People are always asking me how to grill a ribeye. Americans pride themselves on being steak eaters, so we ought to be experts, right? In fact, I think folks ruin more steaks than they grill right. Here are some easy hints:

Buy a thermometer. We get quick read digital thermometers for $10.00. One with all the bells and whistles might go $40.00. I’ve seen them as high as $120.00, but the fancy ones still don’t cook the steak for you. Thermometers eliminate all the subjective steak tests like feel. Ever seen the feel test that compares the pressure-respons of the chin to well-done steak, nose to medium and cheek to rare? It can work, but I know people with fat chins. And I’ve seen NY strips that are firm at rare. Subjective. Go with the technological absolute—digital thermometer.

Make sure the steaks are ready. That means thawed. Completely. Our beef is flash frozen and vacuum packed, so we just drop a steak in a bowl of tap water for about an hour to thaw it. You can also thaw it overnight in your refrigerator.

Get the grill hot. Use this time to clean it from last weeks salmon if you haven’t already (ever have a fishy ribeye? argh.) I use a brass brush and a spatula to scrape. There’s nothing like a good grill-on-high preheat to get rid of off flavor. If using a charcoal grill, I always use a volcano type coal igniter. Lighter fluid can really ruin the flavor of steaks and make them taste like a South Texas oil refinery. And don’t use those ‘match-light briquets’. They have tons of lighter fluid built right in. I like to sprinkle a little green apple wood or soaked mesquite on the coals or gas gill fire plate before I put that beef on.

Get that grill turned down to medium heat about 3 minutes before throwing the steaks on. With charcoal, you coals are white and hot—so raise your grate a little since you can’t turn them down. While waiting, get some water in that squirt bottle. I just use a plastic water bottle with a squirt lid on it. You’ll need this to quench any grill fires you may have.

What about seasoning? For a ribeye or NY strip, I don’t bother. These steaks should have enough flavor to go without. We use a little salt and pepper at the table finish, but nothing else.

Put those steaks on! I shape the steaks how I want them as I place them on the grill—you don’t want to stretch a cut out on the hot grill—it will stick fairly quickly and warp as it shrinks. I arrange them so all steaks are exposed to the same amount of heat, provided that they are the same thickness. If grilling different thicknesses, arrange them accordingly or put them on at different times.

The steaks should fairly sizzle when they hit the grate. If they don’t, your grill is too cold. If they hit the grate and cause a firestorm, maybe you have a little too much inferno on your hands. Shut the lid and start being patiently watchful. This is a good time to get that thermometer ready for a test probe and get that drink you may need to keep cool while grilling.

Flare ups can happen quickly, especially if you are grilling a well finished and marbled steak. Always be on the alert with your squirter. Just a quick shot at the base
is all it takes. Use care on charcoal-you don’t want to lose your coal bed with too much water.
Lets take a look. Insert probe into the middle of the side (not the top) of the thinnest steak—that is your canary in the coal mine. When it reads in the 80’s in the middle of the meat, it is time to turn. Use a tongs or a spatula—never a fork (don’t want to break that seary seal and drip precious juice). Flip quickly and decisively. My friend Greg always impresses me when he makes a steak or cup of coffee. He moves very quickly and decisively, never second guessing his movements. It all looks very impressive—like he might even know what he is doing. Your guests will be impressed as well, provided you don’t flip a steak right on to the lawn…or into Fido’s hopefully waiting (and equally impressed) mouth.

Maybe you are wondering what happens to that thermometer on the flip. We use a heat proof resident type with the cable. It can just live right there in the grill. The key is on the insert point. Insert from the side so you can flip.

OK, back to the grill. Shut that lid whenever you can to increase smoke (remember that apple/mesquite?) and reduce oxygen that can generate yellow fat fires. When your temp now reads 95 or so, turn again. I rotate the steaks 90 degrees as I flip so that my grill marks make an ‘X’. That way I know I did two turns.

Here is where I might digress a little about thin steaks (Anything under 1.25 inches is thin). These I turn once. First turn around 95 degrees. Second, off at 138. See the next paragraph for temps for different tastes.

Back to thick steaks. Do not forget to control fires (seems like guys are all about this as most of us wanted to be fireman when we grew up). Another turn and rotation at 105 degrees. The final at 136-138 degrees. That is medium rare. Figure 138-143 for medium, and 144+ for well. Be aware that if your steaks are lean, you probably do not want to go into medium territory. Without any fat, you are now making jerky if you go into medium. Moisture is a major part of the ‘mouthfeel’ (one of those intense culinary terms) in steak enjoyment.

Now, please pay attention to this deal about takeoff. I have a glass or ceramic plate waiting (not below room temp, but not heated) to receive the finished steaks and a stainless bowl to put over them. You want to hold heat for about 5 minutes to finish cooking the steak. If you cut into it right now, immediately off the grill, you will have a totally gut rare strip in the middle of the cut (although some of you I have met love that). But thermal inertia steps in now, and finishes the steak. Interior temp still rises even when off the grill, for the same reason that July and August days are the hottest, even though the longest day (and the most sun exposure) of the year, June 21 is long past.

So give it five minutes before cutting. This is the time to salt (we use sea salt—regular salt tastes bleachy) and pepper the cuts. Call the guests, pour that Cab, and enjoy.

And remember—like with everything, practice makes perfect!!

Nine year old Mae likes to make muffins on Saturday morning. As those beautiful corn and buckwheat muffins rolled out of the tins, I had just come back from checking cows (had two new babies before sunup) and fixing fence (they had gotten out and were eating my brand new crested wheatgrass seeding). I reached under the warming towel while she wasn’t looking, helped myself to a chilled glass of raw cow milk and put a nice slab of butter on one.

She caught me red-handed. She gets real owly about people eating the grub before its out on the table, but nobody else was out of bed, and I just could not stand seeing those little biscuits get cold.

I wish you could try one—they are entirely of her design—so you could understand why I had to make off with one (actually two now). A little bit of corn meal for crunch and that deep earthy flavor of buckwheat with honey built right in. Just wasn’t fitting to pass them up fresh and hot out of the cast iron.

She stopped what she was doing and said that she wrote a poem for those people in bed while she was pulling muffins from the pan:

Rise and shine!
or the muffins are MINE!
Get out of bed!
or you won’t get FED!

Glad I got out of bed.

I really like eating steak. But eating the one I did the other night was really difficult. Fact is, I even lost some sleep on it and not because of indigestion…

You know, one really cool advantage to being in the beef business is that there is always beef to eat, and if you are a beef lover like me, looking forward to a good dinner at the end of a long day is really nice. Maybe it would be a steak or stir fry, with some fresh steamed garden veggies and a hearty salad with a glass of cab.

There is always beef at our house for the family to eat—vacuum packs are seal compromised, a ribeye that looks like a shoe, or the label is misprinted or stained. It is something that we can’t sell. The other reason we have the occasional steak to eat (like most folks, we can’t afford to eat them regularly) is that we are testing a recently finished beef for taste and tenderness standards before we add it to our shippable inventory.

We use no fancy shear testers or other devices to do these tests. But one steak from every beef we sell through our online store makes it to our kitchen. The protocol we use mirrors that which we believe most of our customers would—that frozen steak is dropped in a bowl of tap water to thaw, and an hour later is on the grill on medium heat. When that interior temperature probe reaches 139 degrees, the steak is off and on a plate for 5 minutes. Pepper and salted to taste, we then slice through the middle of the cut and Caryl and I each sample a ¾” strip. We then strip the rest for dinner (the kids love it too!) and set down to eat.

A couple of nights ago it didn’t go so well. We had five new beef come in from our packer for sale this week on the internet, and one failed the tenderness test. A ribeye from steer number 99 tasted wonderful, and was still by most folk’s definition tender, but it did not meet our standards. A ribeye should not eat chewy at all when cooked right. The knife passed through easy enough, but it was definitely a little chewy.

The other test steaks passed with flying colors, so I knew that it wasn’t feed or aging or handling, as they all were finished by the exact same protocol. We had this happen once before, and we chalked it up to a genetic fluke.

This happens every couple of years, so you wouldn’t think it is a big deal. I think the hardest thing for me is that we have been with this steer through its entire life caring for it to be the very best, and something like a genetic aberration writes off its quality from going top-notch.

The other big deal is the money. Here we have something around $2,000 tied up in this steer, only to find out at the end that it does not make the grade.

I’ve heard folks say that the internet is a wonderful marketing tool because there is no accountability. The customer base is infinite (as long as you can reach them), and even if folks only buy once, there will always be someone there to replace them. So satisfaction is not really important, the thought goes, because you don’t need them back.

It’s the same way in the commercial commodity cattle business. I’ve known people over the years who raised breeds of cattle known for their extremely rapid growth but also for their characteristic toughness. Once those calves leave the ranch for a distant feedlot, they’ll never see them again. Nor will they ever see or hear from the consumers of their beef.

Caryl knows me well enough to know that I don’t sleep at night knowing someone might have a bad experience with our beef. There is just no question—I can’t sell it if it isn’t right. That is why it took us so long to start really selling the grass fed beef that we produced in the first place. We both had to know that it was consistently, predictably good before we could be passionate about representing it. And therein lies the reason what we have not taken on partner producers (even though we get approached fairly regularly about that).

Maybe like the potential of too many cooks spoiling the broth.

We have goats in the living room. Kid goats that were just born a little weak and cold today in this cold, windy, wintery blast we are having in April. Kid goats and 7 kid girls on the living room carpet by the wood stove with the kid girls trying to coax the kid goats into standing and trying to eat.

Our life is intertwined with that of animals. So much that, as we were heading home with daylight left from a day at the park with friends last Sunday, Mae said that our lives were ruled by cows (we had to feed yet that night). I guess she was right to some extent.

We have a rooster chicken called idiot head that the kids hate. They throw rocks at him whenever he comes by, as he runs free with about 7 others (the others are friendly). The Great Pyrennes big white dog named Sadie can be heard at any time of night patrolling the perimeter of the ranch headquarters area with her deep rolling bark on the wind of the night, keeping coyotes honest (is that possible?).

Katie the cat just had kittens in the barn. She hid them all when the kids had friends over who didn’t listen to our kids when they said not to touch them yet.

Arrow, the border collie is about to pup. She bred to our other border collie, Gyp. We watch her carefully.

Last winter, we bought some winter calvers from a neighbor. Sure enough, we got one of those 20 below blizzards with wind in February. I lived with the cows out in the river bottoms, sleeping with them out there in the 20 below (I had two sleeping bags and was still cold).

Early in the morning, I found a calf that I missed, dead in a snowbank.

It was stiff and cold as mom stood over it, hoping for life. Ice covered. Then I saw a faint puff of steam come off of its nostrils in my headlamp. I picked up the stiff carcass, with mom hot on my tail, threw it on the pickup seat and roared off the 2 bumpy miles to the ranch. The white ’74 Ford (its name is Caspar) didn’t like the cold either, and lacks a heater. The calf wouldn’t get anything done for it until I got home.

I pulled up to the house and scooped up the calf and ran to the front door. “Turn on the bathtub!” I said as I set the calf down in front of the hot woodstove. In a few minutes, the tub was full of hot water, and we dropped the calf in.

Ann and Marie held the calf’s head up so he wouldn’t drown. In a few minutes, he was convulsing and kicking wildly. Then his eyes rolled around in his head. It was all the girls could do to keep him above water so he wouldn’t drown.

I remembered one time my totally numb feet thawed by the wood fire. I felt like convulsing too. I thought I was going to cry. I think that is what this calf felt over his entire body.

After his feet finally got warm, we put him by the woodstove while I went out to do chores. Several hours later I came back to screaming, laughing girls and crazed wife trying to deal with a calf running around the kitchen, knocking over everything!

“Get this calf outta my house!”

Calf dry and warm now, standing, rambunctious on seat next to me in Caspar. We head out, now driving more sanely, back into the wind, the snow, the cold.

The cows are bunched in the willows, trying to hide from the wind. I can only get within 100 yards—it gets too rough beyond. Through my icy windshield, I see one cow peel out of the willows. She runs straight for me in Caspar. It is mom. She remembers. I roll the calf out, and he remembers. They touch noses and head back into the whiteout for the willows together.

Our lives are intertwined with animals. They permeate. Sometimes I catch Caryl and the girls referring to them as people. I remember one time we were out hiking and a couple came down the trail with several dogs. They realized our kids might panic when the dogs came roaring up, so they ran up also and tried to tell us and the kids that the dogs were friendly and it would be OK.

The kids were unfazed from the start. I looked up and said “It’s OK—our kids were raised with dogs.” They looked at me a little funny, and after a few words, they headed their way, and we headed ours.

Suddenly I had the grave realization that it might have come out wrong. I turned back and yelled out to them before they left earshot: “Did I just say that our kids were raised by dogs? I meant they were raised with them!”

Got home real late from Salmon, ID, which happens to be our shipping location for UPS. I drove an hour one way down the twisty Salmon River canyon to get those boxes on the truck only to find out that the grocery store, our dry ice supplier, does not have enough to fill our orders. The ice truck will arrive in about two hours, they say. The girls (2 of them) and I wait. When the ice is finally in boxes (12 year old daughter labeling, me icing, 8 year old taping) and we get home it is 8 PM. We grab a bite, and 11 year old Marie heads out into the dark with me. We have 550 hungry mouths to feed, and calving cows to check. I load, and then Marie drives the battered 1959 Chevy Viking two ton truck, loaded with 4 ton bales of our organic alfalfa hay in the starlit night while I fork hay off the back. At least it will be quiet tonight. Last night the tail pipe fell off when we drove across a wash and I welded it back together today.

The pregnant and calved cows are waiting for us where we fed yesterday. I have Marie shining a million candlepower (what is that supposed to mean anyway, and who measured that?) spotlight into the blackness searching for distant eyes reflecting while driving and watching for baby calves that may wander in front of the truck. Any eyes are worth checking out. By the way they move, you can tell if it is a cow, calf, dog, or coyote, but the really big concern is wolves. Several weeks ago we had a loner travel through the ranch—probably a young male. A friend of ours from the next valley lost four calves in one night several weeks ago to a maurading pack of the 150 pound predators that descended on their calving cows. A cow will defend her baby, but in the end, when a pack isolates her, she loses.

Marie spots eyes about a quarter mile away. I had just finished emptying the truck with my fork. We both unload and head out across the cold dark fields on foot to see what was up.

When a cow won’t come to hay, there is something going on. Either she is calving, calved, or in trouble. Maybe a calf is backwards, sideways, and she can’t have it, and needs help. When we finally reach her, we see her licking off the steamy hot wet mass of a wiggling newborn calf. She glanced up at us as I reassured her with my voice to let her know it was us, and left her be to continue doing what she did best—caring for her young one.

I think that is probably the biggest lesson I have learned in this business of ranching. I have come to see the mother cows as employees on this spread, who have been trained by their Maker to care for their young better than I could ever try. Even in several months, when we turn these young calves and their moms on 70 square miles of rugged mountain wilderness, the bottom line is that you’ve got to trust the mother to bring that calf back home again, or worry yourself sleepless. And God knows I need all the shuteye I can grab.

Here is a poem that Marie wrote about night feeding:

Feeding
At night,
When the stars are bright
And light is most gone from the hills

We get in the truck Me and Dad

And with hay from the stack,
Dad will fill up the back,
Of our two ton with everlastin’ will
No need to go fast, But, Boy am I glad,
When feeding is over at last.
–Marie, age 11

Caryl spied me picking away at the hay stacks yesterday. I had 8 year old Rose with me, who was my color picker. She would point out the greenest ton bales of alfalfa grass hay, then I would pull some sample sprigs out from them and we would sniff them together. Anything smelling of sweet grass or with that robust alfalfa green bean fragrance I would mentally mark for our finish cattle—the ones closest to the end.

Spring grass is on the way. A shade of green colors the pastures, and I am not the only one who sees it: those yearling beeves look hard and long for any edible size blade that they may place on their tongues, like many a woman and dark chocolate. It makes it real hard to feed them. They become very discriminating now, and if you do not hand them the very best, they would rather hunt for that grass blade and actually lose weight! Kind of counterintuitive for spring, you would think.

And then there is that tobacco hay. That’s what we call hay that may be the very best maturity, but was put up just a little too green. Smells kind of like tobacco. Cows love it, even in the spring. I had been feeding it once for about 2 weeks several years ago when a store called me.

“Your beef smells musty.”

Musty. It took awhile to figure out, but it was tobacco hay. That strong flavor ended up in the meat. Never do that again. Another good reason to smell test that hay. They are what they eat, after all!

My 12 year old spotted the cow first. Down near the bottom of the meadow, now underwater with overflow from Lawson Creek, swollen with spring snowmelt. The cow was standing on a little island along the field edge in the rain. I looked vainly for little ears, any sign of life at her feet, but saw none. We slogged over there.

The stillborn calf lay on the other side of the berm she stood on, still above the flood water, and thoroughly cleaned and bathed by her mother’s caring tongue. Any good cow would do that, I knew, just following the protocol the Maker gave them to best take care of their young, even if dead. I knew the cow would stand guard over her baby for several days, leaving only to feed on hay with the others, lest a marauding coyote or wolf try to take a bite out of her calf.

We set up a trap with some hay along a fence a few hundred yards away. She was tough, as many young mothers often are, nearly running over a hired man and destroying a fence and a heavy duty cow panel. Finally, we coaxed her into the trailer with 2 other cows. While she waited in the trailer, I headed back down to the calf and skinned it, taking the hide with me. I left the carcass for the coyotes and other critters. Figure they gotta eat too. It would probably be gone in a day. We have many bald eagles hanging around the place that pretty much scarf up whatever the coyotes leave. We then loaded up and drove the mile or so to the home corrals and unloaded there.

Later that day while we were feeding, I kidnapped one of a set a twins we had the other day. Cows don’t count well, so twins are not real desirable. Often a cow will forget about one on the big pastures or the range, and it will go hungry without mom’s milk and often starve, and before you know it, they too become coyote and wolf food, especially without a protective mom watching out for them. We put the calf in the pickup cab, and drove home, dropping the calf off in a barn pen for the night.

The next morning, I could hear the twin calf bawling for mom from the barn. I set out, grabbed the calf hide and some baling twine and fashioned a little coat out to put on the little guy. He struggled pretty hard at first, not really liking his new fur coat, but settled into it fairly well. He was good and hungry—just perfect for what came next.

I ran the mom into the grafting pen—a 14 x 14 pen with solid 2 and 3” board paneling all around it 6 feet high. Built tough for wild range cattle. I’ve never had a cow escape, though many have tried. We make certain there are plenty of places for us to vault over the top in case things get dicey as my 220 lbs flesh and bone (can’t seem to keep fat on) is straw in the wind when put up against a 1200 lb pile of black angus protective angst. Last year one sent both Tim the hired guy and I over the side of the pen. Just yesterday one knocked me down in the barn (she had me cornered against board fence and I didn’t climb fast enough)—but the same day I was scratching another one between the ears. Cows are pretty transparent about how they are feeling—you can pretty much tell when they want to get you. When they want to get out of the calving pen, they usually head butt the gate or try to jump, but it is just too high, especially for the amount of runway they have to clear the high bar.

In the pen is a wooden head catch that we slip cows into so that we can put a new calf to sucking on their milk bar. Often we will tie their legs together so they can’t kick the novitiate into brain-dead oblivion.

The cow is in the pen and the gate is closed. She looks over it quickly, but carefully, looking for a way out. A range cow is rarely comfortable in such surroundings—she has been living in an essential wide open wilderness some 8 months a year and must be cautious and guarded. We have encountered more than our share of predators when we are horseback gathering or moving cattle—I’m sure she has stories to tell that would make our tales look pretty paltry.

She sees the hole and rams into it. I pull the rip cord and in a second she is caught, even while fighting as if for her life. The entire barn seems to rattle and shake with her effort to be free, but I swing the squeeze panel into place and she is immobilized.

I hurry the calf over and push his little head against her udder. He knows what to do. The milk bar is full, much to his delight, and his tail begins to wag merrily from side to side. He forgets all about his little coat.

All is well, I think, and jump out after letting them both free in the pen. She sniffs the fur coat, and in an instant, she believes it is hers. I have even taken white or red calves, put a black calf hide coat on them, and they were well accepted. Smell is number one. I’m told a range cow can scent her baby from 12 miles away. I check once more as I leave the barn and sure enough, baby is delightedly eating from his new mom.

About an hour later, I’m driving the hay truck flatbed with a load of hay and about 5 singing, giggling girls on the back. As we go by the barn, I try to quiet the girls down in time, but was not quite fast enough. The barn began to shake from within as a 1200 lb cow began to try to break out of the heavy duty pen by jumping through or over. I guess she didn’t like the singing. We hear a 3” by 14” piece of Douglas-fir panel board crack as she rams into it. I peek through the crack in the barn door to see her complete the destruction as she is balanced by her belly on the broken 6 foot high panel fence. In a moment she was through, and soon after over another corral fence to freedom and some other cows, leaving her new baby behind.

I had nearly given up on the old girl (after all, she had broken 2 fences and wrecked one steel panel) when Caryl and the girls suggested we get her back in on horseback with a bunch of other cows. I sent the girls off to do it, and it worked! We kept some gentle babysitter cows in with her, and she again took on her new baby to complete the bond that was started.

Another calf had a mother, and another mother had a calf. That’s really our goal through calving season; to send everyone up on the high ranges with a baby to raise.

Many folks ask us why some of our cows can be so wild (they aren’t all this way). There are not many that are actually mean—they are simply wildly protective—usually of their calf. I guess I wouldn’t want it any other way. We have had cows run off predators like coyotes, bears, cougars and wolves and even rouge dogs in search of easy meat. A gentle, quiet cow probably would not stand up.

But it does mean that you always watch your own backside. Maybe a degree in cow psychology would help.

Either way, I was thinking that my 12 year old figured it out, ‘cause as we were bumping down the road in the noisy rattle banging two ton, I thought I heard her say to me “Did Evil-The-One finally take her calf?”

I looked at her quizzically. “Did who take her calf?”

“E101.”

“I thought you said ‘Evil the One’.

We both laughed as we both knew that no longer would she be named by her tag number. Evil-the-One it would be forever. Not all the cows have names, but those who earned them, do. At least with a name like that, we will always be on guard…

After several weeks learning WordPress, we’ve launched our blog, Organic Beef Matters. The name is a double-or perhaps triple-entendre: organic beef really does matter for the health of the land and our bodies, the blog will be about matters related to organic beef production, and finally, I guess, even organic beef produce organic matter.

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