like it.  The first thing I ran into was our old friend Omega 3 and his nemesis Omega 6.  I wrote about these two guys before; Omega 3 is very good for you.  Omega 6 is very bad for you.

Grass fed beef is high in Omega 3, when that cow is finished with corn feeding at a feed lot, he packs on the pounds and much of that weight is Omega 6.  So it looks to me that the very thing I love about beef is the very thing that is the worst for me!  Fuck me!  Next they are going to say that vodka is bad for your liver!

Just when I was about to resign myself to a lifetime of eating my old boots grass fed beef, I stumbled upon this site: Blackwing  I'm going to order some and see if it is as good as they claim.  Notice that even on their site they mention the balance of Omega's 3 and 6.  I keep bumping into a ratio of Omega 6 to Omega 3 that should not exceed 4 to 1 with 1 to 1 being the ideal.  I'm going to email Blackwing and ask about their meat.

That said, I am still going to try a few more purely grass fed steaks.  Which got me to thinking, I wonder how close to my home, I could find an organic herd of walking New York Strip steaks?  That search led me to this site; Here!  Within an hour and a half drive I can get to all kinds of fresh organic foods!  I found that many of these farms sell directly to many of our areas "better" restaurants.  Places like "The Whip", "The White Dog" and "Southwark".  I just might be able to eat outside of our own four walls!  I may take a drive this weekend and visit some of the farms, if I do, I'll take pictures and report back to you.

One last thought for the day.  Summer is fast approaching and that means corn and tomatoes.  I'll likely blather on endlessly about both as they are two of my favorite foods.  Yeah, I'm a little worried that I'll find that eating too many tomatoes will cause my testicles to roll out my pant leg, or something else equally horrifying.  Anyway, this summer, go out of your way to find a corn stand that sells Mirai corn.  The season is absurdly short, something like three weeks.  It is the best corn I have ever eaten.  You can read about it here.  In short it is a cross between two types of corn, they were trying to get a breed of corn that would be ready for picking before the 4th of July.  Mirai (Japanese for "taste of the future") was the result, there is a downside... it is too tender to machine harvest.  That is why you will only find it "roadside" farms and stands.  And try it raw.  Yes I said raw!  Trust me, just do it.

Thanks for reading!

Bald Bill