Grow and Behold Kosher Meat – Nationwide

CW: This is Naf. Naf is runngng Grow & Behold, the gold standard in meats in this country. Also kosher!
Naf: We’re here in the Grow & Behold Foods Butcher Shop. We produce premium meats. Our Animals are raised on pasture. No antibiotics. No hormones. The best meat on the market, happens to be kosher.
Naf: We dry aged meats. We do all of our own kashering. We do all of our own butchering. We’ve got the full range, from the most high-end cuts, that are dry age ribeyes to the more simple Denver steak and a chuck steak.
Naf: I think by now it’s an understood fact that the happier the animal, the better they taste. That’s pretty much how it goes and we’re not fundamentalists here at Grow & Behold. It’s not that you must do it exactly this way or there is only one way to do it. We are looking at the whole picture. We are producing sustainable, ethical, and delicious kosher meat. That means the animals need to be happy, it means our workers need to be paid fairly. It means we have to look at transportation and waste disposal.
Naf: Just like Chaim was saying, the amazing thing is when you do it right, when you hit all those points, the meat also tastes better. And the proof is in the pudding, you know you taste it, and you never want to go back.
CW: We’re here… We’re here in the cutting room. I’m here with Yosef. What kind of cut is this?
Yosef.: This is a prime rib eye. It has been sitting for 21 days. We are going have to trim off quite a bit on the outer portion but once we trim it up it’s going to be nice and pretty.
Yosef.: We are now looking at a boneless rib eye. It is the prime rib, you can see in the center there, you can see it on the other side as well. What I’m going to do now is pull off the cap on it just to leave the eye and then we’re going to start trimming it down so we can cut some nice steaks.
CW: Alright!
CW: People freak out about eating raw meat. This muscle has never been exposed to the air before. There is no worry at all.
Naf: So do you notice your knife is clean?
Yosef.: Yeah, you’re knife is clean. We’re not… We’re not worried about any cross contamination. This is a perfectly acceptable to eat. Here we have a fresh chuck, just kashered. The traiboring happened yesterday. Traiboring is the removal of specific veins and forbidden fats. Forbidden fats and veins, you got it.
CW: #Kosher.
Yosef.: The ancient art of making kosher meat!
Yosef.: The head would sit right here. The forearm comes off like that.
CW: We’re going to watch Yosef clean it up beautifully. Again, everybody talks about why kosher meat costs so much. Or why meat in general, why should there be high meat, in general, costs. Right? There’s a lot of labor and a lot of love that goes into the production of your meat. And if you’re going to a place and they’re selling this for $3/lb, that means that not a lot of labor, and not a lot of love went into it.
Yosef.: A lot of labor still went into it. But not a lot of love. And those folks who did the work probably didn’t get paid too well.
CW: So the animals live with their mom for almost a year, maybe close to a year, and their munching just on beautiful grass. We like our grass!
When they’re with their mom it is straight grass and then they move to finishing where they’re given a mix of grass, grain, and hay. The grain is never more than 50% of the diet. It changes depending on where the animal is in the finishing cycle. The weather. Most of the feed is locally sourced, so there’s, you know, there’s a lot that goes into that. But they’re finished and that finishing process, again, can be anywhere from two to six months, very much depending on the individual animal, the season, the farm, etc. But we have a network of growers that all meet our rigorous standards and then when the animals are appropriately sized they move towards graduation where we schect (slaughter) them. Mazel Tov! Graduation!