Nose-to-Tail Beef: Using More of the Animal

Ask most people to name cuts of beef and you will get six. Ask a butcher and the number changes entirely.

“Yeah, there's probably about six or seven different cuts you get out of a pig. There's 40 or 50 that you can get out of a beef. And so there's so much there that people just don't realize.”

Gray Shipley

That gap between six and fifty is the whole subject. Every animal produces all of it, whether or not anybody buys it.

Why it matters more to a small farm

A large operation sells into a system that moves every part somewhere, usually invisibly. A farm selling direct has to find a home for the whole animal itself, which means the cuts nobody asks for are a real problem rather than an abstract one.

“And I know that it's also going right back in the community that I'm buying it from and I'm not supporting something that's, um, I'm not sending the profit to a big conglomerate or to, you know, a foreign government-owned entity in Asia, uh, supporting my neighbors. And I'm keeping farmland as farmland, which we're losing way too much of.”

Gray Shipley

What gets overlooked, and what it is good for

• Liver. Cheap, quick and genuinely good when it is not overcooked.
• Bones. Stock that sets when it cools. Nothing in a carton does that.
• Marrow. Roasts in twenty minutes and spreads on toast.
• The working muscles. Chuck, brisket, shin. Hours of low heat and they beat a steak for depth.
• The butcher's cuts. Flat iron, bavette, hanger. The ones butchers historically kept.

“I go for the lesser-known cuts. But to me, I'm more interested in things like the flat iron and the chuck eye and the bavette steak that people know a little bit less about.”

Gray Shipley

It is not sacrifice

Nose-to-tail is usually presented as an ethical duty, which undersells it. The lesser-known cuts are cheaper and several of them taste better than what they replace. The flat iron is the obvious example and the one people are most surprised by.

“And so, uh, it's thinking of our responsibility as not just serving ourselves, but serving our community, leaving people better off than we found them, helping people to learn and improve themselves and always be, uh, curious.”

Gray Shipley

Where to start

Start with bones, because the barrier is lowest and the result is the most obviously better than the supermarket version. Then liver, cooked fast and pink in the middle. Then a chuck roast given six hours instead of three.

The one most people have never cooked well

Beef Liver

Beef liver from our own animals. Cheap, quick, and ruined only by overcooking.

View Product

For stock that sets when it cools

Beef Broth Bones

Beef broth bones. Hours of low simmer and you have something no carton can match.

View Product

The one that rewards a slow afternoon

SB Dry-Aged Chuck Roast, Boneless

Dry-aged boneless chuck roast. In early, left alone, and it will be the thing people remember.

View Product

Liver has its own method in how to cook beef liver, the working muscles are in best beef cuts for slow cooking, and the flavor argument is in most flavorful cuts.