Grass Fed Beef vs Store Brand Beef

Many people are scared of ground beef.  And honestly, you should be afraid if you aren't buying grass-fed beef from a trusted source.  Feed-lot beef is not heart healthy and it carries the very real risk of e-coli contamination.  Grass-fed beef, on the other hand, is lower in saturated fat, higher in omega-3's, conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), vitamin A and vitamin E (source: Time Magazine).

But I wondered does Grass-fed beef taste any different than Feed-lot beef?  I'll cheat and tell you the answer before I finish, the answer is a resounding, YES!!

The picture above shows you the two brands I compared.  Honestly, I usually buy my grass-fed beef at one of the local farmer's markets or from Creswick Farms, but I wanted to compare grass-fed beef that anyone can purchase.  So I compared Organic Prairie Grass Fed Ground Beef  ($5.82 per lb) and the Kroger Ground Round ($2.99 per lb).  The organic prairie is obviously more expensive out-of-pocket, but I think the long-term health benefits make it a more economical choice in the long run.

You may wonder about ordering meat online.  How does it arrive?  Well, here is how it comes.  Snuggly wrapped in a cooler box with two cooling packs (my order had more than just meat):



Then I browned it in the pan.  I noticed two things when I was browning it.  First, the Organic Prairie grass-fed beef had a little more blood in the package.  I just drained it out before I put it in the pan.  Second, the Kroger brand was stringy.  If you look at the top picture you will notice that the Organic Prairie looks a little more chunky, while the Kroger is more mushy.  This mushiness was really noticeable as I was trying to break it into chunks while browning it.  Here are both of the versions on a plate:



Once they were cooked, I couldn't feel that much of a difference when I rubbed the crumbles between my fingers.

Then I cooked it up into this stuffed eggplant and our family did a little taste test.  First we ate the eggplants that were stuffed with the grass-fed beef.  They were good.  Then we ate the ones stuffed with the feed-lot beef.  The feed-lot beef filling was tasteless.  While the grass-fed beef picked up all the other flavors and tied the stuffing mixture ingredients together, the fed-lot filling was just filling.  It wasn't bad, but it wasn't good...it was just there.

For a long time I considered myself to be a failure at all of my mother-in-laws recipes because they never tasted as good as hers.  But since our family has switched to the grass-fed beef I am finally tasting some success.  She lives in Malta where feed-lots don't exist, so it wasn't my cooking skills, it was the beef. :-)

UPDATE:  This post is getting a lot of traffic for the term "where to buy grass fed beef in Michigan" with slight variations.  If you found this page through that search, I suggest you head on over to my Southeastern Michigan Local Organic Food Sources Guide to find a few suppliers that I know of who sell grass-fed beef in Michigan.