BISON vs BEEF: The Ultimate Comparison | The Bearded Butchers

howdy everybody welcome back we've got a pretty awesome video planned for you scott's going to do a lot of the explaining the scientific parts of the video i'm going to be doing processing throughout the whole thing this one is called bison versus beef so if you look here you're gonna see a couple bison and a few beef carcasses hanging in our cooler we are going to scott is going to be doing a lot of the explaining throughout the video um just the differences the cuts and then also the nutritionals and things like that so without further ado take it away scott the great american bison both a story of tragedy and come back bison is now the official mammal of the united states which is fantastic this animal has been through quite a storied history in fact bison and the reason why they're such a great comeback story were nearly slaughtered to extinction around the late 1800s estimates were as high as 50 to 60 million bison once roamed the great plains of the united states and they were reduced to under 500 total uh total in the wild and in private herds around 1890 it took a great conservative effort to bring them back to where we're at today we have about 500 000 bison in the world today compared to around a billion cattle now bison and beef or more accurately bison and cattle first we'll talk a little bit about their similarities and then we'll talk about our differences both are in the bovine family so they're really brothers in all sense they have a lot of the same genetic makeup and cattle have been domesticated bison have not bison are completely unaltered from the way they were created also bison are native to this continent to the north american continent cattle are not bison were created and put here they're they're specifically designed to take the most advantage out of our great planes in the sense of the the bison is a fantastic animal in its um ability to survive without shelter without veterinarian input they're truly undomesticated too they're like the linebacker when it comes to the cattle family when you look at one of these things they just look awesome now there's a couple of subspecies in the bison family we're dealing with the plains bison there's also the woods bison which is found more more up into canada and then there's the european uh weisen that that's actually been uh removed from the wild or otherwise they're only in captivity and they've got some reintroduced i don't know much about them i just know that we have one of the best protein sources that you could ever find now the term buffalo is um it's a misnomer it's it's okay but bison are not in the same category as the african buffalo or um the asian buffalo they truly are their own category in fact the scientific name is bison bison you can't hardly mess that one up so today we're going to be talking about the difference um with the uh the carcass that the makeup of the carcass the look of it bison are much leaner um they have a higher protein content they're lower in cholesterol and they're lower in fat and that makes them a great healthy choice they are absolutely the best protein that you can find in the united states and that's really really where we got our start and that's where the white feather name comes from we've got another video planned on some of the history and how white feather became our business name but it really had to do with our start that came in the late 80s when our uh father got into raising the american bison um so we uh we're going to talk about these that's going to break them down now one of the most interesting things about the bison is that it has 14 total ribs whereas the the beef or the cattle have just 13. so seth's broken it down here between the fifth and sixth rib and then he's up there between the 13th and 14th rib if you look at this carcass here is going to be a lot different beef in just a sense you see a lot less fat covering the carcass then we've got this this hump this traditional hump that we have with the bison you may have heard of a hump roast there's not a lot there it's actually pretty thin mostly bone that's where they store extra calories and that's why it's got the most fat right here on this hump but it is much wider than beef if you look at at these feather bones right here look at those feather bones say versus these feather bones on this beef now this is an angus beef and this is um and that's another thing with cattle they've been diversified through selective breeding into hundreds if not thousands of different versions if you will with american bison we have just one undiversified undomesticated version so there's a good look at that carcass and some of the differences that we have there bison are also historically known to be much better at using the resources around them in the wild you'll find that the the cattle mostly spend their their days looking for shade around water they drink quite frequently they use more resources with feed with bison they can go they've been observed in the wild it really only go to a water source once a day and they um they just make much better uses of their their resources like their feed and water resources so you can take a peek at this uh primal right here you can see there's not a lot of marbling in it and there's very minimal fat cover but believe it or not even without that marbling in there bison is very very tender and very flavorful so now that the bison's broke down let's head to the beef so with beef we've found what we're gonna see here is is literally thousands of years of domestication um and and basically selective breeding to get exactly what we want out of it so that's where you see a difference there in the rib eye of the beef versus the bison so like scott mentioned this is an angus sear not a ton of marbling in this but you can see there's a lot larger ribeye section here you know there again not a ton of external back fat but you're going to be able to see the difference between the beef and the bison um the bison is a much darker red this has a little bit more of a palish look to it and you can tell that the bison is going to be a lot richer a lot higher in iron and that that comes through when you see that the color difference in the meat something we're going to do in this video is after we get these processed we have a really cool cooking utensil that we're going to use some of you have probably never heard of it before it's called a birch barrel so we're going to get it out we're going to fill it with some charcoal maybe a couple pieces of firewood and we're actually going to grill a couple of these um and i think we're gonna do porterhouse steaks so maybe like an inch and a half two inch thick porterhouse steak off the bison and off the beef we're gonna get them all grilled up and we're going to give them a taste test that's right stick with us we're going to take these out on the floor we're going to walk you through some of the processing a little bit of the different processing style that we have bison versus beef but ultimately we're going to talk about the the sweet um bison actually have a sweet odor about them when you're out in the pasture you can smell them but the sweet taste of the bison versus the buttery flavor of the beef we're going to compare the two we're going to talk a little bit more about the nutritionals so stick with us as we take these through the processing floor and then ultimately like seth said we've chosen a more of a primitive uh style of cooking and i'm pretty sure that it's gonna be worth sticking around for this is gonna be a fun video let's get these out on the floor you let me get one bro oh yeah so we're on the processing floor bison versus beef let's go got the victorinox ready to go get them out here on the floor and let's just get started processing front quarter of bison front quarter of beef this isn't really going to be a competition between the two because being raised on bison meat we think we which one would probably win so this is going to be more about a comparison between the two we're going to run these simultaneously so we're going to do the front quarter we're going to cut it into all the primals cut it into the stakes on the bison repeat the process on the beef so let's just go ahead and get started we're not going to be explaining as much of the how-to process since you folks have probably seen some of our other videos where we do more of the how-to this is going to be just more about the breakdown the cut out and the side-by-side comparison of the two we think it'll be fun so stay tuned we're going to be pulling things like the skirt steak the rib eyes we're going to be pulling flat irons denver's chuck rolls um on the front quarter and then on the hindquarter we're going to be cutting um porterhouse and t-bones the bone-in version because like we mentioned earlier we want to get those big two inch thick cut porterhouse steaks to throw on that birch barrel here this afternoon so that's the plan so like i was mentioning yesterday bison um a sweeter meat some would say dryer we do think that bison has a naturally high moisture content it just gets cooked out and that's why we will show you later this afternoon but you want to be cautious and err on the side of caution when cooking bison short ribs i'll peel the membrane off of these can't tell me those wouldn't be good on the smoker [Music] [Music] spice and brisket running this through the saw you can just tell that the bones bones are super soft meat's super tender i'm going to take this portion over to scott that contains the uh flatirons of denver and the chuck eye so scott's going to fabricate this out for us just like we pointed out in the cooler the chuck really the big difference is this part up here i'm going to show you when i break this down i talked about energy storage or fat storage that the bison has and they store that up there in their chuck and that hump if you will you might have heard that you know hump roasts and the mountain men and whatnot ate the hump and i'm certain that they did because of the amount of fat that's contained in there you may be wondering why exactly if bison were nearly extinct at one time are we slaughtering them and truly one of the best ways to sort of save a species or whatever if you think in terms of the bison now it wasn't until they began you know the conservation efforts that bison were saved from the brink of extinction and then it became you know it was it was the numbers grew but they really weren't where they were now i think bison have pretty much doubled in the last two or three decades so when our parents started raising bison in the early 90s i think the national herd size was somewhere around 200 000 and now it's at 500 and you can attribute quite a bit of that to the commercial activity or otherwise the the raising and harvest of bison for for food and it's become a an excellent protein source and it's favored by many in the in the beginning in the early 90s bison was lauded as a low fat lower in cholesterol higher in protein meat and it certainly still is now saturated fat as we've learned is not as detrimental to your heart health as once thought so we're not as concerned about the low fat quality but it's always nice to have a resource where you have lower fat lower cholesterol higher protein as well as higher higher vitamin and mineral content while it's a extremely tasty red meat so you can seth talked about like this you can just tell the the tenderness and the the bison like we said they actually have a a sweet odor to them my victorinox is i think i've had this one for well over a year you can see i've used it on the stone quite a bit it's maintained a real nice edge for me there's a shoulder blade now bison was essentially the economy of the native american the plains indian they used the bison for a hundred percent of their staple diet and all number of resources including things that they made their shelter so we know that this animal has not just the resource of the meat but also the hide and hooves and the bones and everything else that came along with it because of the the length of these these feather bones here that i talked about that actually makes it kind of difficult on the slaughter floor to get our splitting saw through there so now that i pull this chuck out it's literally almost twice as long this would be the hump right here it's almost twice as long as a beef and i'm gonna take we make a nice chuck roast out of the chuck eye so i'm gonna take my knife and be cutting right right through this yellow cord it's a pretty tough piece right here this this tendon now everything that we don't save for human consumption is getting saved for bones for bone broth or for pet food we don't let any part of this go to waste this yellow cord is going to continue right up through here but i want to show you i'm actually going to if we were to look for a hump roast this would be it this is literally the top of the hump which on the adult males can be as they can be as tall as six and a half feet but i wanted to show you see that's where a lot of that fat storage is that's why the mountain men would have that's why they would have eaten this piece right here very rich if you eat a bunch of that you're going to get a lot of a lot of energy from the fat so the rest of this pretty pretty similar to the beef we've got that nice squared up chuck that we're going to cut into roast and then this this mussel on the the bison the where we get the under or excuse me the denver is somewhat thinner but we've noticed bison will actually swell up when it's cooking and some of these thinner cuts will wind up coming out almost twice as thick as when as when you started denver our chuck and of course our flat iron all right time to pass this off to stuff and he'll finish it up bison brisket let's get this trimmed out you're going to notice right off the bat that it is much much smaller than beef even though these these sides weighed very similar beef and bison some of the cuts on the bison are naturally just going to be smaller a little bit bigger bone bigger framed animal slightly smaller cuts on them so you're going to notice that right off the bat uh you know big packer brisket grain fed you're probably looking at 15 to 20 pound brisket bison you know you're probably looking at five and a half pounds maybe we've smoked these they're fantastic pair them with some hickory wood chunks season this with some beer to butcher black seasoning get that nice crust going throw that on the smoker yum bison flat iron scott has this trimmed out really nice for me so i'm just going to go ahead and remove this gristle seam out of the middle there's one piece using that fish filet method that we talked about now one thing that we notice when we cut bison is the meat's a lot drier it's leaner and it's drier so when you're processing things seem to sort of stick to the blade a little bit more than you would on cutting a domestic you know beef or something like that and the tables and things like that just they just dry out more throughout the cut that process three bison flat irons bison chuck roll a couple different ways you can do this you can slice this into steaks and then you have chuck eye steaks what we like to do with these is cut them into a two to three pound roast and make a boneless chuck roast our customers love these they will throw these in a netter you can slow roast this entire roast and eat the entire thing there's no gristle minimal fat literally cook it and it'll just fall apart and eat the whole thing run these through our netter this holds the meat together really nice when you're cooking it makes for a nice presentation in the meat case customers really really like the way these roasts look with the netting on them and it's useful too doesn't just look good boneless spice and chuck roast cold winter day dutch oven or crock pot throw your favorite favorite vegetables in there cook them till they fall apart tender makes for an awesome meal one of the prime possessions on any animal the rib section we're going to trim this down and cut ribeye steaks today so the first thing we do is remove the membrane off the bones and you've seen this process before on some of the other videos that we've done like scott mentioned the bones those are not going to waste those will be used for bison bone broth making those cuts and using that pressure with your right hand just to separate that seam remove the padding whack i'm going to take these bones off here we're going to save these as bison back ribs sort of like a baby back rib on pork you can do this with beef bison elk whatever species that way somebody can come into the shop and they can buy those back ribs and they can toss those on the smoker do a little bit of trimming i always trim my primals prior to slicing into stakes that way they're nice and uniform you don't have to go back through and trim each individ individual steak they're already trimmed ready to go now i can just go down through there and cut them into steaks now that i've got it all trimmed down what i want to do is i want to wait to cut this into steaks until i do the beef that way i can have the beef um ribeye section sitting side by side to the bison and then we'll get each one cut into steaks and we'll do our comparison so for the time being i'm going to set that one aside and we're gonna go ahead and we're gonna get started on the beef [Applause] you can see that the cuts that we have on our table already are from the bison from the bison front quarter we're going to go ahead and do the same thing on the beef front quarter and like i mentioned then we will go to the hinds we'll get everything paired out on the table bison versus beef let's get started on the beef skirt steaks if you guys have never had beef skirt steaks or bison skirt steaks get a hold of some the fibers are running this way you can see between the muscle fibers there's a decent amount of fat super tender super flavor flavorful just a delicious cut fun to grill you can grill it cut it into like steaks you can make fajitas with it really really good cut it's a this is an inside diaphragm muscle doesn't get a lot of use kind of a little bit underrated steak that a lot of people don't know about i recently had good friend of ours tell us that it's his second most favorite steak on a beef carcass i should mention that he did say his favorite steak is a ribeye so here again chuck eye flatiron denver i'm gonna pass this off to scott he's gonna do what he does best here's that beef chuck like i mentioned it's just more or less flat across the back really no hump i'll show you once i get down to those feather bones how much different it is [Applause] so i haven't mentioned being drier you can definitely see more of a fat cap here like seth mentioned even though this beef side weighed on the rail just a little bit more than the bison you can see really the the biggest differences are in the front quarters between the two you can see just how dramatically different those feather bones are and then if i cut this one the same way down through that yellow cord to get that squared up chuck roast there's that same piece quite a bit different anatomically here probably the biggest difference comes right from this front right from this front chuck area between the two so i also have the bison brisket laying here and you'll be able to see the biggest difference in the size comparison between the two when they're side by side like this now this half of beef weighed around 350 pounds hanging weight on the rail so you could imagine if this was a big you know 500 pound half how much larger it would be even than what it is here so you can see the difference between the briskets it's pretty significant even though the carcasses on the rail were very similar in weight how much different size some of these cuts are second most tender steak on an animal is the flat irons that top blade steak sees very little if i don't know maybe next to no use on the carcass because of where it's located in the top of that shoulder blade it just doesn't see any movement so that's why it's so tender a little bit of marbling in there delicious throw those on the grill 10-inch victorinox so i have this touch on it real briefly here ten inch eight inch six inch bony knife you all know about that one that's kind of the arsenal for processing some of the larger cuts get your 10 inch out just makes it easier making your way down through there with minimal sawing back and forth so these are the chuck eye roasts here again very little fat no gristle no bone you can throw bones in the pot with it if you want more flavor get those netted up perfect for a roast meal onto the beef ribeye steaks we're going to do the same thing like you did the bison we're going to save the back rib somebody will have a good time barbecuing those up just remove our bones those out of the way so over the years you learn different tricks and things like that so like when i remove this patty whack here you can pretty much just hold your knife and then pull it and you can see it's it's cutting at the same time so i don't want to make a cut here because then i'll cut down into the ribeye steak so if i just hold my knife here and pull it a little trick for you go ahead and remove the bones staying as close to the bone as we can now as mentioned in some of our other videos if i left this bone on these stakes on these sections here if i left it on there that would be called a rib steak i removed the bone that's now a rib eye if i leave the bone on it cut it into a roast that's a prime rib if i take the bone off cut it into a roast that's simply a ribeye roast so there's the beef let's get the bison get them side by side and get them cut ribeye sections i bet you guys can guess which is which beef bison you can see scott talked a lot about that that hump on that bison you can see that being revealed here through this ribeye section a little bit more narrow on this end color wise the bison is definitely a lot darker red a little bit you know a lot richer color the beef has more of a white fat and more of that cherry red look so let's just go ahead and get these cut into steaks see what they look like nice inch and a quarter i can tell when i'm cutting through here that very tender cut doesn't take a lot of pressure on my knife to get through it some nice fat in those those will be a very very good steak you guys hear us talk about the butcher's take whenever we're cutting these primals like this we end up with these little pieces that aren't cut evenly so that's usually what we take home and grill ourselves we own these animals we raise the bison we'll go into that more in detail here after a little while we buy the beef from local farmers so when it comes to saving anything off of these that we want to cook and eat ourselves we can certainly do that because we own the animals now if you were having a beef custom process and your butcher told you that you'd probably be a little bit worried because certainly shouldn't be taking any of it it belongs to you okay so let's just get these laid out here i want to count them they're cut about the exact same thickness one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven so i would have guessed it looked like there was more beef here than there are bison but it's because of their size and it fills up more of the table if we grab a couple of these nice center ones here with that nice ribeye cap on there we do our comparison the bison you can see is a thinner cut fat content is very similar as mentioned we picked a beef carcass that was similar in size just to make the comparison a little bit easier you know easy to see if this was a bigger carcass obviously this ribeye prime will probably be twice that size on the beef so darker red on the bison a little bit paler cherry color on the beef oop get them in the right place that is your side-by-side comparison bison versus beef on the ribeye steaks it's time to tackle the hindquarters bison beef you can see the bison's a little bit wider the beef is going to be more round and a lot thicker put those two side by side and you can also notice the color difference more of a white fat on the beef more of a yellow on the bison so we're gonna pull flank steaks we're gonna pull tri-tips and we're going to cut the bone-in version which i mentioned earlier porterhouse and t-bone if i made those steaks boneless we would have fillet and strip we'll cut the sirloins out of these and we'll just work our way through and continue with our comparison first off pulling those flanks that's the flank stake on the bison pull this rose meat off of here first this just goes into trimmings for burger now we're not mixing the trim on the beef and bison throughout this process shawn and scott are keeping each species separate as we go let's go ahead and pull this bison flank out first so you can see one of his buddies in the pen must have got him with a horn a little bit there but we'll just remove that portion discard it what we're left with will be just fine that did make it a little bit smaller than it should be you can see when i pull these those muscle fibers run down this way one of our favorite dishes with a flank steak and we have a video on this is where we actually take it and we butterfly it and then we stuff it you can stuff it with your favorite fillings that was my new year's eve dinner scott did have that for new year's eve it was delicious too wasn't it it was one of our standbys so b flank there's the beef versus bison obviously i had to take a little bit off that end because of that bruising but you can see color size throughout this whole comparison that's going to be the biggest difference and then of course we get to the end we'll do the taste tri-tips another one our favorite cuts we start by pulling these knuckles out this is where you get your sirloin tip round tip rows some places it's called [Applause] you have to be careful when you pull these out of here or you'll cut right through that that tri-tip you got to find that seam work that seam out of there without hacking into it where it's located kind of a little bit tricky to get out of there so get that pulled out seam it out and i will show you where the tri-tip is located delicious cut to throw in the smoker and there again we have a video explaining where it comes from and how we cook it get it trimmed up a little bit we like to try to get this gristle off of here that way after it's cooked when you slice it you're not slicing through that gristle and trying to eat that bison tri-tip i'm just going to continue on this bison hindquarter and then we will get all these cuts pulled out and then we'll get started on the beef bison kidney suit we save this a lot of times what we do with it is we mix it in with our venison ground meat make some really good venison hamburgers now i'm just going to separate the round portion from the sirloin grab my hand saw story goes that in the olden days butchers would get paid by that piece right there and however many of those they produce in a day is how they got paid so you know you've got your you made your cut right it's called the butcher's dollar butcher's dollar so it should be about about the shape of a dollar coin interesting fact for you bison round tip cut this into some roast nice two to three pounder this is one of my favorites season it up i'd probably use typically what i do is i use our original beard butcher blend seasoning and then we crock pot it or dutch oven until it falls apart and then we throw our barbecue sauce in it and make pulled barbecued sandwiches can't beat it i'm going to break down this uh the short loin here i'm going to pull the sirloin off of it and then i'm going to cut the porterhouse and t-bone and then i'm going to take the round portion and hand it over to scott and he's going to fabricate that like he does the front portion of the chuck on the animal so scott is going to get this as soon as i'm done with it let me remove the remove the shank get that out of the way remove the h-bone talked about it before but this is why it's important to wear chainmail when you're breaking carcasses like this if your knife is going to slip this is where it's going to happen and if it did slip boom it's going to stab me and that wouldn't be good so that's why i'm wearing the chain mail trim this outer portion off just gets darkened up a little bit through the dry aging process in the cooler off to scott the rounds on bison and beef really aren't a whole lot different first we start by pulling this massive femur bone out of here and then we break this down into top round bottom round eye around the one thing that is a larger muscle on these bison is the eye around we'll get to that in a second now it should be noted seth will do things a little bit differently because his role is purely that of a fabricator in other words he just produces the cuts i have two roles because while i'll fabricate and prep cuts for further processing by him or further presentation i also share the responsibility with sean of the trim pieces so a lot of times when i'm fabricating i trim along the way and when seth's fabricating he leaves that up to just the he has the ability to toss it over onto our table but sometimes i work ahead of myself a little bit because i know it'll just wind up either being me or sean doing it anyway and what we're going to do with these rounds is we're going to there's a seam right here that i'm working alongside we're going to separate them and cut jerky and gross out of these so i think it's commendable something that you were into this for a little over an hour now seth shawn and i now with the bison it was raised right here on our farm um and i think it's just it's commendable and maybe a little bit remarkable that we with the the three guys that we have here on our floor in just a little over an hour's time we're going to take animals that we slaughtered which is again such an important step in the process of converting animals to food is the slaughter step i think it's often overlooked but you have three men here that are not only capable but i guess well versed in the conversion of animals to packaged products and we're able to do it all with just the same three people our industry has become much much more consolidated over the years and while you have guys that can do the slaughter step they can't do the processing step and and take it all the way to further packaging as well and we can do that not only one species but we have the ability to do just about six or seven different species here we do beef pork lamb kind of your more common domesticated animals we do bison which is really interesting bison considered an exotic it's classified as the with the usda as an exotic which is backwards in my opinion because it's the only one of those species that's native to this continent but anyway bison being the fourth and then also we do elk we do venison we do goat we do um we have done ostrich which if we can get our hands on an ostrich we'll show you that process from slaughter down through processing as well i just think it's remarkable to have three guys that have the ability to turn out these products in a short period of time doing what we're doing from slaughter to here you also have to enter in the fact that you're not only raising the animal you're also raising the food to feed the animal that's right it starts way back and goes through the whole process pretty close loop system that's shawn's responsibility he's been raising these bison for 30 plus years now and uh it's kind of cool it all comes from one spot and it's all done by the same people and that we have the knowledge and the ability to do it and to turn animals into not just food but highly palatable marketable food my first step is going to be breaking the sirloin off of here so remove that sirloin portion then i can get started cutting my porterhouse and t-bones square it up first thing i'm going to do is pull that chunk of fillet out of there so i'm going to take one porterhouse off of here like so now i'm gonna go ahead and cut a two inch quarter house and that baby is what we're going to put on the birch barrel and cook there are less porterhouse steaks on bison than there are on beef so as you can get down here towards this end you can see that tenderloin quickly disappears when you're cutting that bison shoreline [Music] and there you have bison porterhouse and bison t-bones working on the sirloin i removed a chunk of tenderloin out of there this is where the pecan comes from probably seen in some of our other videos so go ahead and get it trimmed up get it squared up we're not going to save that pecan today as a separate steak we're going to leave it on our sirloins as we as we cut our sirloin steaks so let's get this knuckle pulled out of here we'll trim out that beef tri-tip just like we did on the bison finding those seams just pulling it out like so starting to run out of room on my table which we knew it was going to be an issue how we were going to fit an entire half a beef and then entire half a bison on our tables but they're going to be full but we'll manage we want it we definitely wanted to get everything cut and everything laid out for that visual that good side-by-side comparison visual we wanted to do so some people may not trim these up as much as this it's certainly a personal preference our customers in our store like them to come pre-trimmed like this so we go ahead and do that for them just like that beef round tip two to three pound roast if you don't save these as a roast this makes fantastic stir fry stew meat etc so just keep that in mind if you want to go to the store and buy a roast to make your own stew meat stir-fry at home grab a round tip maybe labeled sirloin tip some places but it's a great roast move the kidneys to it here again we save it we have soap makers that come in and buy it we have people that like to feed their birds etcetera there's that butcher's dollar we talked about there's the beef sirloin porterhouse and t-bone we'll set this over here on the saw we're gonna do the same thing with the beef round that we did the bison i'm gonna go ahead and get it slightly broke down and scott's going to do the rest moving that hind shank remove the h-bone and scott will pull the top round the eye of round and bottom round out of this for me typically we're cutting london broils save an iron round roast and making jerky remove that sirloin same thing as a bison let's go ahead and remove uh one stake [Music] take her up two inches [Music] look at that dandy cutting the rest of them about an inch and a quarter so there's the porterhouse that starts the t-bone just remember folks the difference between the two porterhouse t-bone let me scrape them up a little bit here so you can see them better porterhouse steak is gonna have that portion of the fillet in there the t-bone is going to have a very little portion of that fillet in there just remember that's the difference between a porterhouse and a t-bone steak you get down here to the end of this loin and there's virtually no piece of that tenderloin in there at all [Music] i mentioned the eye around the bison eye around noticeably bigger than the beef so scott yeah it's like scott's bicep seth's bicep let's see him i got a long sleeve that's right buddy 25 years of skin and cattle will do we're rounding third and heading home on his uh beef versus bison i still uh i have these sirloins to cut so let's go ahead and do that bison sirloin we typically cut these these first one or two sirloins we typically cut them in half just because they end up being pretty large if we don't and if you notice here i'm sort of getting crammed on my table so we're definitely running out of space but this video is going to be a fantastic one because i was able to get the whole half of bison the whole half of beef cut and then we're going to go through and do the detailed explanation of what we ended up with but it's been a little bit of a challenge fitting everything on my table but we'll work through it and it'll be just fine using my 10 inch tornox breaking knife works out really well on these go down through it with one easy pass just like that so you can see the comparison here side by side beef versus bison with a sirloin much much darker red there again on the sirloins compared to the beef definitely more fat cover on the beef similar amount of cuts looks like got an extra small one on the beef versus the bison but we got three big ones three small ones three small ones three four big ones that's a little bit of a workout but we got it done bison versus beef it's all laid out on both of these two tables we did have to utilize both tables to get this accomplished now it's time for the overview let's go through i'm going to show you the cuts you can look at the comparison and we'll start with everything off of the front quarters and we'll move to this table which is everything off the hindquarters so starting over here scott wanted to save some little hump roasts so that's going to be our appetizer while we're cooking so we're going to cook those porterhouse steaks later and these are going to be the appetizers so we have some hump roast flat irons skirt steaks some soup bones asabuko we have bison brisket we have denver we have short ribs back rib stew meat bison rib eyes by far one of my favorite cuts that we sell in the shop period is a bison ribeye delicious some arm roasts some of those netted chuck roasts moving over to the beef soup bones skirt steaks like i mentioned don't skip on a skirt steak next time you see one buy one they're phenomenal skirt steaks back ribs short ribs arm roast beef rib eyes some stew meat beef brisket we're gonna throw a side side-by-side comparison with the little beef humps there too little nuggets beef denver some flat irons those netted chuck roasts now let's move to the back table let's go over the hind hindquarters bison beef i've got a little bit co-mingled here but i'm going to go through and separate show you what's what bison top round bottom round beef same thing eye of round bison beef seth versus scott tri-tips bison beef flank steaks bison beef we have some fillets these are all beef fillets same amount these are bison dandy dandy steaks we have some sirloins bison sirloins beef sirloins sirloin tips round tips those are bison these are beef then we have our bone-in steaks don't forget if we made these boneless they would be filet and strip but we left the bone in so we have porterhouse and t-bone these are beef these are bison now let me go ahead and pull out that steak that we're going to cook we're going to take these two side by side bison versus beef beef bison we're going to get them on the birch barrel we're going to cook them and we're gonna eat them and i can't forget that fun little story i told you about the butcher's dollar and i've got two bucks i'm worth two dollars today so there it is that's the breakdown hopefully you guys enjoyed that portion of the video stick around scott and i are going to go get the birch barrel fired up and if you've never heard of a birch barrel it's a pretty cool uh grill based out of bozeman montana those guys are located next to cody who we went elk hunting with out there in bozeman really cool unit it's a tripod grill something you've probably never seen before let's go get it fired up let's eat some steak time to fire up the birch barrel now you can burn charcoal you can burn wood today we're going to be using the rockwood charcoal um something we really like now in here is the charcoal pan this actually has different nine different levels of folding handles so i'm just going to leave it down where it's at right now throw in my charcoal and we're going to add some wood to this too just for flavor but our main cooking heat source rather is going to be this charcoal i don't know what it is but as soon as you get some fire going things just feel a whole lot warmer and friendlier that's the great thing about the birch barrel is um is you can lift this up with a pistol grip and it takes away your cooking grate and then you just simply lower your cooking grate down unlock it [Applause] and you can lift this out of the way and i can adjust my charcoal bed appropriately for my cooking we'll let this charcoal get started seth's in the shop finishing up and then it's time to cook and eat now that she's good and lit i'm gonna add some hickory wood chunks so we get some nice wood flavor oh yeah with the pistol grip lifting and lowering system with the birch barrel you can lift your cooking grate away add more charcoal add wood chunks to whatever you want to do it's a simple twist of the lid cooking grate stays where where it's at you lift the lid up you can do this too if you have food on here and you find that your food needs to be taken away from the heat source for a minute or two stick it up here stick it down here in fact we're going to be doing some of that because we want to just do a slow more or less a reverse sear so we're going to put our steaks on and we're just gonna keem up keep them up here in the lid while we make some coffee and drink some coffee and hang out right seth it's time to get these bad boys opened up get them on our block and get them seasoned there's the beef and out with the bison look at that original bearded butcher blend seasoning going with the og we talk about getting up off the surface like this a little bit higher distributes the seasoning a little bit better we're going to go ahead and coat all sides of these steaks there's so much surface here to cover and we're not gonna really be able to over season these because they're so thick that there's gonna be a lot of parts of the inside that won't even uh obviously aren't even gonna be seasoned so just go like this get it covered real nice perfect you can see i used just just maybe not quite half of this six ounce shaker for these two big porterhouse steaks just remember if you order the bucket online shaker you get this for free and then we also just started offering the refill bag for the bucket so in that order grab the bucket get the free shaker order the refill bag to your shelf life you guys are gonna be good to go let's get these steaks on the grill let's get these bad boys on the grill beef and bison so you can bet that we're going to be taking our sweet old time with these so what i'm going to do is i'm actually going to be really cautious with them just because of uh the fact that we want to go low and slow so i went ahead and hooked up my uh grill grate my grill grate is now suspended with the lid as you can see and i'm just going to put these over here i'm all at them smoke build all that nice flavor warm up slowly i mean they're two plus inches thick around two inches thick that's the great thing about the birch barrels we can adjust our heat by just uh moving this this lid up and down so now that those are on there doing their thing i'm gonna brew some coffee and um i took my little hump roast and i cut it in real thin pieces i'm gonna lift this up and i'm gonna throw those on the grate real quick and we'll have a little appetizer while these are smoking we don't talk about our coffee often enough because it's something that seth and i drink every single day and we have for what how long we've been ever since drinking our own coffee ever since we were stealing it out of dad's thermos and we're well i know that but i'm talking about our own blend oh uh seven years ours is seven or eight years it's a blend of costa rican guatemalan and ethiopian coffees and a friend of ours roasts this for us and has been for a number of years and it's how we start every single day i wish you guys could smell it you want a cup absolutely so coffee is available online it gets great great reviews from everyone that tastes it so this is similar to the setup that we had out in montana pour over the only difference is we don't have any mountains in the back of the mountains i think the coffee tasted better in montana i think we should go back i think so too good sure if you like it ben do you want a cup it's time for my my hump steaks if i had to guess those might be a tad chewy oh they will be i've had them before tons of but they make up for it in flavor yeah there's gonna be a bit i'm gonna use them to clean up all that spice how's that sound great plan and of course it's snowing on us that's all right that's what the mountain men would have done it's all about the experience that's right no seasoning left behind we chose original just because it was the og and that just felt right with regard to buffalo want to beam me up there scotty i'm gonna throw these he's gonna get a quick he's gonna get a quick dash on the poles see now something i noticed right away that's pretty nifty with this birch barrel is that i can just lift this in the air where the steaks are cooking and you'd have access right to those coals pretty handy you ever had a hump steak seth i don't think i have i actually have i love caveman style cooking though so i think i'll like it you see better if i do that i can't see i can't see rob i can't see they're not quite ready this one is what the heck do we care about they're done yep even if they're partially raw they're done there's our appetizers those are going to cool for a minute then we're going to go to town so you know what i think i'm going to do scott well those are sitting there cooling a minute i'm gonna go ahead i'm gonna go ahead and give these a flip now put that lid right back on there twist it get it up off the fire a little bit let's do the other side who wants some nice rare hump steak look at that that's oh what's up tasty boys was i wrong about it being chewy yeah maybe a tiny bit hmm that's an appetizer i can get with hop in there hop in there boys hmm wow that's delicious grab some spencer don't mind if i do it i just remembered i need to change my company i mentioned the bison being a big part of our history specifically the white feather brand and i was i'm i'm actually outside of a log cabin that my dad built well we helped too we were much younger then um we have a real affinity for uh log cabins my grandfather uh lived in the there's like an apartment built on the side but i was in there poking around and i found some really cool stuff i'm gonna grab it and sit down here and show you so my dad and my mom they um they named the business white feather because they started raising bison in 1986 1987. i was like five or six years old then but i was going through some of the stuff in my grandpa's cabin and i found these old newspaper clippings this is from 1990 seth and i here the other kids this is when it says that this herd may end up on the browns training table my dad was working with the cleveland browns getting bison into their training silly there's an old brochure for the business and the name white feather came from the uh symbol of peace that the native american tribes gave to our our ancestors they put a white feather over their door so when our parents started the bison business they named it white feather uh white for the bicycle bay that one's from 1993. here's the meat shop right here white feather meets as it looked um this was a business plan from back in the day our dad was actually one of the first ones buffalo to roam range and creston while owner rome's internet he was one of the first ones to have uh an online company in this area um i think you know late 80s early 90s the internet was pretty new these are really cool there he is right there that's right there in our shop we still have that same picture window fred own fred perkins owner white feather meats found his career in buffalo this whole basket is literally full and this kind of expanded it went from like the local news men's journal 1995. so you see as the years go went on he um he started to get more and more recognition nationally and it's really unique and it's what we draw a lot of our a lot of our marketing prowess is from the vision that our dad had with bison me so i thought that was really cool there's a little history on bison they're really the cornerstone of our business because that's how our meat business started was with raising selling bison meat and um and having them slaughtered um right at the location that they're at now um our dad bought the business in 1994 it was a established uh slaughterhouse and that's where seth and i grew up that's how we learned all these different species but it really is the cornerstone was built on bison so for you know well over 30 years bison have been on this farm and that's why seth said we're a little bit biased simply because we uh we love the animal just for what it means to us we can't even appreciate that we can't even make this a competition because bison's automatically going to win in our book so but i wanted to bring a little bit of that and we do have um we do have a feature plan where we're going to do um we actually have our dad um doing his you know his version of the history and how he started the company everything like that um we've got that film we're going to do some more with the brothers and uh get that out more of like a historical look at each one of us and how we got to where we are we are right now so thought i wanted to interject that real quick and see what you guys thought [Applause] time for another flip [Music] 90s low 90s on the beef we'll keep a closer eye on the bison because it's going to cook up see it's it's already almost 15 degrees more so we're going to keep a closer eye on that we're almost ready for a sear for us to pull the bison aside the beef tube get ready for a sear let's get them off [Applause] time to get these bad boys off let them rest and then back on the birch barrel we go so what were we at scott 110 ish yep so now what we're gonna do is we're gonna move our coal basket we're gonna grab our cool basket we're gonna move it up as high as it'll go so that we get a real nice sear on these stakes i'm gonna go ahead and lower the lid let's go ahead and get this lid out of the way and let's lift that basket up [Music] this baby all the way to the top put our lid back down now we have the coals right underneath that grate we can do a real nice sear so now that we've been resting for a few seconds a few minutes here it's like the beef is registering 117 or so bison about the same maybe just a couple of degrees nope about the same going back on listen to that civil so i'm just going to leave the lid in the air this time and we're going to watch these real close we'll sear them on one side flip them sear them on the other side we're going to pull these probably no more than 135 degrees and then we'll slice them and see what we've got i think it's time for a flip wow look at that he's just trying to do my hump steaks yeah these are not gonna take long i have to keep a real close eye on these puppies i'd rather eat them over than under we have met temp there's the bison there's the beef crazy good looking so we were upper 120s on pretty much both of them we don't want to take them any further just for fear that they will be overcooked and that's certainly something we don't want to do so so i'm gonna start with beef first and what i'm going to do is i'm going to pull this fillet out like so and then i'm going to move down along this bone here and i'm going to cut the strip portion out like so and then what i'm gonna do is just start up here at the top working our way down and we're gonna put the steak back together in its original form look at that look how juicy look how juicy that is wow there's one side we weren't really planning on the snow so the snow is adding a little bit of moisture to our table here but hey we'll get it done either way and don't worry about that meat that's left on that bone we'll know that off of there too so as you can see that bison that strip side is a lot narrower than the beef and the tenderloin side even though these came from the exact same place on the uh short loin of those animals the tenderloin is actually a little bit larger this i know is gonna be incredible very first sample scott i cannot wait so which one are you gonna sample first the b for the bison um i think i'm gonna go with uh i mean i don't know why i wouldn't just go straight for the absolute best bite that i could get right here i'll split it with you how's that oh i'm getting my own piece thanks for the gesture but oh my goodness you get the sweetness almost immediately just the texture is so soft that it's it's it's like it's like red meat sushi you almost have to chew it you could like use the roof of your mouth your tongue and just squish it and eat it it's the sweetness is what gets you right off the bat now a lot of people think that bison is going to be gamey not gamey at all and like we mentioned earlier we almost can't make this a competition because you know which one we're going to choose scott just went through all the history stuff we're going to choose bison the other thing too they say that when you raise like have you ever heard that people's they start looking like they're pets or they're yeah we raise buffalo and it should be pointed out with the beard and like the bigger the bigger shoulders starting to look like baby we look a little bit longer you're going you're going that route yeah right to the beef fillet not as tender it's fantastic i would if you were get if you would order this restaurant i would be thrilled but the first thing i noticed it doesn't have that sweetness you know and um it's it's excellent it's fantastic it's got more of that um the beef like not not butter but like beefy flavor yeah it's beefy but it's it does not have that sweetness now the other thing i noticed too these steaks were cut the exact same thickness and the bison even though we pulled these at the same temp it didn't cook through quite as much as the beef did and i think um i mean you can see here it's it's pretty medium rare to rare on the inside of that steak so just interesting fact that the bison actually um looked like i cooked less even though they're the same thickness and they were on for the same amount of time oh my goodness the moisture too really really good really happy with the way that this uh this turned out i mean the the it's the reassurance that i knew that we would get just knowing that we've been eating bison for over 30 years and just fantastic phenomenal if somebody cooked these side by side and didn't tell you you would just think that the bison's really really good beef um but it wouldn't throw you off to the point where you're like oh i'm not eating bison because it's going to be you know like we mentioned gaming or something like that not at all i mean serve this could be served in a high-end restaurant all over the world with some of the top beef steaks you've ever eaten guaranteed one of the best things i've ever eaten oh yeah absolutely i think my beard just grew a half an inch so you'll find the bearded butchers putting their stamp on bison every single time we hope you enjoyed the video we hope you enjoyed learning a little bit more about the native beef the one that belongs on this continent and we're so proud of the 30 years plus years that we've been around these animals we're thankful that our our dad was a visionary like he was and he started raising the bison because it's really led us to where we're at today so we want to encourage you if you have the opportunity be the bison the best way to ensure a long future for these animals the great comeback story is to support the commerce associated around the commercial activity that is the raising and the butchering and the consumption of this fantastic red meat absolutely and you know we've talked about this before where we don't have a big fancy cook island you know patio behind our house that we're that we're cooking this food on um you know we're on our farm this is just how we do it so we've got the pretty cool birch barrel that we use here today you've seen us use the traegers you've seen us use the big green eggs um but you know we started this video this morning we did all the processing we did all the packaging we made a bunch of sticks smokies later this afternoon and then we just came outside and we fired up the birch barrel and we cooked and ate some food so nothing extremely fancy about our setting however this is real this is us that's what you're gonna get so we hope you enjoyed the video once again don't forget to follow us on all of our pages instagram facebook youtube can't forget tick tock now um but anyways we hope you enjoyed the video um thanks for following along we are almost at 600 000 subscribers on our channel and over 51 million channel views that's awesome it all started with bison thanks for watching we'll see you next time appreciate it until next time see ya [Music] you

Channel: The Bearded Butchers

Views: 1,228,268

Rating: 4.8787045 out of 5

Keywords: bearded butchers, bearded butcher blend, Bison vs Beef, Beef, bison, bison vs buffalo

Id: Ld_oeOLT4G4

Length: 94min 40sec (5680 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 09 2021