Pastured Animal Products

A few months ago, Dave got some beef bones from a meat shop down the street and roasted them to make stock.

Man, did they stink. For the first half hour of the roasting, our kitchen smelled like a derelict diner whose grill had never been cleaned. It was bad, folks.

Then we got some bones at the Pearl Farmers Market from L&M Ranch of Floresville. Their animals are grass-fed and grass-finished. This means that for most of the year, they roam pasture for food. They eat the diet they evolved eating and are not stressed by noise or crowding.

And it showed. When Dave roasted the L&M bones, they gave off no greasy stink. And the resulting stock tasted clean.


L&M's meat products had the same clean flavor. In fact, Dave says that when he unwrapped a cut of beef from them, he could smell the grass.

After that, we committed to using pastured animal products at home. These animals tend also to be hormone- and antibiotic-free. Until slaughter, they live relatively stress-free lives. Plus, their food needs require land -- land that can't be developed into a strip mall. We can get behind that.

Our sources:

We get our eggs from Dave's mom (photo in this post). Her chickens seem happy and get to roam and somehow live in peace with Ed and Julie's dogs. It's pretty funny.

At Pearl, we found a source for grass-fed bison: Shape Ranch, which raises and sells ThunderHeart Bison. Dave made sloppy joes with this meat. It was...amazing.

For bacon, pork belly, and pork shanks: Flying Pigs Farm. They raise heritage breeds on a farm in upstate New York. The bacon? OMG good. Dave can hardly wait to cook with the belly.

For other beef, chicken, and pork products: Slanker's Grass-Fed Meats. The beef bacon was weird*, but everything else has been great.


*For me, nothing beats pork bacon. It's the biggest reason I'm not a vegetarian.

[image via Emilene Whidbee for L&M Ranch]
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