Fat is Good
A taste that blew me away.
Recently we had a beast that had done rather well on lush meadow grass. In fact, too well! When we have our livestock slaughtered we like to have them in good condition. All livestock are graded into fat classes as follows (in human terms)
- Grade 1 = Anorexic. This would be rejected by all. No flavour at all.
- Grade 2 = Recovering (anorexic). This is accepted by most organisations (supermarkets) but we certainly don’t, as it still lacks the flavour.
- Grade 3 = Perfect. We would all love to be like this as you would have all the curves in all the right places, but in beef it’s still not good enough for us. We need more flavour.
- Grade 4 = Chubby/bonny. When we get like this we all want to lose 2-3 stone. This grade is rejected by all organisations, but not by us. For flavour this is perfect, (at least I thought it was until I tasted Grade 5!)
- Grade 5 = Rather large. Rejected by all for the abundance of fat, but not by me. Having eaten a lot of welsh black beef, I know good meat when I taste it. I’ve never had juicier meat in my life. The marbling of fat in the muscle is amazing, the flavour simply awesome, and it was so, so tender.
I have always protested that we don’t have enough fat on our meat, after all fat is flavour. Welsh Black cattle lend themselves to being quite fat. As they are native to Wales, they need to be fat to survive the cold and wet winters. The thing that makes good beef is poor muscle to bone ratio.
All Muscle no taste
To put this into simple terms (again human terms) it is all graded at the abattoir starting with the poorest (P) confirmation to highest (E) confirmation.
- P = somebody whose trousers keep falling down, no hips. This is classed as a reject by all, but the flavour is amazing if it is taken to fat class 4 and above.
- O = Welsh Black cattle and other native breeds of the UK fall into this category. Believe it or not they get fat on grass, without the use of high protein feeds (amazing flavour)
- R = this is a good grade as you do get some fat with the meat. It’s midway to muscle to bone ratio U = Arnold Schwarzenegger. I.e. Limousin and Charolais breeds. Yes you’ve got it, no fat but high muscle to bone ratio. So it heavily prized for profit but lacks the all important flavour.
- E = Arnold Schwarzenegger. I.e. Belgium Blue and piedmontie’s breeds. Again, no fat but a high muscle to bone ratio. It’s more money but with no flavour. Supermarkets pay more money for the farmer to produce this lean and high muscle grade because they can make more money. The down side is, they lose all the flavour that we have in our native breeds.
So, my idea is to produce cattle with a muscle grade O and a fat grade 5 (us farmers know it as O5). This will hopefully meet the approval of those who love that extreme flavour like me. AKA (bloody good beef).
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