Cooking Instructions & General Hints
Tips from The Grassfed Gourmet Cookbook
One of the biggest challenges of marketing grass-fed beef is to educate my customers on cooking methods. Once the beef is out of my hands I have no control over how you treat it. Grass-finished beef is lower in fat and more flavorful but cooked improperly, it can be tough.
The Grassfed Gourmet Cookbook, by Shannon Hayes, helps a great deal with cooking grass-finished beef. It is very well written and helpful! I am not the greatest cook in the world, but I have been enormously successful with recipes from this cookbook.
In it she talks about 4 basic principles for cooking grass-fed meats:
- Put away your timer, get a good meat thermometer and be prepared to use it. Since fat works as an insulator, your lean roasts will cook in the oven faster than roasts that are higher in fat.
- Turn down the heat. If the heat is too high when grass-fed meat is cooked, the fat and moisture exit which will toughen the protein.
- Learn when to use dry-heat cooking methods (for tender cuts-loin cuts for example) and when to use moist-heat methods (for tougher cuts-shoulder cuts for example).
- Ease up on the seasonings and sauces. Shannon says, “As a nation, we’ve become accustomed to the flavor and texture of conventionally raised, factory-farmed meats. Animals raised on pasture produce meats that have a distinctive flavor.” They should be seasoned lightly so as not to mask its true flavor!
Shannon Hayes explains that once you learn these basic principles, you can adapt any of your favorite recipes to accommodate grass-finished meat.
For hamburger patties, Shannon Hayes also suggests shaping 6 oz. of hamburger into a 4 1/2″ “bowl”: 3/4″ around the edges and 1/2″ thick in the center. The patties will cook evenly and not turn out puffy or round. Cook hamburger to at least 140°.
Sous Vide Cooking for Steaks
I’m not sure why we didn’t know about sous vide cooking sooner! Recently we discovered how much easier it is to cook steaks, especially grassfed and finished ones! If you have trouble with steaks being too well done on the outside and too rare on the inside, this method is for you! Sous vide is a cooking method in which food is placed in a plastic pouch or glass jar and cooked slowly in a water bath at a precisely regulated temperature. We bought our sous vide cooker from Amazon.
Find our Sous Vide Steak recipe HERE.