ATTENTION TO MEAT

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The attention for meat, and in particular its origin and the way in which animals are treated, has increased enormously in recent years.

The popularity of barbecues with larger pieces of meat has also contributed to this, but meat in relation to sustainability is also a hot topic.

When I started Aalvink Meat Specialties years ago, I had a very clear idea of what I wanted to sell and why. But also which products I did not want to offer.

I would like to tell you more about the origin of the meat in our webshop and why you cannot buy frozen Wagyu steaks from us.

Grass-fed beef vs grain-fed beef

If you put a piece of beef from a grass-fed cow next to that of a grain-fed cow, you immediately see the difference. Because of the grain, more fat builds up between the muscles, this ensures a marbled appearance of the meat. Grass-fed beef has this less and the meat looks a bit more even in color. You can also taste this in the meat.

The grass-fed beef tastes a bit firmer, the grain-fed beef has a softer taste, a bit more oily. The composition of the fat is healthier in grass-fed beef, because it contains more healthy Omega-3 fatty acids than in grain-fed meat.

For a cow, the most natural food they can eat is grass. Eating grains is against natural and has been especially devised in the meat industry to make the cows grow faster, so that they reach slaughter weight faster.

Of course, it is true that cows in the Netherlands cannot eat fresh grass 365 days a year, when they are stabled they get nicely supplemented with extra feed (mainly silage) to get enough nutrients. But most of their diet is grass. Preventive antibiotic use is also out of the question.

We believe that you should feed a cow what nature has devised for him and that is grass. An additional advantage is that cows that are in the meadow and eat grass also get more exercise than cows that are fed grain in the barn.

Origin of the meat

In order to be able to deliver quality, we use regular suppliers and a few fixed slaughterhouses.

All in our vicinity, so that we can walk in ourselves and see that the work is done neatly and professionally.

Enough horror stories have appeared in the media so that we do not make concessions and possibly get meat from elsewhere. Then we don’t know whether we can deliver the quality we stand for.

To give you an example, a few years ago, well over a week before Christmas, we were sold out. Our regular slaughterhouses could no longer deliver and we were advised to get meat from abroad, so that it would be there in time so that we could sell before Christmas.

So we didn’t! We do not know how slaughter is carried out there and what kind of life the animals have had. So for us a no go. Then just a week less turnover and the following year before Christmas, buy more at our regular slaughterhouses.

The great thing is that the cows and pigs they slaughter there all come from the region. Twents meat from the neighbourhood. This has the advantage that the animals do not have to be transported for hours to the slaughterhouse. A good thing, because that means less stress for the animals, less CO2 emissions from the truck and fresher meat.

If you compare that with an Australian grainfed piece of meat that you buy frozen, for example, then you are many times higher in terms of CO2 emissions just to get the meat here than the meat we sell. The freshness of frozen meat can be questioned, as the meat has sometimes been stored in cold stores for months.

We therefore consciously choose local suppliers to guarantee the quality of the meat you order online. We also believe that an animal should eat as naturally as possible and should have the space to move.

That is why we do not have ‘grainfed picanha’ or Wagyu steaks’ in our range, only pure and delicious meat from Twente.

No preventive antibiotics are used by farmers. Because we work on a small scale and our farmers do the same and do not supply the supermarket chains and therefore do not use the star system. We think it is more important that the animals have a good life.

We are not skal certified and because of this we do not supply organic meat.

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sausage and meat products

beam slurry

Original price was: €9,25.Current price is: €7,99.