By Adele Harty
Beef quality grade is important to the end consumer as well as producers who capitalize on producing a high quality product for a positive eating experience. Quality grade combines marbling and maturity which is used to predict a palatable eating experience. Therefore a higher quality grade results in a better chance of a quality eating experience. There are four quality grades that can be assigned to beef from young cattle that are based on amount of marbling and carcass maturity.
The highest quality grade an A maturity carcass can receive is USDA Prime, which has at least a slightly abundant amount of marbling. The USDA Choice grade requires at least a small amount of marbling while USDA Select carcasses are required to have, at minimum, a slight amount of marbling. The fourth quality grade is Standard, which is practically devoid of marbling. Table 1 shows the relationship between marbling and maturity as used to determine the various quality grades. The majority of the beef found in grocery stores is Choice or Select and encompasses the largest percentage of beef produced in the United States. Within the Beef industry, only about 2.9% of all beef carcasses grade USDA Prime, which equates to approximately 750 million pounds per year.
The beefSD Class 2 participants recently completed a bus tour with stops in Eastern South Dakota, Iowa, Illinois and Minnesota. The purpose of beefSD is to provide beginning farmers and ranchers an opportunity to gain knowledge and expertise to help them succeed in the farming and ranching business.
There are six key components to the two-year course, with one being the out-of-state travel study trips. On this trip, the group toured multiple businesses that impact the cattle industry and learned more about the marketing components on a global scale. This is the second article to highlight one of the tour stops and the value to the beef industry.
Within the cattle industry there is knowledge about quality grade and producing cattle that will provide a high quality beef product, but how many producers have seen or eaten a USDA Prime steak? The answer is probably not as many as you would think. One of the tour stops was Allen Brothers; a wholesaler of USDA Prime beef to high-end steakhouses. They have been in business since 1893 and are only blocks from where the famed Union Stockyards stood. The company prides itself on providing a quality product with “a steadfast commitment to customer service and innovation”.
Driving by, the outside isn’t much to look at, and the facility is small, but Allen Brothers is an industry leader in providing the world’s finest beef to top chefs and restaurants. In addition to specializing in USDA Prime beef, they also carefully age the meat to make it more tender and flavorful. During the aging process enzymes break down some of the proteins that provide structure to meat resulting in a more tender product. There are two forms of aging, wet and dry.
For wet aging, the meat is placed in vacuum-sealed bags and aged under controlled, refrigerated conditions for the number of days specified by the order. In contrast, dry aged product is stored without packaging in a custom-designed cooler that combines a balance of time, temperature, air circulation and humidity. The dry aging process allows the product to age from the outside in, forming a hard crust over the outside. Once the aging is complete the crust will be carefully removed, leaving a more tender product with an intense ‘beefy’ flavor.
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