In an attempt to ween our household off the corn industrial complex (see chapter four in Michael Pollan's The Omnivore’s Dilemma, we’ve been eating more grass fed beef.
It’s lower in fat, has more omega-3s than corn-fed beef, and generally the animals are treated more humanely. Not to mention that farms with grass fed animals have a much smaller carbon footprint.
While I confess that I like the flavor of well-marbled beef, fattened up on a corn diet, I’ve learned that the way you cook grass fed beef has everything to do with the taste. And the conventional rules of cooking beef do not always apply.
Fascinating! Thank you so much for the cooking tips, I've been away from corn-fed beef for a while now but never knew this.
click on my name to read an article I read yesterday. in a taste test, the grass fed beef was not only the tastiest, but it was also the cheapest.
Rare is the best way to cook [and eat] beef anyway. Anthony Bourdain warned in Kitchen Confidential that if you order a steak well done in a restaurant, you'll get the worst piece of meat they have on hand, because the chef assumes you wouldn't know a good piece of meat anyway. And after it's been incinerated, what's the difference?
Check out The Grassfed Gourmet Cookbook. Click on my name and you can see the intro and check out two of the recipes.
Full disclosure: My good friend worked on this book.
"Salmon, for example, contains between 0.68 and 1.83 omega-3 fatty acids per one 3-ounce serving – as much as 47 times more than beef."
http://www.nebeef.org/nutrition_faqs.asp
"When lipid content is standard, a serving of grassfed beef would provide 88.5 mg of omega-3, roughly 13% of the RDI for EPA/DHA, while the conventional product would supply an estimated 54.6 mg or 8% of RDI for omega-3."
http://www.whiteoakpastures.com/24.html
So even if it doubles the amount, it still is piddling compared with fish.
We're the grass fed beef ranch mentioned above by Caitlin that won the Slate taste test. We have a fairly extensive cooking section for grass fed beef on our web site, and will be extensively rennovating that section (adding directions for many more specific cuts and lots of new recipes) in the next few weeks. You can head to our main page, www.alderspring.com or go direct to the first page that starts the section on cooking grass fed beef
http://www.alderspring.com/cooking/html/cooking.html