I updated my blog on the meat that we offer that will never make it into City Press. Please click here. Thanks.
Also please make time to watch this amazing talk by Allan Savory on how cattle grazing can reverse desertification. We graze our cattle in the way he refers to in this TED talk.
Dear Reader
Providing our clients with the healthiest beef available is one of our goals. Despite the evidence (this is for the scientific peer reviewed obsessed factory farmers out there) there are many misguided souls who believe in feedlot beef. They will come around to the facts, eventually.
One of the major benefits of grass fed beef is CLA (Conjugated Linoleic Acid). Regarded by many as anti cancer, anti inflammatory etc.
We have started a 5 year experiment with 8 different beef breeds to see which produces the highest CLA count. This was inspired by the Simmentaler Breed Society who claim that their breed has 30% higher CLA than any other breed.
Our 5 year trial is being supervised by Dr Carel Muller of Elsenburg with input from Prof Kennedy Dzama of Stellenbosch University. Post slaughter a sample of the loin muscle is taken from the carcass and once all have been slaughtered then the Medical Research Council will do the analysis. We have 10 oxen from each breed and by the end of this year we should have slaughtered all of them.
The English Breeds ( the first two are currently topping the scales on daily weight gain)
The French Breeds
The South African Breed
Mixed breeds
Brangus (not in this year’s trial but we plan to from next year)
This high CLA beef is only available from Bill Riley Butchery, 021 511 552, or from us as the one whole animal mince which I wrote about here. Finally occasionally from the Somerset West Spar and Paul Roos Spar in Stellenbosch. Of course only the Cape’s finest restaurants serve it too.
Stay well
Dear Reader
In the light of City Press exposing the study done by Stellenbosch University on the mislabelling of meat, I thought we could revisit this subject. Our mince contains ALL the meat of only one animal at a time. I have maintained for a long time that the big national retailers are the primary problem in the food complex and this supports that argument.
The burgers, sausage, spaghetti bolognese or lasagna that you enjoy are from the parts of animal not deemed good enough to serve as specific cuts. Trimmings is the industry name and it describes the stringy, fatty and generally difficult to eat and or cook bits. All these trimmings and non primal cuts from many different animals (depending on the size of the butchery) are blended together through the process of mincing.
We do it differently. We take one animal (I remove one fillet and one prime rib for my personal use) and mince the entire carcass. Yes, that includes all the so called prime cuts such as sirloin, rump etc.
Why? We want to taste the terroir of our farm expressed in the meat of one animal. The grass growing on our farm reflects the minerality of our soils and this manifests as the flavour of our beef.
Below is a picture of a freezer with our mince in. Packaged in 500 gram “sausages”.
Pasture Reared Beef Mince
We sell this one complete animal mince from our farm for R77 per kg EXCLUSIVE of VAT. That amounts to R87.78 INCLUSIVE of VAT.
We also do cater for the restaurant trade and for them we package our mince in 2kg vacuum bags. Pictured below.
Notice that the fat is yellow. This is a sign of health (more nutrition on all metrics than grain fed beef) and not of ill health like the white fat that you eat from the feedlot.
Finally what our beef mince does NOT contain but what yours does is GMOs. Our cattle eat only grass and legumes whereas yours are fed grain in a feedlot. We are the only country in the world where our staple diet is genetically modified and all cattle in feedlots are fed maize which is approximately 86% GMO by now. According to the expert who gives opinion on behalf of the feedlot industry (a blog about this will be posted soon) there are no risks to GMOs.
I will bet he does not have the courage of his convictions to watch this documentary about GMOs that was released last week.
Dear Reader I implore you to watch it.
