100 % Grass Fed and Finished Beef Burger Joints

Chef Nathan Anda cooks hamburgers at Ruby Frock Burger Bar. (Jennifer Chase/For the Washington Mail)

Fiftyast year, McDonald's started testing fresh, not frozen, basis-beef patties at some Dallas locations. More than two years ago, Carl's Jr. introduced an "all-natural" burger with hormone- and antibiotic-free beefiness sourced from grass-fed and free-range cattle. And since its launch in 2005, the Arlington-based Elevation Burger chain has touted its organic ground beef from similarly pampered cattle.

As much as those developments represent upgrades in the hamburger world, they too reveal the industry'due south glaring bullheaded spot: Burger joints, large or small, don't talk much nearly the sources of their beef. They may say their meat comes from North America or the U.s., but they don't drill down to specific farms or even to a specific country. They're the stubborn holdouts of the locavore movement.

Scarlet Frock Burger Bar is selling burgers made with meat from cattle that have fed exclusively on grass. (Jennifer Chase/For the Washington Post)

Which is why the recently opened Red Frock Burger Bar near Dupont Circle immediately stood out in the ground-beef market place. The partnership betwixt Neighborhood Eatery Group and Crimson Frock Butcher promises to source all its beefiness from Virginia producers, including Leaping Waters Farm in Alleghany Springs, which raises Ancient White Park cattle exclusively on grass. If you've never had a burger made from the meat of grass-fed cattle, you lot're in for a surprise: The patties boast a deeply beefy, mineral-similar flavour, and then dissimilar from the buttery roundness of grain-fed steers.

"We have both a grass-fed burger for the new place also as a grass-fed, grain-finished burger," says Nathan Anda, the chef, butcher and creative strength behind Red Apron. "Yous can tell both of them accept a good amount of age, and both of them are bringing more of a beef, more than of a steak flavor, every bit opposed to kind of the taste of the grill or the sense of taste of the flattop."

Information technology has taken Anda years to develop the network of regional farmers who supply his Washington-expanse butcher shops with all-natural, humanely raised meats. Even then, he couldn't have launched his Burger Bar without the aid of Ryan Ford, co-owner of Seven Hills Food in Lynchburg, Va. Ford is a wholesaler in fresh Virginia meats, which doesn't begin to explain all the work required to build a system with such a regional focus.

A co-founder of the Organic Butcher retail shops in Charlottesville (at present airtight) and McLean (yet thriving), Ford moved into the wholesale business organisation well-nigh two years ago, when he and his investors spent millions of dollars to renovate the sometime Dinner Bell Meat Products processing institute in Lynchburg. Ford decided he would aid remedy a problem that he encountered as a retail butcher: a lack of fresh, locally raised meats to feed a growing market.

Simply equally Ford explains, it's not simple to transform a organization that has historically catered to the article meat marketplace. Virginia ranchers traditionally accept raised cattle for giant corporate feedlots and processors, receiving a fraction of what they could earn past selling direct to chefs and retail shops. But the slaughter-house, processing and distribution systems are not designed for small-scale, regional production. If ranchers wanted to sell directly to those willing to pay more than, they typically had to adjust it themselves, via farmers markets and the like, often at exorbitant costs.

At Red Frock Burger Bar most Dupont Circumvolve, Leah Beilhart makes her motion on a hamburger fabricated with 100 percentage grass-fed beef. (Jennifer Chase/For the Washington Postal service)

Enter Ford and 7 Hills Food, a U.Southward. Section of Agriculture-inspected butchery and processing plant that opened in September 2015. To create this regional organization to process and distribute Virginia meats, Ford has had to discover farmers willing not just to work with him but also to change their agricultural practices to improve almost everything, from animal welfare to the quality of the meat. So Ford has had to find chefs such equally Anda at Reddish Apron who are willing to pay a premium for grass-fed, grain-finished Blackness Angus beef, dry-aged for at least ten days.

"We're laying the groundwork for something that will accept years to build," Ford says.

In its start yr, Seven Hills processed 1,000 caput of cattle. Ford says he's operating at merely 10 percent of chapters and that at that place are plenty of Virginia cattle farmers who could motion their animals into his system.

Which is potentially skilful news for Anda. While the chef says he wants to perfect his debut burger joint before entertaining thoughts of expansion, it seems clear that he and the Neighborhood Eating place Grouping have bigger plans for Red Frock Burger Bar. Maybe even Burger Bars scattered along the Northeast Corridor, each tied into regional beef suppliers.

"I've washed a lot of traveling from Philly to New York," says James Tracey, Neighborhood Restaurant Grouping's culinary managing director, who used to work for the Philadelphia-based Starr Restaurants group.

"I call back the cows are there at this indicate," Tracey says well-nigh a potential Northeast expansion. "The farmers would be happy. They could do more, and they've said they tin do more."

Of class, information technology'due south that kind of expansionist dreaming that can doom a concept, likewise. Only ask Mark Bucher, founder of BGR: The Burger Joint. When Bucher opened his debut BGR in Bethesda in 2008, all he wanted to practice was sell gourmet, steakhouse-style burgers in a casual, counter-service surroundings.

Bucher worked with Danny Alahouzos, co-owner of Prime number Foods in Hyattsville, to create a custom hamburger blend for BGR. They took prime cuts (or nigh-prime when the higher grade wasn't bachelor) of brisket, short ribs and sirloin (sourced from grass-fed, grain-finished Pennsylvania cattle) and mixed them "lightly and gently" with fatty to arrive at the desired alloy, Alahouzos says. The burger was a hit with critics and the public.

Just BGR'south investors, Bucher says, wanted more. They wanted more than stores. They wanted to franchise into markets outside Washington. Inside a few years, the BGR concept had grown besides large for the bazaar performance that was Prime Foods.

"We had other obligations," Alahouzos says. "I couldn't tell my regular customers, 'I'm lamentable. In that location'due south this burger identify that's taking over our place.' We had to become help doing it."

BGR turned to a big beef-grinding facility in New York, where Bucher says he worried he was losing control of the quality. "Every now and and then, I'd taste the burger and I'd say, 'Something's non correct,' " recalls Bucher, who divested himself of his BGR ownership in 2014. Plus, Alahouzos adds, once a visitor reaches a certain size, the owners inevitably start focusing more than on toll points than on meat quality. That, in turn, forces companies to move away from regional suppliers and into the commodity beef markets.

It's not easy to determine where major hamburger chains buy their beefiness. Of the companies contacted for this story — including 5 Guys, Height, Milk shake Shack, Umami Burger and others — just a few responded. A spokeswoman for CKE Restaurants, parent company of Carl'due south Jr., emailed to say its natural beefiness comes from Australia, largely from JBS Australia's Groovy Southern branded beefiness. A McDonald'south representative likewise emailed to say most of the chain's 100 percent beef is obtained from ranches effectually the United States.

"While we remain one of the largest purchasers of U.S. beef, we also import USDA-inspected beef from New Zealand, Australia and Canada," the McDonald's spokeswoman, Terri Hickey, adds in the same email.

The founder of BGR: The Burger Joint says he lost some control over sourcing when the demands of expansion forced him to find a new processor. (James M. Thresher/The Washington Post)

The Shake Shack chain has experienced major growth, but a visitor official says it has been able to maintain the quality of its beefiness. (Pecker O'Leary/Washington Mail)

Major growth, of course, doesn't automatically cheapen a hamburger chain's beefiness supply. With its influx of public investment coin, Shake Shack has expanded to more than 100 locations, including outlets in Republic of korea, Russian federation, Nihon and the United Arab Emirates. Such a vast network of restaurants makes information technology incommunicable to source meat locally in each case, says Jeffrey Amoscato, the company's vice president of supply chain and menu innovation. (The exception, he says, is the Shake Shack at the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minn., which relies exclusively on in-state beefiness.)

Instead, the company buys simply a specific kind of beef: whole cuts from grass-fed and grain-finished Angus steers. The cuts are sourced from usa of the upper Midwest, Amoscato says. Shake Shack, he adds, doesn't shop for meat based on cost.

"Nosotros're actually just looking for the best quality first; then we'll notice a way to make it work" with price, Amoscato says. "If information technology'southward got really good flavor, it volition sell."

Amoscato's point is important to those who follow the hamburger marketplace: Local beef does not necessarily mean better beefiness. Although local grass-fed beefiness may be better for the environment — grass-fed-cattle farms have some advantages over industrial systems, and vice versa, depending on how well managed each operation is — it doesn't mean local beef will always be more flavorful than the commodity stuff shipped from the Midwest. The principals behind the Reddish Apron Burger Bar understand that.

"For me, simply buying local to 'buy local' doesn't make sense," says Tracey, NRG's culinary director. "Information technology has to be about quality. At the end of the day, people don't care that much. They do care, but if they don't like what information technology tastes like, they're not going to come up back."

Will Red Apron Burger Bar patrons like the flavor of grass-fed beef from Virginia? Will they care about the provenance of the beefiness at all? The future of this ambitious project seems to hinge on the answers to those two questions.

Red Apron Burger Bar, 1323 Connecticut Ave. NW, 202-524-5210. redapronburgerbar.com. Grass-fed, grain-finished Black Angus burgers, $five.85 for a single patty and $eight.95 for a double patty; grass-fed Ancient White Park burgers, $seven.35 for a unmarried patty and $11.35 for a double patty.

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Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/with-red-aprons-new-bar-the-burger-market-steps-up-will-consumers-care/2017/01/13/84f466bc-d799-11e6-b8b2-cb5164beba6b_story.html

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