Please forgive the spiritual language, but the way I look at my current situation bears some kind of resemblance to this: After years of wandering in the desert, the lord above first brought me to Texas and changed my situation; then he brought me 44 Farms and changed my life.
This book is all about cooking great steak, and I offer many ideas to that end. But the first and most important requirement in producing superior steak is to start with superior meat. The supplier of most of the beef I use at Knife and my guru in all things meat is 44 Farms, a ranch in Cameron (in east central Texas, close to the middle of a triangle drawn from Dallas to Houston to San Antonio).
One of the maxims at 44 Farms is “Know Your Rancher”—a sentiment I believe wholeheartedly—so let me explain a little bit about them and why they’re so important to Knife and to ranching in Texas in general.
44 Farms is family owned and operated by Bob McClaren, along with his mother, sister, and brother-in-law. But the commercial history of the farm goes back to 1909, when Bob’s ancestors started in agriculture in the rich soils and rolling green hills near Cameron. When they took over, Bob and his sister decided to convert the farm into a cattle ranch and figured that the kind of cattle they wanted to raise was Black Angus, the most common breed of beef cattle in the country. At the time, Black Angus was uncommon in Texas, as the breed is considered better adapted to northern climates (it originates in Scotland). But Bob wanted to prove that well-cared-for Black Angus could flourish in Texas, so he started his herd with the very best Black Angus specimens he could find. The rest is history. He was able to show that with proper management, Black Angus can indeed flourish in Texas, especially in the open grasslands of 44 Farms. The cattle eat grass there, as well as fermented sorghum and cottonseed, and silage, most of which is grown on the property. I’m convinced it’s the cottonseed, which the cattle consume instead of hay in the wintertime, that ends up making the beef taste so good.
Primarily, 44 Farms is what’s called a seed stock operation. That means they put a huge amount of effort into culling the genes of the herd to produce better and better cattle, which they then sell to other ranchers who want similarly to improve the genetics of their own herds. But, proud of the quality he was producing, Bob also decided to create a business to sell his beef on the mass market, something few ranchers do. For 44 Farms, though, selling the beef is also the best way to ensure its quality. To handle raising cattle and selling meat requires diverse skills, lots of coordination, and a great deal of effort, but the product is better and the profit is too.
In 2012, Bob started marketing their meat directly to consumers online at 44 Steaks. But along the way, a new crop of chefs in search of high-quality local product discovered 44 Farms beef. I was introduced to it by the outstanding chef Chris Shepherd of Underbelly in Houston, and it’s been love at first taste. The beef is undeniably great—it has that primal resonant beefy flavor, exquisite marbling, and a beautifully juicy burst of meaty joy when you bite into it.
As good as the steaks are, the hamburger meat they produce is some of the best you can find. In the age when inspection of industrial hamburger can show that the meat composing the single hamburger sitting in front of you came from multiple continents and contains god-knows-what parts of the cow, you want to know where your meat comes from. That’s why I use 44 Farms ground beef in the program I like to call One Burger, One Cow. My ground beef is not coming from different cows in different parts of the world whose various muscles and other parts are mixed together at some (or several) enormous processing plants. The beef I use comes from one place and often from one single animal.
Provenance is not only an issue with ground beef. You will have no idea where most steaks you buy at the store come from. It could be Kansas, Montana, Texas, Colorado, who knows. You won’t know who raised it or how. Buying directly from a single ranch, a single producer, solves that problem. It also, through the act of cooking and eating that meat, provides a greater connection to the land and the people who raised that animal. For me, greater connection means greater happiness.