Grassfed beef is widely lauded as a healthier meat option. But those praises turn to criticism when you get it into the kitchen where it’s gained an undeserved reputation for being tough, gamey, and dry. As a result, the advice for cooking grassfed beef is rife with warnings:
Don’t cook it over high heat!
Don’t cook it past medium rare!
Don’t salt the meat before cooking, or it will be dry!
I took some of these tips to heart when I read them repeatedly. They caused me to doubt my own experiences, and so I tested them all. I avoided searing my steaks, cooking roasts past medium rare, and salting the meat before cooking it. Not one of these techniques made the meat perform better or become more tender or juicy, and I missed the salt and alluring brown crust. Most surprising of all was that while some cuts of the leanest grassfed beef may take less time to cook than their conventional counterparts, other fatty cuts can take longer.
This experiment restored my trust in the methods that have produced fantastic results for the nearly ten years I’ve been cooking only grassfed beef. I detail those guidelines in this section and implement them in every recipe, but, to sum it up: season it well; brown it whenever you’d like; use an appropriate cooking method; and cook it shy of the serving temperature you want.
Before I get into these basic cooking principles, it needs to be said that not all grassfed is created equal. Like other artisanal products, including bread, cheese, and wine, grassfed beef is not consistent from producer to producer, place to place, or year to year. Some ranchers have devined the magic formula for producing pasture-raised beef that is out of this world. (To this day, no one has pinpointed whether it’s the genetic line, the soils, the grasses, the age at slaughter, or a host of other variables that make exceptional muscle meat. Likely, it is a combination of all those facets.)
Your first mission is to find grassfed beef you adore (How to Taste Artisan Beef, page 34) through the best source available to you—and there are many more all the time. Once you have high-quality beef in hand, you can cook it to your satisfaction. I’ve worked with dozens of brands that vary by breed, age at slaughter, finishing feed, and brand to ensure that the cooking principles laid out here succeed in every instance.
Skillful cooking of grassfed beef begins by matching each cut with the proper slow or fast method (The Cut-Cook Connection, page 53). Nearly every end cut, from the shoulder to the cheeks and the rump to the oxtail, is tough and needs low, slow cooking. Only the middle parts—all the places you could reach if you were mounted on a steer—can handle the hot and fast cooking of a flaming grill or smoldering cast-iron pan. This holds true for grassfed beef as well as natural and organic beef from any breed or source.
But grassfed beef is different. Its composition, textures, and tastes are unlike conventional, grain-finished beef and more like wild game. To cook it well requires fine-tuning standard cooking methods to preserve its moisture, highlight its tenderness, and complement its distinctive flavors.
It’s funny how strange regular beef looks to me now, especially in its raw state. Side by side, grassfed and generic commodity beef don’t even look like the same meat: grassfed is red as a beet instead of rosy pink from increased myoglobin pigments; it is nearly fat-free where most beef is fat-streaked and marbled; the meat is compact and firm like a relaxed bicep muscle, not slack and yielding. Finally, the cuts from grassfed beef are smaller—sometimes dramatically, by as much as 40 percent by weight—a convenient form of portion control for anyone who wants to eat less meat.
What sets grassfed beef apart in the kitchen is its leanness, which makes it more sensitive to heat. From the outside fat cover on the muscles to its internal marbling, fat protects muscle fibers from heat. Grain-fed beef, well insulated by its fat, can be cooked at higher temperatures for longer periods of time without catastrophe. In grassfed beef lacking any extra fat insurance, timing is everything.
Beef is up to 75 percent water, but lean beef has a lower water-holding capacity than fattier beef. The moisture trapped inside the meat combines with fat to create sensations of juiciness in your mouth. It also affects perceptions of the meat’s tenderness, which explains why grassfed beef got a reputation for being tough when it was only dry.
Prolonged cooking of grassfed beef contracts the muscle fibers and rapidly squeezes out the juices to the point meat scientists aptly call protein hardening. This is why, when grilling steaks or hamburgers, the longer the meat is cooked, the tougher and less juicy it becomes. Cooking methods and times that preserve the moisture present within the meat are critical to good eating.
All of these qualities affect your chewing experience, since lubrication from both fat and moisture increases the sensations of tenderness in your mouth. (Super lean beef is called squeaky beef, which nobody likes.) Still, even the most tender grassfed beef cuts will not be as soft as grain-finished beef, and long-braised cuts, including brisket and pot roast, will retain some texture, not “melt in your mouth.” While high-quality grassfed beef can be as tender as grain-finished beef, it will always offer a bit of chew—a trait I consider a bonus, since I like to chew.
Size is another factor that distinguishes most grassfed beef from standard commodity beef and shortens cooking times. Whole roasts of grassfed beef are often smaller because the animals gain weight much more slowly over their lifetime on pasture than in feedlots. (Cattle fed high-calorie rations maintain weight gains consistently from month to month while cattle on grass gain only at the height of the grass-growing season.) Beef from some small-framed breeds, such as Corriente, are smaller still.
Your awareness and attention to these physical distinctions will help you to master grassfed beef cookery.
I believe strongly in salt. The application of salt to meat plays a tremendous role in bringing beef to its full flavor potential. To season beef well—salting it—is the single most effective way to enhance the eating satisfaction of any meat you cook.
In general, I add salt to beef either well in advance of cooking or just before cooking. I use kosher salt to season meat in its raw state. The coarseness of the kosher salt gives me more control, and I can see where I’ve salted. I use enough salt so that the meat looks as if it has a light dusting of confectioner’s sugar. You can also use coarse sea salts, such as sel gris, a moist, mineral-rich salt from France that looks like sand from an exotic beach (Sources, page 272).
In order to protect my salt stores from getting contaminated while I’m cooking, I always portion the amount I think I’ll need into a small dish. I take a big pinch of the salt between my index finger and thumb, raise my arm about six inches over the meat, and rub my fingers together to sprinkle it on. This is not for show. Salting from on high ensures that the salt disperses more evenly and I get much more control than I ever could from a saltshaker.
I came across one grassfed manifesto in which the author urged home cooks never to salt until the meat was cooked because the salt would draw out precious moisture and make it dry. No one wants dry grassfed beef, least of all me, but I think the trade-off for the small amount of moisture loss is worth it. When salt hits the surfaces of the meat it does initially attract the water from within. But, over time, the water reverses its course and draws the salty moisture back into the meat, seasoning it profoundly and enhancing the taste of the meat in the same way a brine does without just making it taste, well, salty.
Here’s my rule of thumb. The larger the piece of meat, the sooner it can be salted. I generally salt roasts up to twenty-four hours in advance, while steaks get a dusting of salt fifteen to twenty minutes before they go on the grill. Early seasoning is a principle I cook by, whether I’m making a stew or a skillet supper, a steak, or a smoked brisket. Try it out for yourself, and see what you think.
Good seasoning from salt applies in general cooking too. I didn’t write the instruction to taste for seasoning as often as I’d have liked in every recipe. But if you came to one of my cooking classes, I’d pause frequently to let you dip a tasting spoon into the dish to judge for yourself whether it needed more spices, herbs, or most of all, salt. Adopt the habit of tasting from these recipes as you go from step to step, and I promise that your cooking will improve instantly and immeasurably.
For those who have health concerns and follow a sodium-reduced diet, cut the salt called for in the recipes by 25 to 50 percent. If you salt when the instructions specify, the amount of salt you do use will go a long way toward enhancing the whole dish.
In its raw state, beef is lackluster in flavor, but heat changes everything. During cooking, meat undergoes a wonder of physical and biochemical changes that still enthrall meat scientists. The heat-induced transformations are so complex—rearranged proteins, enzyme hyperactivity, and water distribution, to name a few—it’s not fully understood how they turn bland muscle into tempting meat. But it’s something we all witness in the kitchen whenever we see beef change in color and texture, shrink, and develop aromas that prove irresistible to all our senses.
The one topic that the experts and home cooks comprehend concretely is browning, famously known as the Maillard reaction for the early twentieth-century French scientist who first identified it. I don’t need to convince you that browned meat tastes incredible, but achieving good browning is an acquired skill. Many home cooks are tentative about applying the high heat required to kick-start the chain reaction that leads to a well-seared crust. (Years ago, while cooking at my friend Jill’s house in Sonoma, California, I turned on the burner to heat a sauté pan and she said, “I didn’t know my burner went that high.”) Be bold, but not reckless—you’ll only end up with tough meat and char—and you’ll develop a feel for the high-heat cooking method the Maillard reaction demands.
Any of the tender cuts from the middle section of the cow—the rib and the loin primals (The Tender Middle, page 54)—respond well to the intense dry-heat of grilling, roasting, and broiling. However, I rarely broil because it’s hard to monitor the meat during the final sensitive cooking stages and easy to overcook it. When I can’t grill, I use a skillet on the stovetop instead to fry hamburgers and steaks—either in a little oil or on a bed of salt (Salt-Seared Steak with Chard-Gorgonzola Gratin, page 194).
For tough cuts that are best braised, I depend on browning as a first step to creating an all-important flavor layer that builds during simmering. Called combination cooking because it uses dry and moist heat (the initial browning of beef, or bones, or both, followed by simmering in liquid) makes the most splendid pot roasts, soups, and stews.
It’s worth mentioning that while browning is the most straightforward way to reach beef’s full eating potential, it’s not the only way. You’ll find plenty of recipes in this book, especially with meat cuts that are best cooked with low, slow heat, that do not depend on the Maillard reaction.
There is no general timing guideline that holds true for each and every cut of grassfed beef. It’s important to be attentive while cooking and to use all your senses—and, tools, especially a reliable instant-read thermometer—to judge the moment when the meat is done. There is no crime in under-cooking beef; you can always cook it longer if needed. But you can never cook it less, and over-cooking is by far grassfed’s greatest pitfall.
None of this means that you shouldn’t cook grassfed beef over high heat. I crank up the heat to grill steaks and hamburgers and roast larger cuts over 400°F to create the all-important crust that makes them mouthwatering. But I am vigilant about timing. When grilling, I don’t leave the meat unattended, and I use a timer or watch the clock set for the minimum amount of time it should take for medium rare. With a poke of my index finger, I can test hamburgers and steaks to gauge their firmness. (You can pick this trick up in a single cooking session simply by touching your meat when it’s raw and several times as it cooks so that you can feel with your own fingers how the meat firms up. With a few more cooking sessions, you’ll have it down.) You can use an instant-read thermometer instead (slide it into thin cuts from the side), or when in doubt, take the meat off the heat and knick it with a sharp knife for a visual check. Always take into account that no matter how small the cut of meat is, its internal temperature will continue to climb once you remove it from the heat source (Give It a Rest, page 203). And, note that grassfed beef appears more red or pink than grain-fed when cooked to the same temperature.
To cook any cut of grassfed beef to medium or beyond, I switch from direct, high heat to indirect or low heat—or even off the heat to rest—the moment it hits medium rare. Then, I stand by for the last few minutes until it reaches the final cooking temperature minus a few degrees to compensate for carry-over cooking. For example, when grilling, I slide the meat to the coolest part of the grill, put on the cover, and create an oven to finish cooking. When searing steak in a skillet, I slip it into a 300°F oven. More often, the residual heat from the pan is all it takes to bump the meat from medium rare to medium. When roasting in the oven, I turn the oven off but keep the roast inside. A low-heat finish is the key to grassfed beef cooked to your liking.
Cooking with grassfed beef is often about what you do not have to do. One dramatic difference I’ve found is how little excess fat there is. With roasts and steaks, little trimming is required. With stocks and soups, I end up with mere spoonfuls of fat to skim and only a thin layer, often less than one-quarter inch on top, when they’re chilled. When browning chuck roasts, beef cubes for stew, or ground beef, it’s rare that I have to pour off any fat before proceeding with the recipe. Less fat also means less overall shrinkage in the meat, which means more value for you.
Mineral, wild mushroom, sweet grass, game, and umami (profound savoriness) are some of the words used to describe the tastes of grassfed beef. They also serve as clues for flavor pairings, which form the basis for this quick reference guide. These are ingredients I’ve found to have an affinity to grassfed beef in particular, which has a more pronounced flavor than conventional beef and doesn’t get easily masked. I naturally veer toward these staples whenever I’m devising a dish for dinner, and you will encounter examples of their usage throughout this book. Refer to it for your own creations, either singly or in combinations that play up the unique, resplendent qualities of great meat (Sources, page 270).
•Anchovies, whole packed in salt or paste, plus fish sauce and Worcestershire
•Arugula
•Chiles, fresh, roasted, and puréed
•Coffee, ground for rubs or brewed for stews
•Fresh herbs, especially thyme, rosemary, and bay leaves
•Fresh ginger
•Horseradish, especially freshly grated, and wasabi
•Juniper berries, whole for broths, crushed for rubs
•Miso, soy sauce, and oyster sauce
•Mushrooms, especially wild, including morels and porcinis
•Mustard, smooth or coarse
•Paprika, sweet, hot, and smoked
•Sea salt, including sel gris, smoked, flake, and other finishing salts
•Shallots, fresh or sautéed
•Sichuan peppercorns, toasted and ground
•Spirits, including brandy and whiskey
•Sumac, the mild and tart rust-colored fruit from the Middle East
•Tart fruits, including cranberries, figs, apricots, and tamarind
•Warm spices, especially allspice, cinnamon, and cloves
•Wine, especially red, and fortified wines, such as port and Madeira
Grassfed beef is a seasonal product, available in most parts of North America from June to November. In other months, you’ll only find frozen, and if you buy your beef directly from a rancher or through a meat-buying collective, frozen is what you get.
Fresh meat has long been the standard, but the reality is, especially for grassfed, frozen is better. It allows the ranchers to determine the best time of year to slaughter their animals—typically after the height of the grass-growing season in late summer or early fall. The beef can be aged, butchered, packaged, and stored for future sales without any concerns about compromising the meat’s quality or safety. (According to food industry experts, good packaging and a freezer below 0°F are the most important conditions for preserving meat for up to one year.) One meat scientist also mentioned that freezing can improve grassfed beef’s tenderness because the ice crystals puncture the meat fibers, though it does purge additional water once thawed. (FYI: the red liquid in the bag is not blood but water colored red from myoglobin, a protein pigment in muscles.)
For all the benefits, defrosting is a challenge from both practical and food safety standpoints. It requires planning ahead to defrost meat and preventing its temperature from climbing above 40°F within four hours of cooking. Remembering to defrost your meat will become habitual once you become a loyal customer to your favorite grassfed rancher.
CAN I COOK FROZEN BEEF?
Ideally, you will start with a piece of meat that is defrosted all the way to the center. Yet three of my rancher friends have confided in me that they cook frozen beef all the time. One admitted, “I just stick it frozen in the oven and it comes out great.” “How long?” I asked. “All day,” came the reply. Of course, frozen beef will cook eventually—taking four to five times as long as a defrosted piece of beef. What you sacrifice is some control over the doneness, unless you’re cooking a tough piece of meat, like chuck roast. The critical downside is the increased potential for bacteria to grow during the long period when the beef is in the temperature danger zone of 41°F to 140°F. So, for pot roasting, large roasts, and soups, when the finished temperatures will be well above 165°F, it may turn out just fine. In all other cases, change your menu.
For optimum food safety, beef should be left at room temperature for no more than four hours. So, defrosting on the countertop is not a safe option. However, there are three recommended methods for defrosting frozen meat, listed here in order of speed.
This is the safest, most foolproof and effortless way to defrost your meat. Put the packaged meat in a container to catch any drips and place it on the lowest shelf in the refrigerator with no other foods, raw or cooked, beneath it. It will take a minimum of two days for a pound of ground beef and up to four days for a three-pound roast. When I plan meals for the week, I pull beef from the freezer to defrost at its own pace to use within five or six days. It is amazing how long it takes for meat to defrost in the refrigerator, and it will sometimes still be partially frozen in the center. Whenever necessary, I use the Cold Water Bath method to complete defrosting.
Submerging frozen beef in cold water is the method many restaurateurs use for quick defrosting. Place the meat in a container at least four times the size of the cut for good circulation. Fill the container with cool water (below 70°F) and change the water every 30 to 45 minutes. A pound of ground beef or steak will defrost within two hours. You can expedite the process by letting a trickle of cool water run over the meat. Because of the water waste, I am reluctant to do this except in an urgent situation. It is most effective with steaks and other small cuts or packages of meat or to finish defrosting larger roasts.
This is the riskiest defrosting method, to be reserved for when you’re in a pinch. Wait until just before you are about to cook the meat, because the microwave can heat the meat to unsafe temperatures (above 40°F). Microwaves also heat the meat very unevenly and can even start to cook it, especially ground beef or the tips of steaks. Larger pieces of meat over two pounds that are still frozen in the center fare best. Use short bursts of the defrost setting on your microwave, turn the meat frequently, and cook it immediately.
I created every recipe in Pure Beef using locally sourced grassfed beef, but you can use these recipes with any beef. Depending on the technique and the size of the cut, the cooking times may vary slightly, and you may find the need for more trimming before cooking and de-fatting before serving.
Beginning with the most abundant (and cheapest) cuts, the chapters proceed from ground beef, chuck, and round to steaks and roasts, and conclude with bones and trim. There are recipes for every cut—from the most popular rib-eyes to little-known beef cheeks. This recipe collection offers appetizing examples of nose-to-tail eating and a model for putting beef in balance on your table.
My goal was to make the other components of each dish equal to or greater than the beef. Overall, I reduced beef portion sizes in general and supplemented with beans, potatoes, and grains. Many of the recipes include side dishes to suggest ways to complete the meal; the more side dishes you add, the less prominent the beef becomes. With steaks, I suggest specific ways to serve less meat in combination with seasonal vegetables and salads. With roasts, it’s hard to get beef off center stage (sometimes meat is the point, and that’s okay on occasion), but I hope that you’ll apply what you learn in the other chapters and use your own appetite—adding salads, cut fresh vegetables, and fruits—to create truly fulfilling meals.
Each chapter covers a range of cooking methods suitable to the category of meat cuts included. The first recipe in each chapter is a learning recipe for those who are new to cooking with grassfed—or any—beef and want to follow a foundational recipe such as meatloaf, grilled steak, stir-fry, roast beef, or stock. The recipes that follow within each chapter illustrate technique variations for the appropriate beef cut. Typically, I recommend the specific cut I find least expensive and best suited to the job; you’ll find other recommendations listed under “More Choice Cuts.” Some of these cuts (or their names) may be unfamiliar to you (see the Pure Beef Cut Guide, pages 42-43). I hope that you’ll ask for them wherever you buy beef. Customer requests have a big impact, not only at the individual retailer, and can travel far up the supply chain.
In addition to high-quality meat, these recipes will benefit from the best ingredients you can find and afford. Whenever possible I choose produce that is local or regional and organic. I use eggs from chickens that ranged free and dairy products labeled “pastured,” meaning that the butter, milk, and cream comes from cows that grazed on grasses, never in feedlots. Likewise, the pork meat used in these recipes comes from locally raised pigs, and the pork fat I use for charcuterie is supplied by my butcher. But I’m no purist. I depend on shredded mozzarella, boxed breadcrumbs, and pre-washed spinach, which you’ll encounter in the recipes. With the same eye toward convenience, the recipes list substitutions wherever possible, from canned beans to frozen vegetables.
| BLACK PEPPER | is freshly and finely ground (it really does make a difference). |
| CHOPPED ONIONS | are diced ½ inch. One medium onion yields about 2 cups (8 ounces) chopped. |
| EGGS | are large, preferably from free-ranging local chickens. |
| FLOUR | is unbleached and organic. |
| FRESH HERBS | are chopped and lightly packed and, if possible, locally grown. |
| MILK | can be whole, part-skim, or non-fat unless otherwise specified. |
| PARMESAN CHEESE | is preferably Parmigiano-Reggiano. |
| SALT | is fine salt, preferably sea salt, unless kosher is specified (The Salt Supremacy, page 60). |
| VEGETABLE OIL | is any mild-flavored cooking oil, including sunflower (my favorite), canola, corn, safflower, or olive. For stir-frying, good-quality peanut oil contributes flavor and smells heavenly. |
