Adventures in shopping locally: Beef

Cut Beef, Tyler, Texas, insulated shopping bag.

My husband and I wanted to fill our freezer with beef. He finally fixed it enough for us to use. The cover still needs a replacement seal, but since it’s winter, we’re not worried about energy loss.

A couple of years ago, we tried the Meat Market west of Tyler.

The meat was great, but the price was a little rich for our blood, not to mention they sourced the meat from Wisconsin. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but we were working to get all of our supplies from local businesses and farms.

Then there was the butcher we kept passing by on our way to church. We’ve been wanting to stop by for a while, but it’s difficult to get out during the week when they’re open, because of Mike’s work schedule.

We did finally stop, and we got a pamphlet and I bought some soup bones, which made some tasty stew.

But it was another week before we could stop again.

I’ve always thought they were open on the usual business days (Monday through Friday) so when we finally had a chance, it was Monday… and I was wrong. But when I tried to take a picture of their hours, the owner opened the door and offered to help us out anyway, since he was in doing paperwork (a perk of a private business).

We made our order for 1/4 cow to be picked up the following week, although we could have gotten it sooner, but we had planned to travel that weekend and we picked up our order the following Wednesday. I got some free oxtail (the upper half of the cow’s tail) for bone broth out of the deal.

They gave a choice between all grass-fed or grain-finished, or whatever comes first. We picked whatever comes first, because to be honest, I happen to love the gamey taste of grass-fed and the even flavor of grain-finished equally. They each have their own merits.

So we end up getting mostly grass-fed with a few pieces being grain finished.

Half of it was ground beef, which brings me to the price.

Just under $1000 (995) dollars for a quarter cow- that’s almost $10/lb. Granted, local grown beef has a tendency to be pricey, but it was way more than the usual market price for hanging weight for *grass-fed* cows (they don’t differentiate in the price).

If you are rich, by all means, go there for your meat. I highly recommend it. The service was awesome, the staff was friendly, and the meat tasted great! As for us, I will still go there to get soup bones, and probably organ meats, but a friend of ours is splitting another cow with us for considerably cheaper for us.

You can check out their website here: https://www.cutbeef.com/

We also got a couple of free Kozies out of the deal. The insulated bag (featured picture) I bought to add to my collection of reusable shopping bags, but that’s a blog post for another time.