This is one of our number one questions- "What percent fat is your ground beef?"
The short answer is this:
Our best guess is approximately 90/10 most weeks. I don't drain it when cooking.
But this blog isn't for short answers. This is the place to explain things. And the real answer is: we don't know, and it changes each week.
We send one animal to our local butcher each week, or every other week during the slower seasons. They cut that meat, and 2 weeks later, we get that same beef back.
When I've gone to help cut beef, I was surprised to see that the ground beef comes from our trimmed fat and deboned shoulder, ribs, roast, shank, etc. Any meat or fat that we don't get cut into larger cuts goes together into essentially a large rubber tub on the table. When that tub fills up, that tub full of beef trim goes into the grinder. About 30 seconds later, it comes out the other end looking like play dough.
If it's a fatty animal, the ground beef has more fat in the ground beef. If it's a lean animal, it has less fat. But either way, it's rarely fatty when I cook it, and I would estimate 90/10 most weeks.
My question is- how did this "percent fat" come about? When did grocery stores begin labeling beef with this "90/10" or "80/20?"
And my theory is that this stems from large processing plants butchering super-lean cows, such as dairy cows, for ground beef. Those have so little fat that you almost would need to add fat to the ground beef to get it to hold together.
Fat cattle that are butchered for high quality beef cuts (you saw lots of those dead recently on the viral video) have a LOT of excess fat. When you see a highly-marbled ribeye, that same source cow more than likely had a large layer of fat around every organ.
I am guessing that at large processing plants, the extra fat from fat cows could potentially go into a vat of just fat. Then the lean beef from dairy cows & skinny cows could go in a separate "meat" pile. Then the 2 can be mixed to accurately get the 90/10, 85/15, whatever mixture.
Tara Morris
Three Twelve Beef
225-721-1313
threetwelvebeef@gmail.com
@threetwelvebeef
The short answer is this:
Our best guess is approximately 90/10 most weeks. I don't drain it when cooking.
But this blog isn't for short answers. This is the place to explain things. And the real answer is: we don't know, and it changes each week.
We send one animal to our local butcher each week, or every other week during the slower seasons. They cut that meat, and 2 weeks later, we get that same beef back.
When I've gone to help cut beef, I was surprised to see that the ground beef comes from our trimmed fat and deboned shoulder, ribs, roast, shank, etc. Any meat or fat that we don't get cut into larger cuts goes together into essentially a large rubber tub on the table. When that tub fills up, that tub full of beef trim goes into the grinder. About 30 seconds later, it comes out the other end looking like play dough.
If it's a fatty animal, the ground beef has more fat in the ground beef. If it's a lean animal, it has less fat. But either way, it's rarely fatty when I cook it, and I would estimate 90/10 most weeks.
My question is- how did this "percent fat" come about? When did grocery stores begin labeling beef with this "90/10" or "80/20?"
And my theory is that this stems from large processing plants butchering super-lean cows, such as dairy cows, for ground beef. Those have so little fat that you almost would need to add fat to the ground beef to get it to hold together.
Fat cattle that are butchered for high quality beef cuts (you saw lots of those dead recently on the viral video) have a LOT of excess fat. When you see a highly-marbled ribeye, that same source cow more than likely had a large layer of fat around every organ.
I am guessing that at large processing plants, the extra fat from fat cows could potentially go into a vat of just fat. Then the lean beef from dairy cows & skinny cows could go in a separate "meat" pile. Then the 2 can be mixed to accurately get the 90/10, 85/15, whatever mixture.
Tara Morris
Three Twelve Beef
225-721-1313
threetwelvebeef@gmail.com
@threetwelvebeef
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