Back British Beef Week and Buy a Beast!

This week is British Beef Week: a fantastic chance to spare a thought for our squeezed farmers, try beef recipes and cuts you haven't cooked with before, and to celebrate the best of our native beef breeds. That's why we're introducing an exclusive foodie experience: buying a beast.

It works like this; we've put together a delightful hamper of expertly butchered cuts from each part of the same animal. Some of the cuts are household favourites such as Fillet Steak, others you might not be familiar with, for instance a Silverside Salmon Cut.

Each cut however is delicious in its own right, giving you a chance to try traditional cuts that you won't find in a supermarket, and ensuring there is no waste from the animal. You'll also find inside the hamper descriptive and informative recipes cards, giving ideas as to how to best use each fresh piece of meat.

At Farmison & Co we believe native breed meat tastes better, and we're committed to native breeds like Longhorn, Galloway, Highland, and Dexter. They taste better because they haven't been bred to produce meat on an industrial scale: where whether a cow is suitable for meat depends on its ability to put on weight in a short space of time by eating poor quality feed.

Unsurprisingly this industrially made meat doesn't taste as good, and if you're not used to much else, it may came as an almighty shock as to how good slowly reared beef can be.

Then there's the problem of how industrially produced meat is put together. In light of the recent horsemeat scandal it just goes to show you can never be certain what you're getting in lower quality meat. Processed meat by nature is the supermarket's way of making more money out of natural foods, bringing it from afar, divvying it up and making it more lucrative. But these reconstituted foods have poor nutritional value. That's the argument of Joanna Blythman - Farmison & Co blogger and foodie author of "What to Eat"- who suggests a link between additives and novel ingredients of processed foods to the modern endemics of obesity and food allergies.

We're often asked though why we market native breeds as tasty if they're so scarce. However it's precisely because they're not eaten enough that they're rare and by buying a beast - or any cut of our native breed beef - you can be sure that the animal is allowed to mature, you're giving a fair price to our Great British farmers, and there's nothing unwanted ending up in the food chain. In fact we can trace our animals right back to the fields they were raised in.

So go on, celebrate British Beef Week and broaden your culinary horizons through trying different breeds, and widen your recipe repertoire through making full use of the animal you purchase: just click here.