Meat 101: Everything You Need To Know About Choosing Healthy Meat, Grass Fed vs. Grain Fed, DIY Meat Curing & More!

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness Podcast, in our country, you know, we have kind of, I'd say, jumped the shark in terms of what is acceptable to consumers in our agriculture. The consumers just don't know it. There's natural how I mean it and then there's natural how again, the USDA allows people to define it. So in our country, the term natural means almost nothing. People who have been raising pink in Iowa for three generations, they don't believe inherently what they're doing is wrong. And so convincing them to change over, you're not convincing them to change philosophically. All you're is convince them that they can make more money if they change their system. We've been curing meat for thousands of years. So before the advent of a lot of technology that we have, it can be done safely at small scale for sure.

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Hey folks, it's Ben Greenfield. And if you're like me, you've occasionally wandered into the meat section of the grocery store or a butcher shop or one of these fancy charcuterie style restaurants and you've been kind of perplexed about like, which cuts to get and how to know if the meat is actually safe and actually healthy. The difference between words like natural and grass fed and grass grain fed and hormone free and cafo free and humanely raised and all these terms that tend to be associated with meat these days, it seems almost more complex than it should be. Well, today we're going to delve into the mystery of meat with Jacob Dixon. And Jacob is with Dixon's Farmstand Meats. He describes it as a candy shop for carnivores and one of the most sought after purveyors of fine quality meats in the city of New York. And they offer things like artisanal meats and house made charcuterie made from animals raised without added hormones or prophylactic antibiotics or animal byproducts, whatever those are. So we're going to delve into all that with Jacob today. So, Jacob, thanks for coming on the call, man.

It's my pleasure. I'm happy to be here.

So from what I understand, you came into the food industry originally from the world of corporate marketing. How'd that happen?

Well, for me. I used to work for American Express for many years and I was looking for a business. I wanted to start and I wanted to start something in an area that I was passionate about. I was looking not to start a business in something that I would start and sell. I'm not an entrepreneur from that perspective. I was looking for an industry that I would start and be in for the next 35 years. And I was enjoying my time in American Express. I got to use my brain every day, but it wasn't satisfying. I was looking for something, something bigger at the same time. In parallel, I was, I call myself a foodie, I was passionate about cooking and I was a big carnivore. And one day I kind of realized, here I eat meat every single day almost, but I know nothing about how it gets from a farm and what a farm might even look like. And so I went about educating myself and, you know, and I started researching and reading books and going online. And the more I learned, the more kind of horrified I was about the industrial agricultural processes in our country.

Like what, like what kind of stuff were you like going to specific websites, like watchdog websites? Or were you reading books that made you nervous about this stuff? Or like what was it that, that you found that you were using as a resource?

A little bit of everything, briefly. I mean, it started with reading. I think a great primer for everyone is Michael Pollan's Omnivore Dilemma. It's not my favorite now that I'm more into the industry for a lot of reasons, but I think it's a great starting place. It kind of is like an eye opening book for you. Kind of makes you start asking a lot of questions. And then from there I just started basically becoming a massive consumer of information online. What was out there? And then books. I was buying all the Joel Sullivan books. So the big jumping off point from Omnivore delevant, getting into his perspective of things. But really the more I was learning, it started then driving me to look for a better solution. Where could I buy Mead? That I was happy with it. And the truth is I was struggling to find them. There weren't great options either. I could buy at the farmer's market, but everything was frozen and pre cut. Or you could go to the supermarket and I wasn't happy about things that were the way things were raised. I couldn't find someone doing kind of the whole package and kind of said to myself, maybe this is it. Maybe if you could figure out how to do this. Well, there was a business there because there are either people out there like me looking for better options, or if you could open people's eyes and educate them, there would be a near infinite amount of people that would be interested in what we could offer. So I started reading more and working on a business plan. But the thing about meat is that it's very hard to do right. There are so many moving parts, so many things to learn. I said I got to just throw away the business plan for right now and quit my job and just dive into the field. And I spent a year just kind of traveling the country working on farms, working in a butcher shop in Minneapolis, working at the slaughterhouse that we now use, just because I felt that the doom me is a hands on industry. I needed to have hands on experience with it. And so I said, I'm not even going to think about what this business is going to look like. All I know is it's going to be in meat, it's going to be working with small farmers and I'm going to learn and then let the business ferment as I go through it. And then at the end, I kind of cross my fingers that there's going to be a business plan that's going to be the way forward after this year.

Yeah, I mean, I could imagine it would be a pretty steep learning curve even for just myself. Learning how to filled dress and skin and quarter a deer has been just an enormous process in and of itself. My wife recently butchered a whole hog and for her that was having to be immersed in learning about it for literally weeks. So I can't imagine what would go in learning what you would need to know to do what you're doing now. Because you're like the main butcher at this Dixon's farm stand now, right?

I actually don't consider myself a butcher. I believe that my role in Dixon's farm stand is kind of a curator of both products and people. So for instance, it would take me a decade to be as talented as a chef as my chef. And it would take me six years to learn the skill set that butcher has. So can I bring everybody together? So yes, I can cut meat and yes, I know a lot of agriculture, and yes, I know a lot about sausage making. But. But I hire individual specialists that bring them into my organization and then we work together to create what is now Dixon's farmstone.

So I've got kind of a weird question for you, but if you could choose like one animal and I'm going To totally gross out all of our plant based listeners. But if you could choose one animal that you are going to butcher in terms of just like either the ease or the enjoyment or whatever it is that that turns you on when you're butchering an animal, what animal would it be?

For me personally, probably in the business aspect of it, it's the pig. Pigs are great for so many reasons. From a farmer's perspective, it allows a small farmer with minimal investment and infrastructure and time to really get a farm going in a short period of time. Because pigs grow quickly. From a butcher's perspective, the yield on them is tremendous. Almost the entire pig. When we butcher a pig, we can get as high as 86% of the carcass. As a retail saleable product. That's tremendous. There's so little waste there compared to beef and lamb. And then from a chef's perspective, pork is just so versatile and you can do with it making sausage, charcuterie. It is the most versatile and profitable species because of all these things kind of throughout the whole supply chain. So that's why I like pigs. And they're great and they're delicious, obviously, if they're good. Also for a pork's perspective, the pork that I offer is such a huge gulf in difference in quality for what you find from commercial hogs in the U.S. i mean there is, it might not be well raised, you know, and I might have problems with the supply chain and the ethics behind it, but you can go into a high end supermarket and buy, I'm going to say in quotes that you can't see high quality beef, right? You can buy prime, steer, dry, aged, it's going to taste good. But you can't really go into a supermarket and buy delicious pork. It just doesn't really exist anymore in the US there's such a gulf between that product that I offer that we call pork and the product that the supermarket called fork. In terms of home butchering, I think the best pieces by far for people just getting started is lamb actually, because they're super simple to break down. You can basically do it. You could watch a couple videos online and with a cleaver and a butcher's knife and a boning knife, you could break down a lamb pretty easily. Like I could teach you in one session enough that you could break a lamb home and not do a beautiful job with it, but you could break it down. So I think lambs are a great starting place for people and then pigs. Now if you ask my butchers what their favorite species is they all say beef because beef is challenging and complicated and big, and everything about it is big. It's expensive to buy. There's a lot of waste that you can't afford to waste a single piece of things. There's a lot of fat and trim that goes in the garbage. So beef, if you're a butcher, is probably your favorite. But I think pigs are great for everything else and lambs are great for home. The long answer to it, simple question again.

Yeah. When my wife went and butchered the whole hog, she actually just got one from a local farm. And just the bacon alone, you say that it's hard to get good quality pork. And I remember the first time that we had bacon just cooked over the cast iron skillet at our house. And it's a night and day difference between the best, most expensive bacon we could find at the grocery store. She used this book called Beyond Bacon. Have you heard of this one?

I have.

Not really. Interesting recipe. It's actually a paleo book. It's called Paleo Recipes that Respect the. The whole hog. But really, really cool book in terms of teaching you some interesting pork recipes. And I'm totally in agreement with you that that pork tastes completely different than anything we could find anywhere else. So I've got a few questions for you here about meat and knowing what to get when you walk into a butcher shop or into the meat section of your local supermarket. When you do that, how do you know that the meat that you're getting is actually healthy? Like, what kind of things should you look for on the label?

Well, I mean, I guess there's healthy in a lot of ways, right? There's healthy. There's a couple questions that you're asking. Healthy could be fat content, I think. I don't believe that that's the kind of healthiness that we should care so much about in our meat, especially where I suggest people eat in moderation. When I think about healthy, I want to put in my body things that are well raised from a humane treatment perspective, that matters a lot to me. But then also on how the animal is raised in terms of what will point into its body, because I think that affects what goes into our body. In our country. We have kind of, I'd say, jumped the shark in terms of what is acceptable to consumers for agriculture. In our agriculture system, the consumers just don't know it, really. We've done a really good job of slaughtering on a massive scale, raising animals on a massive scale, and nobody sees it. If you think about it, there's like 6 million steers a month, I believe, are slaughtered in our country. And has anybody ever seen it, the average person? Because it's kind of tucked away and we don't see it. There's this massive system in place to supply us, and it's developed to hide the bad practices that are out there. Those practices for me are basically widespread use of hormones, growth promoters, beta antagonists in beef, antibiotics in pork and chicken. Those are the things that I'm trying to avoid because I believe that they have both humane implications for the animals and also for ourselves from a healthfulness perspective.

Okay. I actually. I want to ask you some targeted questions about that stuff because, I mean, we hear those terms thrown around, like, all the time, like hormonely raised and no added hormones and no antibiotics. But, for example, humanely raised, like, how do you know. How do you specifically know that the animal that you're getting there at the. Well, I actually don't really even know how it works. You just get these big dead animal carcasses or are the animals coming live to you?

So because I want to opt out of the commercial meat industry, I have built my entire supply chain from scratch. So the slaughterhouse that we use is where I work. It's three hours north of here. I'm going to be there tomorrow, actually, with a group of students. We use that as kind of our point of consolidation. So each of my farmers I work with, just four farmers I tried to, you know, we grew our businesses together. I want to work more deeply with fewer farmers so we can control more variables, know more about each other. Those farmers bring the animals to the slaughterhouse. Lowell and his two sons run the place. They bake slaughter for us there. And we have our own trucks that we. In the farm that we use to transport the animals in. He actually lives up there. My driver lives five miles from the slaughterhouse. So every Tuesday morning, he pulls up and all the animals that have been slaughtered for us for that week are loaded to the truck and brought down. The pigs and lambs come in whole, and the bees come in quartered. So we can control as much of the butchering and processing in our store. So we bring them in as large pieces as possible. Nothing comes in a box. Nothing comes from an outside supplier. It only comes from my group of farms who are raising specifically for us and bringing to our one slaughterhouse. Basically, I want very deep relationships so I can understand as much as possible about these farms. I've been working with most of our farmers for about seven years now, since the Very beginning. And for me to bring in a new farmer, I've got to get really comfortable. And we start really slow, one animal here and there. And as we become closer with each other and our organization, their farm in our butcher shop, and the quality and consistency and how the animals are raised, we'll start building our business up together.

So when an animal is humanely raised, what exactly does that mean? What's happening to the animal as it grows up that causes an animal humanely versus non humanely? Because like I've been to some places where it seems like it's a commercial feedlot and the animals are. The animals still seem to be kind of in the field. Like there's a lot of them out there, you know, kind of in close quarters. But I'm curious where you draw the line between something being humane versus non humane.

Well, I believe that humans as a species, that we have an internal mechanism and a feeling and understanding about what is correct in terms of scale. And I think a lot of agriculture as humane, not that you can't be small and inhumane, but. But a lot of agriculture and food production, it's about scale and small scale and controlling variables. That's where we're concentrating on. So I'm looking for small scale producers that are interested in staying. They want to be viable farms, but staying on a small scale and raising animals well, where they have room to roam and express themselves. And when you start getting at the scale or mistreating, they'll more likely need antibiotics and other things to keep them healthy. So we're looking at kind of a small scale operation where animals can be themselves, their pigginess, not that they're wild animals, but they have room to root and socialize, access to outdoors at all times. These are the things that we're looking for. And I agree with you, some of it is kind of hard to pin down. How do you define it? Because one of the problems we've had in our country is when things become defined terms by the usda, once it's written on paper and says this is what it means, the industry then can follow the letter of the law, but not the spirit of the law. A great example of that is the term free range for chicken. Free range, when the term was developed, was really about that happy chicken running around the field that farmers were believing in, that you picture. But when it was written down on paper by the usda, companies could follow the letter of the law saying it has access to outdoors, but not necessarily that the chickens ever go outdoors. And then describe what the outdoors look like or how much access there was. So free range became a term that at one point meant something, but once it became a defined term by the usda, it ceased to lose its meaning. You see that a little bit with grass fed as well. Grass fed, you can follow the letter of the law by feeding them porridge, no grain during their life cycle, but you could be a grass fed feedlot as well. That's a term where when it came about, people were trying. It was really that pasture raised ideal that you're picturing for peak. One of the reasons during my journey why I spent time working on farms before I got started is that I needed to learn for myself, not for what I was reading in books, but have firsthand knowledge of what I consider to be acceptable agricultural practices for my business and for myself, what I would want. And that's why I went and worked on farms. And the first farm I worked at actually was kind of right on the border. There are things that I thought were great about that farm. It was Cornell University sheep farm. A lot of things I said, you know, I'm not really comfortable with the way they're doing things. Yes, these animals are pretty healthy, but they never go outside from when they're born to when they're slaughtered for the lamb. It was a little bit too commercial of an operation for me, so I kind of wanted to go a little bit farther towards the small scale and independent farmer than what I was seeing there. But I'm glad that I worked on that farm because it kind of gave me that firsthand experience about that kind of middle road. It wasn't a master seed lot, but it wasn't quite what I was going for from my farmer.

Gotcha. So if I pick up a piece of meat at the store and it says grass fed, is there a way for me to know if that's humanely raised grass fed versus kind of like the half assed version of grass fed that you're talking about where it's still a feedlot but they're technically getting grass.

That's a big problem. And that's why my business is so extreme in one direction is that there isn't a great way to know. The best thing you can do is start asking lots of questions in the supermarket. And if there's no one to answer those questions, it means that it probably isn't as far down the path of humane and small scale and helpful as a shop that can answer those questions. It's really hard to get to scale in the kind of business that we run to run a wholesale brand you're paying farmers a lot of is very difficult. So if it's something and you need to get a high dollar value for it, so if it's at a low cost and it's sitting on a supermarket shelf with nobody to kind of explain what it is, chances are it's either the commodity or somewhere in between. You can get the premium you need for raising animals on a small scale and sell it wholesale. So that's why buying from small scale places like mine or other premium shops opening around the country, or buying directly from the farmer where they can capture more of the retail dollar, that's a much more likely place where you are going to find meat like ours, raised on small scale and well raised meat.

So it's a better idea if you're actually going to buy meat, to not go into a grocery store and buy it. I was actually recently at a conference and I was sitting with a guy named Daniel Vitalis, a friend of mine who also has a podcast. And the way he described it was, he said that basically poor people have the mentality of buying food in these small quantities like a pack of carrots or a piece of steak from the grocery store, and that healthy people or people with an attitude of abundance, they'll purchase their meat as like the whole hog or they'll go out of their way to go like to the butcher shop and buy like larger quantities of high quality meat or they'll like, you know, grow their own carrots or go to the farmer's market and buy big bundles and you know, learn how to store those properly. So when it comes to purchasing meat, would you say that people should just for the most part avoid the supermarket in the grocery store and just find like a specialty butcher shop to work with if they're not going to buy the whole cow themselves?

Yes, I mean that's obviously I advocate, but I'm biased. I own a specialty place. But yeah, I think that's your best option. I mean, if you have access directly to a farmer and want to buy in bulk, I think that's buy a half deer or split it with family. It's the most economical way. If you don't have access to a place like us and don't want to buy in large quantities, I think farmers markets are the next best thing and those are the best solutions. And I think when we think about economics, the ground beef from a well raised animal is just as helpful as a ribeye from a well raised animal. It's going to cost a lot less. So I think that you're always going to have to keep cost and quality in perspective, especially when we're talking about healthfulness and nutrition, because there's not more nutrition in a ribeye, it's just more tender. And so I always say ribeyes are not sustainable. Ground beef is sustainable. There's a lot of ground beef on the animal and there's not a lot of tenderloin ribeye on the animal. So if you want to support local farmers and local butcher shops and local agriculture and have well raised meat at a reasonable price, it's about buying sausage and ground meat and those other cuts, it's not about buying middle meat, those premium cuts that you're used to.

Gotcha. Okay, now, how about the word natural? You see the word natural appear on a lot of this packaging. What exactly does that mean? I mean, is that just something that anybody can slap on or how's the word natural?

Yeah, using the term natural in our, in our logo is actually one of my regrets. I gotta go back and forth about because there's natural how I mean it and then there's natural how. Again, the USDA allows people to define it. So in our country, the term natural means almost nothing. There's two ways that can be used. There can be the term natural, which means minimally processed, basically, that it has kind of no additives and it's not mechanically separated, which means basically spraying something down with a pressure washer and then collecting the bits and parts from the drain, for lack of a better description. So in that sense that almost any meat you buy, regardless of how it's raised, it can be labeled as natural for that perspective. The other way you see natural, you'll see natural asterisk, asterisk at the supermarket. Now, what that allows is a marketing term that companies can go and register with the USDA and give their definition of natural. So it can say for, you know, let's say cap, the, let's call it the certified Angus program. They can say for us, natural means no hormones and no antibiotics. Right. And they register that definition with the USDA and they can put it on their marketing materials and you'll always see the asterisk. And you can look on the back of the package or often it's even more misleading. They'll say see, pamphlet or go online for our definition of natural. So it can mean something different everywhere you go. So we define natural. I mean, the way I personally define natural is the same kind of trying to gather up these Feelings about when I visit my farm and our process and the things that we make. So it's about small scale family farms, it's about small slaughterhouses that take care with each animal, about handling every carcass in the optimal way and respecting the animal. And in our store, we make everything by hand in small scale, small batches. That's kind of what I meant by natural. So I think it is a very confusing term for the consumer.

Yeah. Okay. So natural pretty much means jack squat. Really? I mean, if it's on. Pretty much.

So if you come into my story now, we've got natural in the, in our logo, but none of our other materials ever use the term because we kind of realized as we got into it it's kind of a loaded term in the US and at some point we'll probably revise our logo and, and eliminate that term because it means so little in the US at this point.

You actually have some blog posts on your website at the dixonsfarmstand.com site and in one of the articles that you have over there, you talk about antibiotics and why they're actually used and how there's kind of some misconceptions out there about why antibiotics are used. Can you get into the idea behind those misconceptions? Like why is it that animals are fed antibiotics?

So there's really two reasons why you would treat an animal antibiotics. So the first is for growth promotion and the second is for healthfulness. Right. For the animal. Now the way we start using, why antibiotics are problematic in our country, forgetting about creating resistance for the human population. So you have animals, right? Animals can get sick and you treat them with antibiotics. You always see in our marketing we say no prophylactic antibiotics. So even in the best of circumstances, the well raised animals, animals get an eye infection, they have a foot problem. We always want our farmers to be able to treat that animal with antibiotics if it is injured. The problem is more with prophylactic antibiotics. So using it on an animal that is not yet sick and as a preventative to keep it from getting sick, that's where we're getting into a practice that allows agriculture to exist at densities and treatment levels that I don't believe we should be doing. So it allows you to put more chickens into one coop, more pigs into a warehouse at once. By treating them with antibiotics, you keep them from getting sick. And the way the industry justifies it, saying that, oh, if we didn't treat them, then they would get sick and there would be problems with humane. But I believe It's a system of density and scale that is inherently inhumane. And antibiotics are just an enabler of that industry. And that's scale.

So do you think it's ever okay to use antibiotics with me, I do. In which case?

In the first case. So the way we would allow our farmers. So if there is an injury or an animal gets sick, you treat the animal with antibiotics. Small scale farmers can't afford to not use an animal that may have gotten illness. And just like people, we get over illnesses. It's about minimal antibiotic use as much as possible and for very short periods and far before the animals ever brought to slaughter.

Have you ever wondered if, like in humans, how nowadays with alternative medicine, in a lot of cases when people get sick, we'll use things like probiotics and essential oils and vitamin C and zinc and things like that to assist the immune system with natural healing. Why is it that something like that couldn't be used with animals?

It is actually. And all of our farmers practice that as much as possible. We really try to use as little antibiotics and call the vet as little as possible for an animal. You can do it through nutritional supplements. People use oregano and oregano oil. We use probiotics and preventative measures and natural deworming methods as much as possible on animals. But I don't want throwing our formulas. I never draw a line that says you can never use antibiotics in an animal that is injured or sick. But yes, I believe just like with people, we should do as much as possible to minimize the use of antibiotics for sure. And that's a big difference. I was watching a video of a farmer at a big pork place in Iowa at a big pork warehouse and factory farm. And he's just walking around with a. It looks like a caulk gun basically full of antibiotics. And any animal that looks a little pale or looks a little like has a light limb, he's just hitting it like, you know, in the five minutes in the video, he must have given antibiotic treatment to 20 or 30 different animals and he's just hitting them and then spray painting them as the tape and mark hitting them and spray painting them so he doesn't double dose them. It's that total, near indiscriminate use of antibiotics in that way. That's a problem. This is also. One farmer in the industrial system is caring for thousands of animals in one day. They can feed like 15,000 pigs. Because so much is automated on our farm, even our largest farm that's raising 600 pigs a year. Which is not a lot. They know every single pig, right? They're keeping an eye on that pig. They saw an eye infection. If you think about it, I think of our farmers as like the headmaster at a small high school. A headmaster. They know every kid and what's going on. They know the personality, they know the issues, and so they are looking out for those. These kids are also. Each individual animal at the scale we're talking is extremely valuable to a small farmer. And so they are looking out for the best interest of every single animal. They can afford to have high mortality rates. Whereas if you look at the industrial system, there is an expected loss on each animal. And each animal is kind of a widget. And the more widgets they raise, the more that they are growing. They're automating as much as possible. So each individual animal is not that valuable to the system. And that leads to all these issues that we're talking about, about inhumane treatment, devaluing the life of the animal. And when you devalue the life of the animal, the healthfulness and the way you raise, it doesn't become as important anymore. Terms like antibiotic use, humane, they become marketing terms. They actually don't really mean anything about the toll of the farmer and the animal itself. It's not about caring for the individual animal. It's being able to say, oh, well, if I can be never ever antibiotic, I can sell more meat or at a higher premium. Those things are important to a farmer from an economic viability. But that's not why we should be raising animals and caring about what we consume. That's about what can I put on my label so I can get 10 cents more a pound. It's not about what do I believe in and how I raise animals. That's a huge barrier to converting our system, because people have been raising pigs in Iowa for three generations. They don't believe inherently, for the most part, that what they're doing is wrong. And so convincing them to change over, you're not convincing them to change philosophically. All you can do is convince them that they can make more money if they change their system. And that's a challenge. I think that's a challenge for everyone, because if you don't actually believe in it, are you really going to follow. Are you just going to follow the letter of the law and not the spirit of the law of what you're practicing?

Yeah, it's a good point. It's kind of like this concept of when you raise your own animals, when you have, like, Bessie, the cow in your backyard that you're going to eat in two years, you're going to take a lot different care of that animal because it is this single individual animal that has a spirit or a soul and that you have a connection with and that you're going to treat far differently versus that faceless, nameless cow that's in a feedlot.

And that's one of the reasons why in our shop, we put pig heads in our case every week when they arrive. Nobody ever buys a pig head, but it's about reminding people that that pork chop at the other end of the case came from a pig that had a head and lived on a farm not that far from there. We always have to try to remind people of the connection that meat is not just. It's not the same as a protein shake. It came from an animal that was living. If someone took a long time, whether it be nine months for a pig or you're almost two and a half years, first year, someone took a long time and a lot of care in raising that animal.

Yeah. Yeah, that's a good point. Well, I want to shift focus here and ask you a little bit about, like, this whole curing and dry aging process. The first thing I want to ask you about is when it comes to dry aging, one of the things I've seen out there is that when you dry age, and I know this is something that, like Dave Asprey of Bulletproof Exec was talk about mold and fungus will form on that meat when it's dry aging, and that's part of the curing process. He says that that could potentially be unhealthy or cause health issues. What's your take on mold and fungus? Why does it grow when you're dry aging, and what's the purpose of that? And then do you have any thoughts about the health or lack thereof when that happens?

Well, it's an interesting question. The first thing I would say about dry aging, that it is more art than science, and there are different ways to practice. And then when it comes to mold and fungus, there are millions of different strains, whether it be dry aging or dry curing. And the strains that you are cultivating could be positive or negative. So answering the first question, we do a lot of dry aging in our store, but the style of dry aging we do is about high airflow, very cold temperatures, and lower humidity. So we actually, in our dry aging process, cultivate almost no molds in fungus. We don't get that funky flavor. So we're actually cultivating more a dehydration. So evaporation of water from the meat to concentrate the flavor and alter the balance of water to fat to make it seem juicier. And an enzymatic process which tenderizes the meat. So we actually. Our dry aging process as we practice it has almost no mold growth, no fuzzy growth. I can send you pictures of it. We don't have that kind of funky looking exterior with fuzzy molds of any color.

Is that because of the actual temperature? You said it's colder than usual, or is that because of.

Actually it's more a function of humidity and airflow.

The higher your humidity, what humidity do you guys cure at?

So our humidity is a little bit lower. People usually do from the low 80s to the high 80s, and we concentrate on the low 80s in terms of relative humidity for our practices. But what we also do is we use what I call extreme airflow. So we have 18 inch fans that are about 20 inches away from the face of each piece of ribeye or New York strip that we're aging. And what that does is it dehydrates very quickly the front surface of the animal and it creates a crust almost exactly like beef jerky, actually. And it's a very thin and hard crust. Now, what that does is twofold. The first thing is it protects the meat on the other side of the crust. So if you develop that crust slowly, it thickens and you end up having more waste when we go to cut off and throw it away to get to the good meat. So that's from a loss perspective, it's better. The other thing it does is by dehydrating it very quickly, there isn't a surface that there's so little water. There isn't an opportunity for the mold to really form. It needs moisture. It needs a hospitable surface. Just like how beef jerky does not mold, even at room temperature. By dehydrating the surface, you lower the water activity and other factors to make it a place where mold growth won't happen. So kind of those two variables together, lower humidity and high airflow prevent the mold growth. This is not the style of dry aging that other people are doing. Some people are actually purposely trying to get more mold growth to get that more funky style, like aging a funky cheese. Now, in terms of healthful versus not, I would think that there's two factors there. One is the type of mold. There are great molds for you and there are bad molds for you, and great fungus and bad fungus. Now, knowing which ones you're cultivating would require sending them to a lab to analyze. You can inoculate like adding just like you would if you were dry curing salumi or hams. You could introduce penicillin or other varieties which would then have positive molds that could grow on them. Positive molds and bacteria. So that's one way to do it, to create, to cultivate a better mold that you actually want instead of just what's randomly around. But the other thing I would say is that no one ever really eats the moldy part. The first step when we get to it is that we cut it off. So I'm not sure how much of that mold, even if there were harmful molds there that the individual is actually consuming.

You mean you guys cut it off there at the butcher shop or when? Exactly.

So when you dry age, when you dry age something, even if you're going for the funky flavor, very little of that mold, if any, really penetrates into the meat itself. Almost all forms on the surface. And that you would cut it off before you would cook that meat or serve that meat. So I would be curious how much of, even if there were harmful molds and bacteria or fungus on the outside, how much of it you would actually consume even if there were a lot on the exterior surface.

How long do you guys dry age your meat? How long is it actually sitting in there in that high air flow? Flow, slightly lower humidity type of situation?

Minimum. Two weeks is our kind of standard everyday product. That goes in our case. And with a well raised piece of meat, we'll go up to 60 days on a well marbled piece of meat. I should say if there aren't enough fat that doesn't age very well, it's a lower shelf life. We also don't age the grass fed beef as long because the higher percentage of unsaturated fats are more volatile and you're more likely to pick up off flavors in the grass fed. So we stick around two weeks for the grass fed only. We don't go further. You would benefit from some additional tenderizing. I know some people like to go more like four weeks and more with the grass fed beef because they want the additional tenderization. But we find with the grass fed beef there's enough tenderization and we don't want the fats to start souring or pick up off flavors at all.

Gotcha. Okay, so let's say that somebody wanted to try this at home. Like when I have a deer and I want to cure my own meat at home. Have you Ever run into people who kind of try to put together their own home meat curing type of setups, like with an old refrigerator or something like that?

Well, I want to clarify, are we talking about curing or dry aging?

What's the difference?

Okay, so when we talk about dry aging, it's about taking a fresh meat product that you will still cook. And we typically dry aging is done with beef, sometimes lamb, almost never with pork. And it's about aging it in a temperature, humidity, air velocity, controlled environment to create a different product, but it's still a fresh meat product. Now, when we talk about dry curing, typically we're talking about a salumi or charcuterie product where we're taking a raw product and converting it to a ready to eat product through using thyme and salt. Thyme like the 1, 2, 3, 4 minutes, not thyme as in the herb, but through thyme and salt and other ingredients, creating a ready to eat product through curing it. Now, that also involves a temperature, humidity, air velocity, controlled environment. Typically, dry curing would be done above refrigeration temperature, whereas dry aging is always done under refrigeration.

Okay, gotcha. So which of those processes, the dry aging or the curing is the process where the mold or the fungus kind of forms on the meat?

Well, both, actually. I would say with dry curing, you need to cultivate the positive one. And mold and fungus plays a very integral role in creating those products and their flavor and what people call terroir by having different molds and funguses. And again, even with those products, you would typically cut off those molds and funguses as well. They're always going to be on the outside. If you see when you go into an Italian specialty shop and you get salami that's really white, like, has almost like a powder coated white color on the outside, that is a specific mold that they have cultivated for the outside. And they are cultivating a positive mold because they want to ward off negative molds that they're not controlling. They're introducing mold that they want.

Now, is another word for curing wet aging versus dry aging, or is wet aging something also different?

So wet aging is also something that we do for beasts. And that would kind of be paired in terms of what we're talking about. Wet aging goes with dry aging, not with dry curing. The curing kind of, we put that off to the side, like making salumi and prosciutto and charcuterie. Wet aging is a process where instead of putting that beef New York strip In a temperature, air velocity and humidity control environment. We vacuum seal it in a plastic bag, typically in our country, happens 24 hours after slaughter. And keep it under refrigeration and under vacuum. And what happens is you get the enzymatic process that makes the meat more tender, which is necessary for beef, less so for pork and lamb. But the enzymatic process breaks down the meat into more tender. But you don't get any of the water loss or any additional flavor enhancements through natural bacterias or anything like that. So the wire industry likes wet aging. It's easier to transport because it's already broken down. You can put it in a box. They like it because there's less water loss. So that same piece of meat will be heavier at retail because you haven't had any evaporation. And they like it more because you don't have what we call trim loss. That exterior surface I talked about that you would cut off and throw in the garbage. There's nothing that you got, you know, there's no equivalent that you throw away. Now the problems with it are, is that yes, you get tenderization, but. But you get a wetter product. You get something that sits in its own blood or juices. What that's going to do is give it what people call a serumy flavor, Often like almost tastes bloody. And also when you go to cook it, what happens is there's a lot more moisture in the product, so it's less likely to get that nice sear on the outside and more likely to kind of gray or brown because you basically have to boil off the liquid before you can really get a nice crust on it. 95% of the meat in our country is wet aged. And even the dry aged meat that you get at the supermarket was often wet aged, vacuum sealed before it got to the butcher shop where then they dry aged. Very little amount of beef is actually never put in plastic in our country.

When you are getting charcuterie at a charcuterie shop, is that mostly wet aged then? Is it dry aged? Is it cured? Is there a way to know?

I would say in terms of wet age or not, it would all depend. There's no kind of way because you go to a charcuterie shop, that doesn't mean anything truthfully about how the animals are raised at all. Now, typically, shops like mine who are making charcuterie and they're coming up in the country, most of us are also paired with the ethics of working with small farmers. That does not mean that they exclusively are that way. There have been companies that make salumi in our country for the last 40 years that are just using commodity, regular old pork. People trying to make distinctive, high quality products are looking for better quality pork, typically. But if you think about all the Applegate farm stuff that's out there, they're just using commodity pork typically. There's nothing special about the pork. They might be creating a more specialty product out of it, but there's nothing special about the pork that goes into it.

I see. Okay. So in many cases, you'll read nowadays about how people are curing meat in their basement. Like folks with a basement or a cellar with the right temperature and the humidity range. Is that something that you think is doable? Is it okay? Is it safe if you've got a good temperature and humidity range, to just use your basement or your cellar, like one of these old refrigerators that you can turn into a curing chamber to do this yourself at home?

For sure. I mean, it's not something that you just decide one day to do. I'm on a lot of Facebook groups about this. It's a mix of professionals and home enthusiasts. If you do want to do it, it's something you should be passionate about and really take the time to educate yourself about the safety behind and read up and join a group on Facebook that you can email questions you have. A lot of the amateur people are taking pictures and say, hey, what do you think about this mold that I've got on my. And you got people who are out there who have been doing this for 30 years, be like, I just throw that one away or I wipe it off with vinegar and you should be fine, you know? So definitely you have to take it seriously and respect it. Just like if you want to become a mushroom forager. Right. You gotta actually invest the time in learning. And if you do, you can do it safely and enjoyably. Right.

And if not, you're gonna be tripping out for days underneath that tamarack pine where you picked that mushroom off.

Exactly. And you know, these are serious things. You can cultivate some really nasty bacteria and fungus and mold. When you dry cure, you're curing something for a long period of time outside of refrigerated safety zone. So bad things can happen if you don't practice correctly. Now, that being said, we've been curing meat for thousands of years, so before the advent of technology that we have, it can be done safely at small scale for sure. So you should be scared in a way that makes you respect the process, but not so scared that if you really want to do it, you shouldn't move forward.

Okay, gotcha. Are there any books that you'd recommend if people want to out there listening in and want to learn how to cure meats themselves?

Sure. I mean, my basic starter book, I tell everyone, is the Michael Rulman book Charcuterie and he also has one called Salumi. They are a great starter book for getting started and it also will recommend further reading. Another one. And his book is kind of it's technical enough that a lot of professional kitchens have it around like we have it as a reference, but it takes that technical knowledge and brings it down to the home, the home cook and home enthusiast. It's enough detail in there that you can do this safely. It stresses the safety behind it and the basic practices that you need to know. It doesn't have like some of the other more technical, lots of grasp on humidity and things that you don't need yet until you get more advanced. Also, in the beginning, it's very important, I think, not to make up your own recipes, find an established recipe and follow it to a T, because it might cross your mind that an individual ingredient might be a bad idea. But it could be. Maybe it will increase moisture in a weird way inside that you don't want or increase the chance of listeria or alter the ph. So in the beginning, it's not like a fresh sausage that you're like, you know something? I love oregano. I'm going to put tons of oregano in it. It's a dry cure product. You should in the very beginning, until you're very comfortable in doing it for a long time, follow the recipes, really stick to it.

Gotcha. Okay. Well, for people listening in, you mentioned the Omnivore's Dilemma. Some of the books by Joel Salatin. I know I mentioned Beyond Bacon and then this charcuterie book. What I'm going to do is put links to these books for anybody who wants to pick these up. The URL for the show notes for today's post is @BengreenfieldFitness.com ChooseYourMeat. That's BenGreenfieldFitness.com chooseyourmeat and I'll also put a link over to Jacob's Dixon's Farm Stand Meats for those of you who are in the New York area. Jacob, I've got another question for you. And this is going to be kind of like a rapid fire 60 seconds or less style question. But what would you say in about 60 seconds or less is the ultimate way to cook the tastiest steak.

My universal method for cooking any steak pretty much is to use a cast iron skillet. I take my skillet, I put it on high on the stove for about six to eight minutes. You want it smoking hot, can't even touch the handle without burning yourself. Steak at room temperature took it out an hour ahead. Lots of salt, a little bit of pepper, more salt than you think you need because you're going to leave a lot in the pan. Right before I put it in the pan, I put a little bit of grapeseed, canola or vegetable oil, no butter or olive oil. They'll burn at really high temperatures. I sear four minutes on the side on a typically inch and a quarter thick steak. It's a little thinner, a few minutes less, a little thicker, maybe up to five minutes. And that'll get you to the rare side of medium rare on almost any steak. If it's a bigger steak, anything over a pound and a half thicker, I would then take the whole pan and throw it in a 350 degree oven for a few minutes. If it's anywhere from 2 to 10 minutes, depending on the size of the steak. And then most important thing, after you're done with the cooking, put it on the cutting board and don't touch it for eight to 15 minutes, depending on the size. The bigger the piece of meat, the longer it needs to rest and then slice it and serve it.

Why do you let it rest like that?

When you're cooking meat, it's a high temperature, extreme heat that causes the muscle fibers to contract. And if you cut right away, while the muscle fibers are still contracted, the pressure inside the cells pushes all of the liquid and juices out. And even a great tender steak is going to eat very dry. By letting the meat rest, whether it be a sausage, a burger, a steak, a chicken breast, you allow it to come so down from temperature a little bit, the muscle fibers relax and it will eat much juicier. You can really take the same steak and it will eat completely differently if you cut it right away.

Cool. I like it. All right, well, I took some furious notes during our conversation. So if you're listening in and you want to check out some of the things Jacob and I talked about, the books, his website, his steak recipe, etc. Head over to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Jacob, thanks for coming on the show, man.

Yeah, it's my pleasure. It was a lot of fun.

All right, folks, so this is Ben Greenfield and Jacob Dixon from Dixon's Farm Stand Meats signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have a healthy week.

Visit BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness, nutrition and performance advice.

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