Guide · For first-time bulk beef buyers
The moment you get your beef home is the moment most people feel slightly overwhelmed. It's a lot of packages, they all look similar, and there's a real risk that in eight months you'll find a mystery roast fossilised at the bottom of the chest freezer.
Twenty minutes of organising now saves you the whole year.
Lay it out on the kitchen table in piles: ground beef, steaks, roasts, stew and stir fry, ribs, bones. Don't put a single package away until it's sorted.
Reusable shopping bags or plastic bins work well. One per category, labelled. Now you're pulling out a bag of steaks, not excavating a freezer.
A sheet of paper with the counts (22 lbs ground, 9 ribeyes, 4 chuck roasts) and a pencil on a string. Cross things off as you use them. It sounds fussy. It is the single most useful thing you will do.
You'll go through ground beef fastest, so it goes on top. Roasts and bones live at the bottom.
Counter-intuitively, don't start with the steaks. Start with the cuts you don't know, while you still have plenty of everything else to fall back on. Cook a chuck roast in week one. Try the flat iron. Make stock from the bones. By the time you're down to the last third of your beef you'll actually know how to cook all of it.
In the fridge, always: overnight for steaks, a full day or two for a big roast. It's the only method that doesn't cost you texture. If you've forgotten, a sealed package in a bowl of cold water works. Never on the counter, and never in hot water.
Don't waste the bones. Roast them at 400°F for 40 minutes, then simmer for 12 hours with an onion, a carrot and a splash of vinegar. You'll get stock that sets to jelly in the fridge, and it costs you nothing.
Keep that inventory sheet when it's finished. It tells you exactly what you ran out of and what you had too much of, and that makes next year's cut sheet a five-minute conversation instead of a guess.
This all starts with good beef. Ours is raised on grass in the Bighorn County foothills west of Calgary, and cut the way you want it.
