I have been accused of many things in my life, but lately it’s getting out of hand. What has a lot of folks tied into a big ugly knot at the moment is my assertion that the best steak I have ever eaten was grass-fed. For those of you who make your living growing corn, processing it, or feeding it to cattle, my apologies. But the truth is the truth.
That said, I am not an out-and-out enemy of all beef that’s grain-fed. There is such a thing as a great grain-fed steak. I wrote as much in Steak, but the sentiment seems to have been lost on most. (Perhaps I should have underlined it, or jacked up the font size?)
To prove my point, I would like to tell you about a steak I ate the other night. It was a rib steak from a 100% Angus cow raised in the great steak-loving state of Connecticut. It came from a place called Greyledge Farm, and the cow that produced it ate – gasp! – grain.
It just didn’t eat very much. Greyledge practices something called light graining. This is a technique that used to be popular here, and that you still find an awful lot in Scotland and Ireland. A light grained cow eats about 4 lbs a day of grain, as opposed to the 18 lbs a day fed in a feedlot. In the case of Greyledge, it’s 4 lbs a day of oats, barley and corn, with a little soy thrown in.
The steak that results is somewhere in between a grass-fed and a grain-fed steak. It has the big flavor profile of grass-fed beef. But it has the consistency and rich mouthfeel of a grain-fed steak. The rib eye from Greyledge was exactly that, a tender, juicy and beefy piece of meat, a solid home run. Was it as nuanced as the very best grass-fed steak I’ve tasted? Not quite. But it was really, really good.
More to the point, I’m not sure how a 100% grass-fed steak would taste at Greyledge. I haven’ visited the farm, but a lot of grass-fed steak I’ve tasted from the eastern North America has been sub-par if not worse. My guess is it has something to do with decades of soil depletion due to improper farming techniques. Then again, maybe western soils make for better tasting beef, period, or maybe the larger size of western ranches make high-level grass-farming a more straightforward proposition. But not to worry, easterners, because all it takes is a little grain to put it all right. As much of a fan as I am of grass-fed beef, I think a lot of farms would do well to followthe Greyledge example.
This raises an even bigger question: Do you farms like Greyledge have to use grain? Is there a feed that could give a nutritional energy boost without the negatives of of grain? That’s something I’ll address in the next post.
