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Comment by workinthehead | Hacker News Reader

You seriously can't taste the difference between pasture-raised beef and the grade D swill that junk food pushers like In-n-out peddle?

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The biggest factor is in fresh vs frozen, and in N out is on the correct side of that divide. I'd be interested in a blind comparison between burgers made with high and low end pieces of beef, but it'd be very difficult to eliminate the confounding variables. Getting fat percentage equal would be tough.

In N Out uses factory-farmed, garbage-fed, antibiotic-saturated beef from cows who have no room to move and stand in their own shit all day. I can tell the difference between that kind of stuff and a good healthy grass-fed cow by smell alone. Seriously, I wonder if you have ever even had healthy beef.

Interesting. How did you come to the conclusion that you can tell the difference just by smell? Can you do that after it's been cooked? It's easy to see certain differences in uncooked, whole cuts of beef, but I'm impressed that you can smell the difference.

To your point about high end and low end pieces of beef, steaks are usually priced by the tenderness of the beef, which tends to have an inverse relationship with flavor (of course, there are other factors as well, and some people just prefer a mild-tasting cut).

As you might have inferred by now, good burgers are typically made from cuts like brisket and chuck that are tough, inexpensive, and high in flavor. Using high-end steaks for burgers is simply a waste, doubly so for well-marbled ones.

The fat percentage would not be difficult. Any good butcher would probably be happy to help you set such a comparison up. That is, if they don't warn you that it's a waste to use that T-bone on a burger first.

I'm interested in using the same cuts of meat from different grades of beef. The higher degree of marbling in higher-end beef will make it difficult to get the same amount of fat.

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