Pick your mail order meat – Crowd Cow

Recently I wrote about our experience with Walden Meat Co.  Overall a great experience and the meat tastes great.  The one problem is that you don’t get to pick exactly the cuts of meat that you want – although close with the custom option.  Let’s say you only want to eat chicken breasts or ground beef and don’t know how to cook brisket (which is delicious smoked by the way).  So I started looking around for a delivery service that would sell specific cuts of pasture raised and/or grass-fed meats from small farms.

I didn’t have to look too hard to find – Crowd Cow.  They market themselves as supplying exactly what I was looking for:  “Craft Beef”, “Heritage Pork” and “Pastured Chicken” from small independent farms.  They do a great job of introducing you to the farm and the farmer and their philosophies, almost to the point you feel like you know them after reading their web page.  You can pick the exact cut of meat that you want and order small quantities (as little as pound) but you may have to wait a few weeks until it is shipped but they will tell you when the shipment will happen so you have to plan ahead.   They usually have one maybe two farms per animal type (chicken, beef, pork) at one time and the farms are located all over the US – Virginia, Alabama, South Carolina, Texas, New York, Pennsylvania I have seen so far.  I was specifically looking for chicken breasts which were already sold out at the time but I signed up for a notification by email when they would be available again.

About a week later I get an email:

“Good news! Items you are interested in are now available from Marble Creek Farmstead”

I buy 6lb of Chicken breasts from Marble Creek Farmstead in Alabama (https://marblecreekfarmstead.com/) and at around $13.70/pound is quite expensive but was looking forward to my shipment. How could I resist a product description for chicken like this:

“(Approximately 6 lbs) Six pounds of protein-packed, lean chicken breast like you’ve never had before. Treat your body to chicken that spent a life outside foraging for grass, bugs, seeds, and worms. This share includes 6 lbs of boneless, skinless chicken breast.”

About a week later I got the shipment after plenty of emails notifying me of the shipment.  It was packed in a box with dry ice and completely frozen. Each pack of around a pound was marked with the farmer’s name and the farm address.  What I did overlook at the time of ordering was the shipping charge – at an additional $12.99 we are now looking at around $15.33 per pound!

 

There real question is of course: ‘How did it taste?’  The first thing to note is how small the chicken breasts seemed – but in reality this is the size of a chicken breast that wasn’t jacked up on hormones to grow an abnormal sized breast.   I dusted them with some BBQ seasoning and cooked them on the grill.  I cooked them to an internal temperature of 160F and let them rest for 10 mins – as I always do.  They tasted good, not great but good – to be honest I couldn’t really tell a whole of difference.  But I did feel better about myself.  Glad I got something good out of the experience since that meal (with some leftovers but not enough for a full second meal in my family of 5) was $46 just for the chicken alone!