Do you use grass-fed beef?

[framing fowl]

Can you give us more specifics on what cut you have cooked, how you prepared it, and what temp you cooked it at? That may help us help you trouble shoot. Grassfed needs to be cooked differently than regular beef. Lower temps and slower.

Some helpful resources I have found are onlygrassfed.com and grassfedandhealthy.com

If you have a library or want to invest in your cooking library, I HIGHLY recommend Tender Grassfed Meat by Stanley A. Fishman. Tons of great recipes and tips.

Hope this helps because no one should be tortured with tough meat.

 

[citylife]

One of the ways I tenderize tougher meats is by soaking them in my homemade Kefir Milk for a few days. That does seem to help. I am a bit shocked your meat is tough.
I have not had that problem with pastured beef.
Hope this helps

 

[so lucky]

Well, the stew meat I just cooked on low in the slow cooker. I recently tried grilling organic pork steaks--tough. And baked an organic pastured chicken, at 350 for about an hour and 30 minutes--breast was ok but the dark meat was tough, and odd taste.
I do understand that meat can be cooked too long. My mother was so accustomed to having to deal with cheap tough cuts, that she would cook a good steak to death. She never learned to cook a great cut of meat. She was great at chuck roasts and neckbones, tho. It is possible that the stew meat was from a tender cut and I didn't realize it. Guess I should have asked.
However, today I threw some organic grass fed beef soup bones in the pressure cooker, and they turned out great. Best home made soup we have had in a looong time.
I just was kinda hoping to not have to pressure cook them, trying to follow the Nourishing Traditions suggestions and not use the pressure cooker, due to it supposedly killing some essential nutrients in the bone broth. I don't know....some of the things they suggest are far beyond my comfort range. Pretty sure I won't be eating raw liver, for example. But if I get just a handful of helpful, do-able, nutritious principles out of the NT book, my money will have been well spent.
As far as availability, we have at least three businesses here that sell grass fed meat. We are pretty much a farming based community, and have a lot of big family farms. Some of them have decided to go with the flow, I guess, regarding the grass-fed trend. Thanks, ya'll, for your suggestions and comments.

 

[deb4o]

We only eat grass fed beef and have for years. We raise our own, we do give him some grains
but not to much maybe a coffee can a day. We have the most tender meat-our T-bones are to die for. I have never had a problem with tough meat. The breed we like is angus or angus cross. Never raised anything else. Maybe thats why it is so good!

 

[moxies_chickennuggets]

Well, if you cannot eat the meat because it is cooking up tough, and unedible......you're still not getting those nutrients. But, if pressure cooking allows you to consume it....even if it destroys some nutrients.....you're still benefitting then.

 

[kstaven]

Grassfed doesn't mean good quality beef. You need good quality pasture and the right cattle to do it well. Some regions just don't have the grass to raise good beef and some breeds just don't produce on grass well. Too many generations selected for the grain bin.

 

[~gd]

Might I suggest that grass vs grain fed is not the cause of the difference in tenderness [taste maybe] If an animal has to walk a distance to find food it is going to develope muscles and strong muscles are going to be tough. Put another way poor pasture = tough meat. Grain fed beef is usually closely confined and the rancher brings the food to it muscles develope but they aren't anywhere near as strong [tough] as a ranged animal. Remember those trail drive movies with cowboys? When cattle are forced to walk from Texas to Kansas the beef is going to be darn tough. it is going to be more tender when the cattle cars are unloaded because the cattle didn't move much. Confine them in a feed lot for a few months and they will get more tender. In the modern day I have eaten beef taken right off the semi-desert in the Rocky Mountain rain shadow [western great plains, takes 4 acres to support one beef] and that beef was tough! Take the beef from where the grass is green and lush, still grass fed, but good grazing makes a big difference.~gd

 

[JacksFlock]

no one should be tortured with tough meat


Nor should a cow be tortured so we can have tender meat.

Having said that, We just finished our first grass fed cow and we didn't get one tough cut at all. Everything was tender, and tasted better than any beef we've ever bought in the supermarket. We just ordered #2!

 

[BarredBuff]

I think it would be good just to have them grow up on pasture, then maybe a month or two before slaughter they should be confined and grain fed. IMO

 

[hqueen13]

We get all grass fed from the farm club that we buy from and I LOVE it. I haven't found much that is tough, and the ones that are are usually the naturally tough-er cuts. The stew meat is to DIE for, and the roasts are amazing.
We figured out the trick to cooking a good steak, or almost any meat is nothing more than salt. Salt the meat and then put it on the grill or in the oven. The salt seals in the juices, and keeps it nice and moist, which helps with the tenderness a LOT. A few times when the steaks were thin they ended up over done and that made them tough, too. We cooked our turkey breast at thanksgiving in the oven with nothing more than butter/salt/pepper over it and it came out FANTASTIC.