Buying a Side of Beef

by Bannon

My husband came home from work a month ago and told me that one of his coworkers was looking for someone to share buying a cow with.  I have been thinking about doing something like this for quite a few years, but living in the city I had no idea how to go about doing it.  So when he mentioned that this coworker has bought a side of beef for a few years now and they love the quality of the meat they get I said yes without hesitation.

I will say that we did this on a whim without doing much research into the whole thing.  I knew it would be something that would be good for us and if it cost a bit more out of pocket at first then so be it.  That's what I did when I signed up for our summer CSA* as well, I found one I liked and just dove in head first and that turned out to be a great decision. 

He brought home this Angus Beef Chart so we can pick out what cuts of meats we would like.  We will get the beef on May 14th and there will be somewhere around 200 pounds of roasts, steaks and ground beef. The cost is going to be around $3-$4 a pound.  I'm not sure that will save us money in the long run but I know the quality will be so much better than what I can get in the store.

As we were finalizing some of the details of purchasing the side of beef I started to hear more about this "pink slime" that is creeping into our meat supply.  First it was in meat from fast food restaurants.  Then we hear the government has purchased millions of pounds of the pink slime for school lunches.  Finally today the media is reporting that 70% of the ground beef we buy has pink slime in it as well.  This makes me even more happy and willing to spend the money for the side of beef.

So my job right now is to continue to serve meals out of the freezer so we have space for all of this as well as figure out what cuts of meat to choose to get.  If any of you have experience with what I should choose leave a comment, I'm taking all suggestions.


* CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture and what it means is that you pre-purchase shares, or a membership of a farm.  Specifically for us, we get weekly from May to September fruits and vegetables that we pick up at the farmers market.  We prepay this every fall for the upcoming year.