Relearning old lessons

How to buy local meats

By Deborah Madison

October 11, 2007

After breathing in the seductively fragrant smells emanating from a lineup of grills cooking grass-fed beef, people can’t wait to pay their $10 to take part in a unique tasting of local meat.

Tickets in hand, they enter the huge old alumni hall on the local college campus, and the smells that greet them there are as tempting as those they had encountered outside.

Roast heritage turkeys with dark, succulent meat, tender braised rabbit, grilled lamb, Thai beef salads, sliders, and savory briskets competed with one another for top billing, but fortunately no one had to choose. All those meats are there to be tasted.

And along with the sampling, the public has a rare opportunity to talk with the ranchers who raise animals for food.

Corriente cattle roam the range in New Mexico, eating grass along the way.

As chefs serve up their fare, ranchers are free to introduce themselves and talk about what they do. So while savoring a tasty mouthful, one can learn about these ranchers’ animals, from Rio Grande wild turkeys to Label Rouge chickens, from bison to Highland cattle, from Churro lamb to Black Angus beef. Ranchers talk about how their animals are raised, what grass-fed means to those whose animals are range-fed, and most importantly, how to enjoy these deeply wholesome foods at home.

The scene is Sante Fe’s second annual round-up of local flavors and livestock tasting — with 500 people attending, it is double the size of last year’s event. There’s clearly a hunger to learn where the protein on our plates comes from.

To make it easier to imagine, home freezers are on display. One of them, plus some generous coupons to spend on meat, are raffled off. The kids, less interested than their parents in this whole thing, have a corner where they can hone their roping skills with an expert teacher. A lively little country duet warms the hall, and periodically, ranchers are introduced to an enthusiastic crowd and interviewed.

Marketing meats

The melodic chord that has rung for so long in praise of produce is just beginning to be heard for local meats. Meats didn’t appear in farmers’ markets right away — they followed cheese and dairy once the vegetable part got going — but today a great many of our farmers’ markets serve as a hospitable showcase for the highest quality meat to be had in the nation.

Farmers’ markets are the place to shop for meat with flavor, often from grass-fed animals — definitely not feedlot-produced. It’s meat that’s humanely raised, and is traceable and safe to eat. In my Santa Fe farmers’ market alone, for example, we can now buy grass-fed beef, Navajo-Churro lamb, pastured poultry (chicken, turkey, duck, eggs), and bison.

But there are many more producers in New Mexico raising first-rate livestock, and in part, this tasting is to introduce them and their products to the public.

Ranching in the arid west tends to require a lot of open space, which means ranches are frequently far from urban centers. One of the obstacles to the direct marketing offered by the farmers’ market is the four- or five-hour drive to a market that opens at 7 a.m., followed, of course, by the drive home. This just isn’t doable for most ranchers.

But what these ranchers can do is sell their animals to individuals. The animals are slaughtered in an inspected slaughterhouse, butchered in an approved facility, then mailed to the customer, a box of neatly wrapped, labeled, and frozen parcels.

Once you meet a rancher whose meat you like, and once you sit down and figure out what kinds of cuts you want, the rest is easy. And it’s hard to give up once you’ve got it going.

One rancher, Nancy Ranney, jokes that their customers become “Ranney spoiled.” They just don’t want to eat any other kind of beef once they’ve become accustomed to her tender Angus beef. And every rancher has his or her following.

The return of the meat locker?

This shopping method, however, is one that few people are versant with today. Once it was seen as a practical and fairly efficient way of dealing with one’s meat supply. From the 1930s through the 1960s the meat locker was a part of America’s food life. Often found in butcher shops, such freezer spaces were rented by the year. In those times, people knew more than they do today about buying wholes or halves of beeves and butchering and freezing game that was also destined for the meat locker.

Selling meat directly to customers via previous arrangement usually makes more sense for ranchers than selling at the farmers’ market.

Another thing people knew then was how to cook shanks and oxtails, make stocks from bones, and produce succulent roasts and other large cuts of meat. Today our in-a-hurry lifestyle favors fast-cooking hamburger, steaks, and chops, not frozen, of course. (Bigger cuts are not fast cooking.)

Like remembering to soak beans, defrosting meat requires some forethought. Once it’s defrosted, a roast wants a long, slow cooking time on the stove, in the oven, or in a Crock-Pot. In fact, the Crock-Pot is a great answer to the question of what to do with oxtails and arm roasts and pot roasts.