Saturday, October 31, 2009

America's test Kitchen Baltimore Style- Beef

Last night was beef testing night. Robby, Aveline, and I headed over to Finn and Joanne's to begin our evaluation of three local beef farms. Finn and Joanne have been buying from Roseda Beef http://www.rosedabeef.com/ for a while and I have always been impressed with the steaks and burgers they have made for us. This year we are planning on going in on a cow with them. After some trouble we have managed to purchase and install an extra freezer in the basement for our cow. So in the interest of fairness I decided to give 2 other local beef farms a taste off against Roseda. So I headed to the farmer's market and got ground beef from Hickory Chance Farm http://www.hickorychance.com/ and from Albright Farms http://albrightfarms.net/index.php.

First Joanne shapped and weighed the patties to make them look uniform, she then labled the plates with a letter and handed them off to Robby. Robby then changed the letters to numbers and wrote down the changes. So this way no one knew which burger came from which farm.

Finn salted perfectly and then cook the burgers outside on the grill. Now for the taste test!

The votes were split down the middle. Robby and Joanne for Hickory Chance farm and Finn and I for Albright farms. Roseda was our least favorite.

Becuase the Roseda burger was frozen for almost a year and becuase we like eating beef with Finn and Joanne we are going to give all the farms another test and buy some steaks.
Stay tuned...

4 comments:

MsJoanie said...

Hold on. Those look like homemade hamburger buns! Mmmm, mmmm, good.

Keswickian said...

They were homemade BAD hamburger buns, Finn can't put me in charge of bread, he's the bread king. I rot!

strawberriesinparis said...

awesome test guys!

Julie said...

I just bought a chuck roast from Albright farms last weekend -- first time I've ever bought beef at the farmers market. It was great although it cost a small fortune.