On Saturday December 19th 2009, a group of 17 affiliates of Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism tasted two “Kofta with Cauliflower and Tahina Sauce” meatball dishes. One of the dishes was made with supermarket-bought, factory-farm American beef. The other was made with beef purchased at Dickson’s Farmstand Meats, which came from Wrighteous Organics’ farm in Scholarie, NY.
I had planned to make both dishes with ground lamb, but Dickson’s did not have any ground lamb on hand. Jake Dickson, the owner of Dickson’s said that its best to call ahead for such items.
For the grocery store beef, I went to the Garden of Eden market on Broadway and 107th Street. There, I asked Brian Kenny, a friendly employee at the meat counter, to tell me where the beef was from. I was pleasantly surprised when he got out the invoice to show me the name of the meat supplier: Meat Innovations of Hunt’s Point.
The invoice said the meat is “domestic” and “organically-based” (which means that most of the feed is probably organic, but not 100%). According to Brian, the cows start out their life on the pasture, but are grain-fed. He adds that the cows “keep fairly descent conditions.” Unsure of the meat’s exact origin, Brian said, it’s “most likely from somewhere the Mid-West.”
Other than the meat, all of the other ingredients, along with the cooking time, was identical in both dishes. The dish (25 meatballs) made with the pasture raised meat cost around $3.50 more than the other dish.
The tasters went into it blind, not knowing which plate contained the pasture-raised meat. The real challenge with this experiment lies in the fact that the dish’s spices and tahina sauce are intense, making it hard to pick up on the taste of the meat.
It turns out that nearly 3/4 of the taste testers knew which meat was which. The others were unsure. But almost everyone claimed to taste a difference and enjoyed the pasture-raised meat better. One taster said, “this one [the grass-fed meat] is delicious, but the other I can take it or leave it.” Only one of the tasters confused the two meats. Although he tasted a difference, he thought that the supermarket meat was the tastier meatball because he assumed that the grass-fed, healthy option would be blander.
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