About six months ago I wrote about locavorianism, the practice of eating only or mostly local foods, and our attempts to seek out local foods.
It's time for an update. How have we done? Where have we succeeded or failed?
To begin with the failures, we still have not gotten into the habit of buying local milk, and it's hard to come by locally produced eggs consistently. I'm making an effort in that department, though, having put our name and phone number on the list of a local organic farmer should he ever have extra eggs.
On the other hand, we have locally raised free-range organic chickens in our freezer now, and we had a local turkey for our Thanksgiving dinner. In all honesty, the turkey was very expensive and didn't taste all that different from the turkeys we've had in the past that purported to be Amish (or Amish "style," perhaps, whatever that means). The chickens, however, are excellent, and it will be very difficult ever to eat another supermarket chicken. I promise you that if you search out free-range chickens, you'll be forever glad you did.
We also have half a side of grass-fed beef in our freezer, minus a couple of packages we've already used. We drove a couple of hours one-way to pick it up at a small meat processor's, where we met Melvin, the grass farmer who raised the beef. Before we parted ways, Melvin told us he wanted feedback, as he is always trying to improve his product through selective breeding; he also wants to know what the consumer wants, what satisfies or disappoints. When I ordered the beef, he wanted to know if we preferred "lean, less lean, or fat." From what I'd read of grass-fed beef, I couldn't imagine that "fat" would be that fat, so I went with that. But he told us that one customer had found the beef too fat and took advantage of Melvin's buy-back policy. When we loaded the beef into the car, I couldn't believe, looking at it, that anyone could find it too fat. It's quite lean, actually, although some of it did have some nice, though I would say minimal, marbling.
Melvin's other concern was that we knew how to cook grass-fed beef properly. Because it is lean, and because the cattle actually use their muscles to walk around while grazing, rather than standing in their own waste all day, grass-fed beef requires different cooking strategies than grain-fed. We assured him that we had read the information he'd sent us and would treat the beef with care. You can't blame him: one of his customers wanted his money back for the round steaks he'd ordered because they were tough. It turned out he'd treated them as if they were porterhouse steaks! That's just plain foolish.
You can imagine that, having spent hundreds of dollars on this beef, we were eager to try it. We selected a round roast and slow-cooked it in liquid for several hours. When we sat down to eat it, we were immediately struck by how much more flavor it had, a richer, more complex flavor. It tasted like beef, the way I remembered my mother's pot roast tasting. Jim said it reminded him a little of buffalo; I wouldn't know, as I've never eaten buffalo. All I knew was that it tasted like the beef of my childhood and youth, when my dad bought locally raised and processed beef for his grocery store. It was so delicious and quite tender. We ooh'ed and aah'ed over it the whole time we were eating. Jim thought it was a little chewier, but I didn't find it much different from the last roast we'd gotten from a local store.
After being dry aged for two weeks, the flavor was much more concentrated than it is in "wet aged" beef. Dry aging evaporates water from the meat and gives certain enzymes time to develop, so that you end up with a more tender, more flavorful product. Contrast that with the usual commercial practice today of vacuum packing and "wet aging" the beef so that no weight is lost. Dry aging is rarely done these days and is usually available only at upscale restaurants and groceries, so we're fortunate to have dry aged beef.
Anyway, we were smitten. Over Thanksgiving weekend, when my daughter and son-in-law were here, I made the leftovers into hash, and you should have seen it disappear! Hannah was happy to have a chance to taste the beef (her half was still in our freezer; she was taking it home that weekend); after all, she too had laid out a lot of money. Her first taste made her exclaim, "Well, that ruins every other kind of beef for us." We're hooked!
We also learned of a local hog farmer, and while we wouldn't want half a hog, this particular farmer offers variety packages of pork weighing about 25 pounds. Many stores around here stock this farm's products in small freezers, so we bought some pork chops the other day to check them out. They were good! They tasted like actual pork! So we may very well be ordering a package.
Of course, in addition to the meat and poultry, we've got lots of veggies in the freezer, grown right here on our land. We've got jars of salsa, tomato juice, jam, and applesauce in the pantry. We've got dried herbs, tomatoes, scallions, and leeks. We bought half a gallon of locally produced honey earlier this fall. And we've got our locally grown wheat and rye berries; buckwheat and barley; black beans, kidney beans, pinto beans, and a couple of varieties of heirloom beans (most of these we grew ourselves) on our pantry shelves as well. So we're pretty well stocked up for a winter of eating lots of locally grown foods--meat, veggies, grains, and legumes.
That feels pretty darned good. I know where the food came from; I know that it's safe to eat; I know that it's not adulterated with all kinds of additives or tainted by pesticides; I know that I'm helping local farmers remain on their farms. Best of all, I get to eat food that tastes really, really good!