Sunday, August 7, 2011

SORRY!! and tips to buy meat in Germany

Hey guys,

I just realized that its already a month since my last post. I'm really sorry about that. I'm still a beginner in the Blogger world and I didn't know how much time you need to put into a blog post. Believe me, it's even more when you need to write everything twice, once in German once in English. The next 3 weeks I will be pretty busy as well. I have work during the week and the next weekend I will go camping. After that Chris and I will be in Spain for 10 days. I promise you I'm still gonna try to post more often. And if you need help with something, just write me.

Thomas Weiss  / pixelio.de
Ok, back to some paleo information. Where can you buy the best meat in Germany? The best choice is grasfed beef, pork and poultry free of antibiotics and pesticides. Did anyone of you ever ask for that in the supermarket? I tried once and just got strange looks as an answer.We sometimes buy beef from Argentinia in the supermarket, but its pretty expensive.  On the other hand, its definitaly grasfed because thats the cheapest way to feed cows in Argentinia. In Germany most cows are grainfed because the goverment subsidized agriculture so much. If you can avoid it, don't buy your meat in the supermarket. So what are your options?

1) Neuland meat

Nearly everywhere in Germany there are butcheries that sell Neuland meat. This meat has come from animals who lived after certain rules. These rules include living outside and beeing fed with food which is not genetically modified and free of antibiotics. What these animals eat specifically is not clarified so you would have to ask the butcher. Therefore the Neuland sign is not a guarant for grasfed meat but its definitely better than the meat from the supermarket!
You can eather look for a butcher in your area:
Or you can order online from the farms listed here (chicken,beef, prok and lamb):

2) Order directly from a farmer

If you invest a little bit of time and use google, one can find farmers who sell their produce directly to the costumer. You can even drive by and check out, how the animals are living. Most of the time you can preorder meat and when the time of slaughter arrives, you can pick it up. In the US thats known as cow-sharing. I found such a farmer in our area. At his farm the animals are outside the whole summer and eat nothing but gras. You can either buy 1/8 (15-20kg), 1/4 (30-40kg) or1/2 (70-80kg) of a cow. Those meat packages include all parts of the cow, from filet to beef shank. And that for a price of 7.50 Euro per kg.
This is the farmer:

We're on the waiting list for meat there. At the moment the cows are still outside eating gras. In September they will be slaughtered and I will definitely tell you about my experiences. 

3) Buy meat on the internet
Gerhard Frassa  / pixelio.de

Okay, that might sound strange in the beginning, but there's actually nothing strange about it. Meat can be vacuumized and send to you in a cooled box within a day. We actually found a shop on ebay that sells poultry, beef, pork and goat. The 'Schwäbisch-hällisch' pigs do get some grains to eat but also gras, apples, carrots and so on and they're allowed to live a happy life. The 7kg meat package includes roast, sausages, chops, rips, cutlets and knuckle. We've already tried this package and the meat tasted really good. Not comparable to the usual pork.
The highland cows do live outside the whole year and eat nothing but gras. A 6kg package includes roast, goulash, roulade, ground meat, rips, beef shank and soup meat. We will order this package when we come back from Spain and I'll let you know how it was.
Additionally you can buy single üpeaces of meat like steaks etc, goat, rabbit, deer, cheese and sauerkraut. 


I hope I could give you some helpful tips here. Where do you buy your meat? Just write it into the comments and I am happy to include your links in this post.

10 comments:

  1. Thanks for those leads (and reassuring info about Edeka). I'll be sure to look into them.

    I have one tangentially-related question that I hope you can answer: butter. I clarify mine (I have a tutorial on my blog) and mix it half-half with expeller-pressed coconut oil and use it for everything - so I need a LOT!

    It's a great source of fat, of course, but good butter also supplies Vitamins A, D, and K, and ALAs, but only IF it comes from the raw soured milk of grassfed cows. The yellower the butter - generally - the more sunshine it has in it :) I buy Kerrygold because it's mostly grassfed, and quite yellow, but it is pasteurised. I can get raw grassfed butter from my cheese guy at the market but a) it's twice the price of Kerrygold, and b) it's more than half milk solids, so I lose a lot when I clarify it (making it 4x more expensive).

    Can you recommend a brand or source of decent butter in (south) Germany?

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  2. I'm sorry, I cannot give you a tip on that. I rarely eat butter (maybe once a month) and than I just use Kerrygold butter. I'm just too lazy to produce my own when I only eat it once in a while. Maybe someone knows a source. Why don't you ask that question in the german facebook group?
    http://www.facebook.com/groups/263774986981871/

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  3. Lauren, I would recommend Alpenbutter. Milk products from Berchtesgardener Land for example are guaranteed grass fed.

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  4. Thanks for the information about finding good sources of meat! You said you would update us about the highland cows... how is the meat?

    any idea about lamb (where to find it, especially in the South (Munich))?

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  5. Awesome,
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  8. Grazie!!!!!Great topic and infos!!! We live in Germany and we would like to feed ourselves with no-grain fed meat, eggs, diary. Hard but we'll do. Do you know farmers that sells this kind of eggs? Thanks a lot! Erika

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  9. Thanks for sharing such a graet info, it is really helpful to who looking for Ordering meat online

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  10. I am really not aware about these things however this is for sure that shopping in Germany is the best experience once could get.

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