Comparison of Crowd Cow and Supermarket Chuck Short Ribs

[RonB]

Nice write up.

[johnec00]

Recently ordered some beef chuck short ribs and some chuck steaks from Crowd Cow. The beef was "Pasture Raised, Grain Finished" from Cottonwood Ranch. Firstly, the order arrived on the day promised and was very well packaged with dry ice, so it was still thoroughly frozen. Yesterday, we SV-Q'd the short ribs along with a rack of chuck short ribs from a local supermarket. both were trimmed of excess fat and the membrane. There was about 1/2 as much trimming from the Crowd Cow ribs. In the pictures below, the Crowd Cow ribs are on the right.



They were rubbed with Oakridge Black Ops rub and SV'd for 24 hours at 150ºF. Following that, they were smoked for about 2 hours with light cherry smoke. Here's a couple of pictures of the finished ribs:




Critique: Both my daughter and I agreed that the Crowd Cow ribs were noticeably moister and somewhat more flavorful. (She did not know in advance which was which). Both were a tad dry, but more on that below. Is the difference sufficient to justify ~$15/lb versus ~$5/lb? Purely financially obviously not, but I'm not doing this every day, and I know how to waste money much more efficiently on my boat, my pool, going to a crappy basketball game, or taking my grandkids swimming. To me, the attraction of Crowd Cow is some level of support for small independent farmers, so I will buy from them again.

In an aside, the combined starting weight of the two racks was about 7 pounds and the weight of liquid from the SV purge was over a pound. I also noted the same effect on pastrami when SV'd first then smoked. I found that the pastrami is much better when smoked first then finished SV. This time, I followed the SV'Q instructions on the main site. Next time I will smoke first.