Buying Beef

When we bought our house, we were super excited to have room for a chest freezer.  We bought a large one, because we’ll use it eventually.  It’s 24 cubic square feet and looks pitifully empty right now.  My parents never bought beef in a grocery store.  They always bought it from a farmer and had it butchered, or they bought it directly from a butcher.  Since I’ve been an adult (an undisclosed number of years), we’ve bought our beef in the grocery store.  Now that we have freezer storage, I wanted to know the best way to fill it with beef. 

               

Here’s what I’ve learned:  I could call a local farmer, buy a cow and have a butcher cut it up and package it for me.  You have to watch the numbers.  If you buy from a farmer, they sell by an “on-the-hoof” weight, or the weight of the live cow standing on a scale.  The head, hooves, and other unusable parts make up about 50% of the weight.

I could also go in to a butcher and buy a cow they have already killed.  They charge by “hanging weight”, or the weight of the slab of meat hanging in their freezer.  The bone and other trimmings make up a little more than 20% of the hanging weight.

Or I could go in to a grocery store and buy the processed meat.  They charge by final cut weight.

We usually buy meat at Sam’s Club.  They have pretty good quality, and pretty good prices.  We bought a 5 lb package of ground beef last week at $3.78 per pound.  If you buy it by the case, it’s about $3.50 per pound.  Chuck roast goes for $4 to $5 per pound right now, and a t-bone steak is going to be $8 to $9 per pound.

I called a local butcher shop my aunt recommends all the time.  They’ll sell me a quarter of a beef for $3.09 per pound.  Accounting for that 20% loss, that’s about $3.86 per pound.  That’s a little more than Sam’s Club for just the ground beef, but if you have it cut into a few roasts and a few steaks, too, that’s a pretty good deal!  His estimate was that a quarter of a beef would weigh about 175 to 180 pounds.