My wife and I got a package in the mail this weekend. A white styrofoam package with dry ice in it and a few Omaha steaks. We promptly set the steaks out to get to room temp, then grilled them up. I noticed they were nearly perfect looking steaks. Clean, crisp, not a blemish or lipid on the damn things. I got to wondering: Could I buy a cow and cut it into steaks, trim every ounce of fat off and pawn it off as the best of the best in steaks?
All kidding aside, what is so special about Omaha steaks? Right on their website they say:
Is it just cut up steak to look nice?
I know they have other products, and they are all pretty good, but what’s the big deal with trimed up steaks? Is there any gimmick to the Omaha Brand?
They are excellent cuts of beef in my experience. Not the very best - but consistently excellent. A bit pricier than I’d like, but then I live in Iowa, where good beef isn’t hard to find anyway.
In fact, Omaha steaks would be a good solution for someone who has difficulty finding decent beef, namely, huge swaths of the country. They send out a nice “cookbook” pamphlet with their products and their method of pan-searing plus oven is a great way to prepare steaks at home, I use it often.
I’ve never had a Omaha steak, but their are different grades, the highest ‘regular’ grade ‘Prime’, which is usually not available in your common supermarkets. There are also different aging processes - aging serves to undo the rigormortus <sp> that sets in and tenderizes the meat naturally. Usually prime cuts (I think by definition) are well marbled, which means they have fat evenly distributed throughout the meat - very small white patches of fat, as the grade falls the amount of marbling decreases and the patches usually get bigger. When you state above that there was not a lipid on it I suspect that there were many very small ones as no fat would make a rather flavorless steak. It is possible that the visual appeal of no fat may influence your taste however.
But the steaks are pretty good. I was vacationing out west - and found a mom-and-pop butcher shop, the meat looked wonderful - but to my midwestern taste buds was pretty much flavorless and tough as shoe leather. So Omaha does a good job at making decent steaks available to those benighted folks who can’t get decent beef.
Come to think of it - a clone of Omaha Steaks, except offering seafood, would be great for us landlocked folks.
A few years ago, a slightly broken leg stuck me at home for a month. Friends showed up with frozen stuff (& catfood). The local pizza places delivers fine salads, as well as pizzas & sandwiches. But I had a strong urge for a REALLY GOOD STEAK.
So I ordered a bit of pricey meat from these guys. Who apparently specialize in seafood. Friendly folks.
I am not a big beef eater, but I thought that almost all beef in the US comes from grain-fed cattle, but that grass-fed cattle was more desirable, partly because grass is the natural diet of cattle, and cattle that’s been fed corn need a lot of chemicals to help in the digestion of the corn.
Corn is used to “finish” beef, in part because it is too expensive to use exclusively. Grass fed beef is tougher. As an Iowanian I can tell you even the venison is much, much better than other areas, since they love corn too.
If corn is used (only?) to “finish” beef, what is it fed earlier? My understanding is that almost all beef in the US comes from cattle fed almost entirely corn and other grains, because it’s relatively cheap. (So Omaha Steaks’ “point of distinction” that their beef is grain fed is not very distinctive.)
Those of us who live in Omaha tend to avoid the stuff sold by Omaha Steaks. They are better than many steaks I have eaten in other places, but I get my steaks from a local butcher shop. They are much better than the frozen plastic wrapped stuff Omaha Steaks sells.
No, most cows live their lives eating grass (even cheaper than corn), in may cases living in several different locales along the way. They are typically fed corn on feed lots just prior to their slaughter. It’s been done somewhere on this board in the past, but I can’t search.
