Skip the Steakhouse: Aged Grass-Fed Beef at Home
If you’re an omnivore who loves a good steak, you probably already understand that grass-fed beef has more flavor than conventionally raised beef. You’ve probably also had a great aged steak at a steakhouse, but unless you have access to an uncommonly good butcher, you haven’t been able to find or buy an aged, grass-fed steak—until now.
Lasater Grasslands Beef currently sells its beef through its mail order website, and offers 21-day aged tenderloin, ribeye, N.Y. strip, sirloin, top sirloin, flat iron, skirt steak, and flank steak. By July 2013, they will also offer 28-day and 35-day aged cuts—that will rival anything you can get in a steakhouse, for a fraction of the price you might pay at a steakhouse.
The Lasater ranch in Colorado raises grass-fed beef, with no growth hormones, anabolic steroids, or antibiotics. None of the Lasater cattle ever spend any time on a feed lot or eat grain, and as a result, the beef is leaner and healthier with fewer calories and lower in fat. They don’t use pesticides, herbicides, poisons, or commercial fertilizers on the land, and they don’t kill local predators that wander onto the property.
The beef is processed in two small, locally-owned facilities that could not be more different from the huge industrialized plants where most U.S. beef is processed.
Lasater Grasslands Beef has been profiled in articles in National Geographic, Atlantic Monthly, and on PBS’s Nature, not to mention in Eric Schlosser’s bestseller, Fast Food Nation:
The Lasater Ranch occupies about 30,000 acres of shortgrass prairie near the town of Matheson, Colorado. It is a profitable, working ranch that for half a century has not used pesticides, herbicides, poisons, or commercial fertilizers on the land, has not killed local predators such as coyotes, has not administered growth hormones, anabolic steroids, or antibiotics to the cattle. The Lasaters are by no means typical, but have worked hard to change how American beef is produced. Their philosophy of cattle ranching is based upon a simple tenet: “Nature is smart as hell.”
…Before taking over the family ranch, Dale Lasater spent a year in Argentina as a Fulbright scholar, ran a feedlot company in Kansas, and managed cattle ranches in Texas, Florida, and New Mexico. He has come to believe that our industrialized system of cattle production cannot be sustained. Rising grain prices may someday hit ranchers and feelots hard. More importantly, Lasater finds it hard to justify feeding millions of tons of precious grain to American cattle while elsewhere in the world people starve.
…Dale Lasater recently set up a company to sell organic, free-range, grass-fed beef. None of the cattle used in Lasater Grasslands Beef spent any time in a feedlot. The meat is much lower in fat than grain-fed beef, and has a much stronger, more distinctive flavor. Lasater says that most Americans have forgotten what real beef tastes like.
So now, there’s no reason to drop a few Benjamins for a fancy steakhouse dinner (with beef of questionable origins) when you can have “real” aged, grass-fed beef at home.
Photo by TheBusyBrain
