I mentioned in my last post how my meat knowledge has rubbed off on my mom, what with her meat thermometer and all. So here comes a newly inspired series of posts called "Meat Savvy." These will focus on shopping for and cooking meat, while the "Meet Your Meat" series is more to make you aware of what you're buying.So, as I'm a huge fan of cattle dishes (in case you couldn't tell by that obnoxiously large hamburger), the most important first thing about being meat savvy is understanding how beef is graded by the USDA. There are two main scales, yield grade and quality grade. Now, it is important to note that unlike inspection, which is required by law, a harvesting or processing facility is NOT required to grade their meat. This is a purely voluntary thing because it costs the facility extra.
A yield grade is pretty much exactly as it sounds--the amount of usable, lean meat on a carcass, compared to the weight of the carcass pre-slaughter. There is a really complicated process and formula to determine a yield grade, which Texas A & M University provides here. (It might not be that complicated, but I get really overwhelmed with numbers sometimes!) Yield grades range from 1 to 5, with 1 being the highest and 5 being the lowest. 1 has a higher yield of lean to fat than 5, and it honestly does not matter that much for the average consumer how much meat this particular bovine had on its body. The only way it probably would matter for a consumer is if you were buying a whole carcass to eat or freeze for yourself and you wanted to know how many meals it would get you.
For that reason, we're going to focus on quality grades in this blog, because that SHOULD matter to you, as a meat savvy shopper. Quality grades basically determine how tender, juicy, and palatable meat is. There are eight quality grades that the Agricultural Marketing Service (ARS) gives for beef: Prime, Choice, Select, Standard, Commercial, Utility, Cutter, and Canner.
Why is it so important to know what these grades mean? In my opinion, it's because if you don't know anything else about meat, you can understand the basics of what these eight grades stand for, and know immediately if that steak in your hand is worth buying or not. There are tons of factors that go into choosing the cut of meat for you, but this one is very very basic, because the USDA has done the job for you.
Prime grade, of course, is the top of the top. Why? Mostly because of the age of the animal that is slaughtered. The younger the animal (and by young, I'm talking under three years old), the more tender the meat. Prime meat only comes from steers (males who are castrated between 3 and 6 months of age) and heifers (females who have never been bred for reproductive purposes). It also has a TON of marbling. Marbling is intramuscular fat that gives flavor to the meat. If you look at a cut of raw steak, for example, prime steak has a lot of little white tissues running through it. That's marbling.
Choice is similar to prime, but is less marbled. Only certain cuts of meat from choice cattle are going to be as tender as the same cuts from a prime animal. Choice meat comes from heifers, steers, and cows under 30 months of age. A cow, if you didn't know, is technically a female that has had at least one calf before.If you're at the grocery store and are not meat savvy at all, you're probably going to be looking for Select grade whether you know it or not. Select grade has very little marbling, so it appears to be leaner than choice and prime. However, it's that marbling that gives meat flavor, tenderness, and juiciness, so your Select graded cuts might require more spices, tenderizing, and marinating if you want them to taste similar to higher quality meats. Once again, 30 months is the maximum age an animal can qualify for being Select.
Standard grade is for cattle ages 30 to 42 months, and Commerical grade is for cattle (steers, heifers, and cows) over the age of 42 months. These grades are probably not going to appear on any label because they are not good grades and so a facility is not going to pay to have a label for them. You can still find them in grocery stores though, most likely sold as the store brand's meat.
The last three grades, Utility, Cutter, and Canner, are rarely sold on retail shelves. They're kind of the low point of the beef grades; basically used for process products and pet foods because the meat is definitely not marbled enough to be sold straight off the animal. I have heard before that these three grades provide the meat for many fast-food restaurants' hamburgers, but I want to research on that before I write about it...just to make sure.
The above grades were for meat from heifers, steers, and cows, in case you missed that point. The USDA's AMS (Agricultural Marketing Service) also has grades for bullock meat. Bullocks are males that are castrated after the recommended age of 3-6 months. By the time they are castrated, they have begun showing secondary characteristics of a bull (in humans, think of a bullock as a teenage boy), so their meat is going to be a little different than steer meat because of testosterone and other sex hormones in the animal. The grades for bullock meat are Prime, Choice, Select, Standard, and Utility; basically the qualifications are the same as listed above.
So before I continue with my last point, you can use these two Web sites (okay, so one is a PDF document, but whatever) to do more in-depth research about beef grading. This first site, the document one, is the United States Standards for Grades of Slaughter Cattle. It has all the technical requirements for grading, like how much fat an animal should have, the ages, that kind of thing. The second site I used, Inspection & Grading of Meat and Poultry, is probably the one you'll want to take a look at. It has images of the seals and explains the grading in terms of marbling and meat flavor, and also lists some uses for the different grades of meat as far as cooking goes.
Last point, as promised. I just want to reiterate something that I think might get lost in translation. Utility, Cutter, and Canner grades are the low grades and are not usually sold. This does not mean that meat with these grades is in any way unsafe for humans to eat. Remember what I said earlier about marbling = flavor, tenderness, and juciness? These bottom three grades of meat straight from the cow are not going to be good for meals as steaks and ribs. People might be able to buy them, but it would take (scuse my language) a hell of a lot of tenderizing and cooking to make those some likable steaks. So most facilities turn these products into processed ones, where the cooking and preparation is done for you before you buy it.
Oh and one more quick thing. You can also slaughter dairy cattle. Usually this is done when the cow is too old to have another calf or is not producing enough milk to satisfy the cost to maintain her in the herd. However, since dairy cattle are bred not for meat quality but for things such as udder size and milk production, the meat is not going to be as high quality graded as beef cattle.
Just wanted to clear those points up; and I think I will do some research on fast-food burger meats, now that I've got the idea stuck in my head...
