What to Cook First From a Beef Share
A share arrives and the temptation is to start with the most exciting thing. Start with the most familiar thing instead.
You have just put a year of beef in a freezer. The order you work through it in the first fortnight decides how you feel about the whole thing.
Week one: ground beef
Cook it the way you always cook ground beef. No new recipe, no new technique. This is a controlled comparison against whatever you used to buy, and it is the clearest signal you will get about the beef itself.
“And I think people enjoy kind of getting to figure out what am I supposed to do with a sirloin tip? What am I supposed to do with a picanha or a tri-tip? I get to go learn and experiment in the kitchen some and figure out how to cook something.”
Gray Shipley
Week one, later: one steak
Pick a forgiving one. Chuck eye or a ribeye rather than a filet. Cook it simply, salt and heat and a rest. If it goes wrong you have learned something about your pan rather than about the farm.
Week two: a roast, on a day you are home
A chuck roast on a Sunday. Three hours mostly unattended, and it is the cut that shows what a share is actually for, because you would rarely buy one otherwise. Method in the Sunday chuck roast.
“I like to go with something a little more economical. And so either something like a chuck roast or a sirloin tip, maybe in the crock pot or some short ribs this time of year. Or, I like taking out maybe some skirt steak, some fajita meat, and making some tacos, making some fajitas, getting something that you can just kind of chop up and mix up whatever.”
Gray Shipley
Then start on the unfamiliar
Once you trust the beef, work into the cuts you have never cooked. That is the real value of a share and the part people enjoy most, and it is also the part that goes badly if you start there.
“Those two things, I think, are a little bit of the combination that maybe has a little bit of whatever our secret sauce is that has people to come in and say, this is the best thing I've ever eaten. That's the best guess I have as to how to explain it.”
Gray Shipley
Cook it the way you always do. That is the point.
View ProductWhat should I cook first after collecting a beef share?
Ground beef, then a steak, then a roast on the first free weekend.
- Freezing and Food Safety, USDA FSIS
- Cook to a Safe Minimum Internal Temperature, FoodSafety.gov
Food-safety temperatures and storage times on this page are cited to the agencies above rather than to us.
Written at Shipley Farms in Vilas, North Carolina: a family cattle farm raising and dry-aging beef in the Appalachian Mountains, now in its fifth generation. No shortcuts since 1872.
Every quote on this page is Gray Shipley talking, the man who runs this farm. We sat down with him, turned on a recorder, and kept his own words. Hesitations are trimmed so they read on the page. Nothing else is added or reworded, except where Gray revised his own words in review.
Nobody knows this beef better than we do. On food safety we leave it to USDA FSIS and FoodSafety.gov, and we have linked their pages above. Reviewed 3 October 2026.
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