One man. One cow. One year.
The site is finally live!
To everyone who knew about this project in advance, thank you for your help and your patience.
To those just learning of it, I bought a cow. A whole steer. Everything I was allowed to take home, I did.
This blog is the chronicle of that event, and one man’s earnest attempt to make the absolute best use of an entire cow that he possibly can.
To learn why – go here.
To read from the beginning – start here.
Thanks for visiting.
-jared
Hello, weekend.
Glory be, hallelujah, mazel tov and hare krishna.
June was crazy. I bought a cow, climbed a mountain, and essentially didn’t stop moving from May 31 to now.
But June’s over. I’m ready to get some quality weekend on.
And I’m ready to do some beef right. No coasting on steaks and cake recipes today. I want something different. Something I probably wouldn’t have tried if I didn’t have a quarter ton of beef in my backyard. I want to stretch out.
Let’s play with some eye round.
Eye round comes off the round primal, which is essentially the back leg and hip of the animal. It’s a very pretty piece of meat. It’s round, five-ish inches across, and about as long as your forearm. It’s very lean, and uniformly red-pink. Frankly, it looks an awful lot like an intact tenderloin.
I’ve only used this piece once, as a pot roast. Since I’m not very familiar with it, I solicited some expert help. It turns out that despite appearances, this piece is distinctly NOT tenderloin-y.
Hidden inside this silky pink cylinder is a tremendous amount of connective tissue. If you treat it wrong you’ll be chewing it for days. It is as lean as it looks, though, so it dries out very quickly. It’s a riddle, wrapped in an enigma, wrapped in beef.
One solution: slice it very thinly, across the grain, and serve it in liquid.
Pho.
I haven’t cooked much eye round. I haven’t done much vietnamese. Hell yeah.
We start this by making a broth for the soup. It’s kinda like making a stock, except I’m skipping the Reduce To Almost A Syrup Then Reconstitute When Ready To Use step. I’m just going to reduce it to what I’m going to use.
This involves boiling bones (to turn their connective tissue into delicious gelatin) along with some veggies, then discarding all the spent bits. I could skip this, and start with store bought stock. But like I said, I’m ready to get my weekend on. Let’s do this up right.
stock to be
I do a little interwebs research, and find some quality recipes, but I think I’m gonna use this one as my skeleton.
Water. Once my Little Engine That Could stove brings eight-ish quarts to a boil, I add five and a half pounds of grassfed beef marrow bones. Boil vigorously for fifteen minutes, and discard water. You don’t have to do this, but it does reduce the amount of fat/blood/yucky stuff you have to skim off the broth as it’s coming together (and trust me, you will want to skim that off).
I’m gonna add a number of things to the broth when I build it – among them, onions and ginger.
From what I can tell, the French influenced the Vietnamese to char their veggies (especially onion) prior to inclusion into the broth. If fact, one theory of the etymology of “pho” is from the french “feu,” meaning fire (as in the stew “pot-au-feu”)… and the charred onion is considered one of the elements that separate pho from other similar meat soups. So I rub the onions with canola, throw them under the broiler and char them for eight-ish minutes for some Maillard-y goodness.
You can see the flavor!
Let’s build a broth. The mise:
Mise en place. Simple, eh?
A quick rinse, then six quarts of water over the bones. Cover, return to boil. Add charred onions, charred ginger, a cinnamon stick, some whole coriander seeds, some fennel seeds, a cardamom pod, some cloves, and a half a dozen star anise. Follow that up with four-ish tsp of salt, two tbsp of white granulated sugar, and about a quarter cup of fish sauce. Boil, then reduce heat and simmer.
Once everything’s in, I set up a skim station. Otherwise, I pick up my copy of Being and Nothingness and settle in for a few hours.
skim station
Three and something hours later. The house smells wonderful, and I need to get ready to plate.
My rice noodles need hot water for ten minutes to soften. Done.
I pull the eye round out of the freezer and wait a few minutes until it’s still firm, but not really frozen. I slice thinly across the grain.
That bit is key – across the grain.
We aren’t really doing anything chemically to break down that connective tissue… in other words, we aren’t cooking this beef low and slow with liquid to convert collagen (yuck) into gelatin (yum). So we have to do something physically. To wit, we have to slice that connective tissue into very tiny pieces.
Thin beef at the ready, I prepare the condiment platter. One of the wonderful things about this dish is that it’s extraordinarily simple, and you can make it exactly how you like it at the table.
Big plate. Add chopped cilantro, mint leaves, basil leaves, sliced jalapeno, mung bean sprouts, lime wedges, more fish sauce, hoisin, and sriracha. This plate lives on the middle of the table. Next to it, the sriracha, fish sauce, and a jar of hoisin.
You don’t need to anticipate what somebody will like. They can build it themselves.
We’re ready. Strain and dump out anything chunky. We’re left with a lovely, golden broth. I bring it to an enthusiastic, rolling boil. This broth has work to do.
Bowl. Very thin beef slices at the bottom. Add boiling broth. Soft noodles. Then on to the table for whatever other accouterments folks want.
I go for some mint, cilantro, a little basil, two slices of jalapeno, a handful of bean sprouts, a dash more of fish sauce, and a squirt of sriracha.
My wife is entirely different. Mint, cilantro, basil, and that’s it.
Verdict? This soup is simply unreal.
When the boiling broth hits the raw beef at the bottom, it cooks in seconds. Poached, tender, lovely beef slices.
The broth itself is excellent, thanks to the quality time it had with wonderful, marrow-filled beef bones, at a simmer, for a long time.
And I’m basically a chimp with a spoon, people. Find someone with real skills? I shudder to think.
There is absolutely nothing intimidating about this soup. I daresay, it’s even easy. It requires good ingredients, a few spices we don’t use every day, and time. A few times, I wished the eye round was sliced a little thinner. I would have used my slicer, but for the fact I haven’t purchased it yet. Note to self.
The next day, we reheated the leftover broth, sliced some more eye round, whipped up some more noodles, and did the whole thing again.
The eye round was 3.42 pounds, and even after two uses, we still have half left.
I don’t know what I’m going to do with the second half of this piece of meat, but the first have gave me one incredible soup
Special thanks to my friend Eben for all his advice on this potentially problematic cut.
Nobody ever talks about the Fifth of July.
Sure, the Fourth is sexy. Friends, family, drink-drink, boom-boom, nosh-nosh, yay!
But the Fifth — The Fifth is an altogether different beast.
The Fifth is trying and failing to sleep ’til 1.
The Fifth is two weeks of laundry in two and a half hours because you were too busy having fun the day before.
The Fifth is rummaging through singed grass and Black Cat wrappers to find the fingers you blew off twenty-four hours ago.
The Fifth is just about getting to the sixth.
Still, a guy’s gotta eat.
Time is at a premium, and I’m beat up from the feet up. Burger time.
I haven’t done straight-up hamburgers yet for this project. But I don’t intend to start now.
My wife and I split tasks. She was looking for something to bake today, because she finds it relaxing. She finds a recipe in Bittman for Bacon Cheddar buns, but she isn’t interested in using bacon today, largely because we don’t have any. (I have it on good authority that the entire local bacon supply was consumed in some sort of explosion at my friend Ben’s place the day before.)
We do, however, have pancetta. So she whips up some cheddar-pancetta hamburger buns.
I have a pound o’ ground thawing. I usually hit my burger patties with salt, pepper and Worcestershire, because I dig that fermented anchovy, garum-y goodness. But not today.
I know Sum’s worked hard on those buns, so I want to do something to bring that out. I have some sharp cheddar in the fridge. That’ll do nicely.
But I’m in a mood. Let’s make this a surprise.
Salt, pepper, then I build the patty around the cheese, rather than melting the cheese over the top.
This burger could sneak Greeks into Troy.
I'm sneaky.
…though my subterfuge didn’t hold.
Maybe if we made a giant badger...
In the end, everything came out beautifully. And unlike yesterday, did not take double the projected amount of time.
I love it when a plan comes together.
Also, I’ve learned my son loves corn. Like, really, really loves corn. Like, “Hey, your son is one year old. And he just ate a burger and two full ears of corn. I’m a little afraid of him” -loves corn.
You're next.
Next: sleep.
Ah, the 4th. Birthday of our nation. A celebration of individual liberty, Locke-ian natural rights, and assertions of American Exceptionalism.
Naturally, we celebrate with liquor, explosives, and outdoor cooking. I can get down.
This year, I’m celebrating with some straight-up American barbecue. Beef back ribs, vaguely Texas style: low and slow, in a nationalistic haze of hickory smoke.
The bits: I’m rolling with back ribs today. These are the bones off the ribeye steak, if you remove them from said steak prior to cooking. Ribeye’s a high-end, expensive piece of beef, so my back ribs are sheared pretty close to the bone, so that the ribeye itself will be as large as possible. The majority of the meat on these will be between the bones, rather than on top of them.
There’s usually a membrane on the underside of back ribs, which you’ll need to remove. My butcher already did it for me, because he’s a rockstar.
I start the party at 10 am. I need a rub, so I cast my eyes through the series of tubes (it’s not a big truck!).
I find a gent named Craig “Meathead” Goldwyn, who has an exceptional website. After forty-five minutes or so reading more than I anticipated, I settle on his Big Bad Beef Rub. It’s light on the sugar, which is good for beef (Pork rubs like the sweetness. Beef rubs, not so much). Plus, I appreciate the attention he pays to oversalting, if you happen to brine and then rub. That’s detail. Good man.
Oh, Basil.
I had help with the rub.
Good work.
Today, I’m smoking over hickory. It’d be lovely over any number of woods… anecdotally, fruit woods seem especially popular. I also have some mesquite laying around, but I think that’d be overpowering. I love hickory, so hickory it is. I don’t own a hot smoker, so I’m doing soaked chips in aluminum foil on the fire beneath the grates on my gas grill. It isn’t fancy, but it’s functional.
Ribs land on grill at exactly noon. My scheduling kungfu is impeccable. We land at 225 degrees. Best estimate is five to eight hours, but I’ve been surprised by how quickly grass-fed cooks, so I’m keeping a close eye on things.
Oh! Except that I want to knock together a quick sauce to baste with in the last couple hours. I’m feeling like wet ribs today, so I want to do it right and I need a few things from the store. My wife will be home, so if anything goes sincerely pear-shaped, I’ll hear about it. Plus, I’ll only be gone a minute.
I hop in the car and place foot on gas. At that precise instant, (as if it knew!) my propane tank coughs its last, and settles quietly into a pit of stealthy nonfunctionality. Goodnight, sweet hydrocarbons. I knew you well.
I get back, and the mercury’s south of 150.
This, however, is why I keep a spare tank.
We’re back up in ten, but my timeframe is all akimbo. I’d rather not be mayor of Chucktown again. We shall have to wait and see.
And wait.
And see.
And wait.
And see.
Getting close! Baste (with homemade sauce). And wait.
I've grown facial hair since this project began.
And see.
Ooh, fireworks!
And baste.
And wait.
And see! Finally, we’re there. The bones rotate gently in their sockets (so the collagen has transmuted into delicious, unctuous gelatin), and we’re in the sweet spot.
Thar be ribs.
It’s 9 pm.
So my son had to stay up late for ribs. It’s a holiday, right? Basil heads to her crate so we can have a picnic in the yard. We watch illegal fireworks and eat like kings. Which is perhaps antithetical to a celebration of American democracy, but there ya go. Ribs are good.
They’re crunchy, and sweeter than you’d think, given the amount of sugar in the rub. There isn’t as much beef in a back rib as a short rib, but my wife and I are only two people, and D doesn’t eat much. It was an almost perfect amount of meat for us. I call it a success.
I hope everybody staring at electrons right now had a happy and safe holiday.
So, it turns out that when you buy four hundred and numfty-mumph pounds of beef, organization matters.
My freezer, as you can see, is a chest freezer. One large space, with drawers hanging on the sides.
I filled these drawers stem to stern with one-pound packages of ground beef. Still, I had ground to spare.
So I lined the bottom of the freezer with packages of ground. Figuring, I wouldn’t need to access these packages for a very long time, since I had four full drawers of ground beef.
So all’s hunky dory, yes?
Kinda.
You see, fitting the rest of the meat into the freezer is something of a feat. It’s like a giant game of meat Tetris. If I do it right, I have millimeters to spare. If I do it wrong, the lid won’t close. So I fit everything else in there as best I can.
So my meat is stored with a very high degree of geometrical order, and a very low degree of logical order.
Which means, of course, that whatever I’m looking for at any given time is at the very bottom of the chest.
This means I have to displace a large amount of meat to find that tiny piece of top round or flank or <Insert Bit Here> that’s invariably nestled between a three-bone standing rib roast and a giant chuck roast somewhere near the Earth’s mantle.
Where'd I put that oxtail....
Displace that meat haphazardly, and you get a Beefalanche. A cascade of ice-cold, rock-hard, relatively heavy, irregular shapes tumbling onto the ground, the dog, your feet, and worst of all, back into the Beefchasm you’ve already created in your freezer, causing you to lose your place and begin again.
Please, god... I'll be good...
If anybody has any tips for keeping everything organized, I’d love to hear it.
