This robustly flavored steak is Glenn's favorite, as it combines tenderness with definitive flavor and marbling from high mountain Pahsimeroi pastures. This is one of the very best steaks we offer, and is always in short supply due to high demand and small numbers per beef. Each ribeye is weighed and selected by us to ensure that the steak meets our rigorous quality standards.
Each steak is individually vacuum-packed.
The Details: What Makes the Alderspring Ribeye Different
-The Reviews
The Alderspring ribeye has won awards for its superior flavor depth and tenderness. As far back as 2006, Salon Magazine said after a taste test contest of our ribeye that "Never have I witnessed a piece of meat so move grown men (and women). Every taster but one instantly proclaimed the grass-fed steak the winner." In 2010, Ian Brown of the Globe and Mail compared our ribeye to a wagyu, saying: "The grass fed rib-eye is a revelation...The Idaho steak has the middle, the robustness of the wagyu, but without the fattiness; it also tastes, unmistakably, like beef." In 2011, celebrated author Mark Schatzker published "Steak: One Man's Quest for the World's Tastiest Piece of Meat," He spent 1 year traveling the world looking for the best steak, and found it at Alderspring Ranch. In 2013, ForbesLife put the Alderspring ribeye on its spring A-list. In 2017, award-winning executive British chef, Richard Turner, recommended Alderspring in his book "Prime: The Beef Cookbook." Besides mentioning our flavor, he also recommends Alderspring as the leading U.S. producer of ethical beef.
-The Thickness
We cut all our ribeyes at a minimum of 1 1/2 inches thick. Most of our competitors cut ribeyes around 1 inch. We believe that thickness is critical to creating the maximum ribeye experience because crust caramelization doubles the amount of flavor a ribeye offers. Enough thickness ensures that even while putting a lovely crust finish on the exterior of the steak, a chef still has an opportunity to serve a rare or medium middle that showcases the flavors of the beef unchanged by heat and flame. Thin steaks simply present uni-dimensional flavor, and when you have a steak as we purvey at Alderspring with a 550 species of plant ingested diversity offering (the actual number of grazeable plants on the Ranch), you want to maximize the possibility of palate!
-The Marble
We've been working on our ribeye for over 29 years. If you've ever tried a grass-fed ribeye, you may be under the impression that a grass-fed steak has to be lean, and that's simply the nature of the thing. But more often, leanness is caused by too-early harvesting, low grass nutrition and diversity, or even low soil organic matter. We've grown our ribeyes literally from the ground up, and after 29 years of trial and error, we get consistently incredible results every time. This is a truly superior steak, far above typical grass and grain fed standards (unless if you choose a non-marbled option from our diverse offerings of steak on the webstore).
-The Sustainability
This isn't a steak you need to feel guilty about eating, either on behalf of the planet or your own health. We raise our beef only on our certified organic, highly diverse wild pastures. No hormones, antibiotics, pesticides, herbicides, insecticides, or other "cides" (even most grass fed producers still use these 'cides). We are always humane and quiet when handling our animals...to do otherwise is unthinkable for us. On top of that, we are committed to improving our landscapes, and we put our actions where our words are. In the last ten years, we've tripled our soil organic matter (sequestering an average of 4 lbs of carbon for every 1 lb of beef we produced in that 10 year period), and protected 55 acres of our ranch as wildlife and fish spawning habitat (and made it so that these areas are legally protected even after we're gone). We've also restored over 55 miles of wild mountain springs, streams, and wet areas on our remote rangeland. These areas had been severely overgrazed by cattle for over 100 years before we came. Now we're seeing our range return to what it was pre-settlement. Many wildlife species that had been all but extinguished have returned in force, including bighorn sheep, beavers, several wild fish and fowl species, wolves, mountain lions, and bears. Your purchase from Alderspring contributes to our continued efforts in restoring wild landscapes and sequestering carbon.
-The Selection
We are more picky than any other online grass fed beef retailer about which steaks make the cut to sell as our premium ribeyes. We inspect each steak for marbling, thickness, color, shape, vacuum package integrity, and proper sealing (lots of ice crystals or bubbles in a package are a no-go for us--this means that the steak froze too slowly, which means denaturing as well as loss in flavor and tenderness). If the steak doesn't meet our high standards, we don't sell it as a premium ribeye.
