Market Meat
Market Meat contains 1 pack bacon, 1 pack ground beef, 1 seasonal fish (typically albacore tuna back/belly or wild black cod), 2 seasonal salmon fillets, and 1 full 3-5 lb. pastured chicken.
Pastured Chicken: We're lucky to partner with several incredible fully pastured chicken farms: dominantly, our friends Geoff and Anna up at Osprey Hill in Skagit Valley, and the amazing Rapphun family at Sky Valley in the Cascades, also our main egg provider. Every year, chicks start their lives near their farmstead home in heated open barns full of hay. Once they're big enough to move around, they cluck and forage in groups across a new massive open tract of fields, and are moved to a fresh patch every day. Compared to chickens sold in grocery stores pumped with saline and preservatives, pastured birds' buttery, archetype-of-concentrated-chicken-flavor is the absolute finest bar none. We each roast a whole chicken regularly and make broth from the bones, and love having more butchered sections and extra bone broth on hand.
*Chicken size varies naturally, both in whole bird and portions: we do our best to adjust value accordingly to stay consistent by pairing larger butchered portions (breast/leg) with smaller whole birds and vice versa!
Skagit River Ranch: Skagit River Ranch is run by Eiko and her daughter Nicole, drawing the largest pre-market lines at Seattle street markets for decades. Their biodynamic farm is located on a gorgeous plot directly on the Skagit River in Sedro-Wooley, WA. All of Eiko's animals are happily pastured and fed grasses and herbs grown on the land. Non-ruminants' diets are supported by the finest organic non-GMO whole grains that are milled fresh onsite.
The quality is almost inconceivable. I've been ruined on their uncured bacon, thick and syrupy-sweet. Side-by-side tasting of their ground beef with three other competing small farms yielded an obvious winner in Skagit's wagyu cattle quality, a grass-fed sweetness and tender lack of gristle that clearly reflects the good practices of folks raising animals kindly on some of the finest riverside pastureland we've ever visited.
Salmon: Bristol Bay is a fishery that consistently sees the largest sockeye salmon returns in the world through careful management by Alaska's Fish & Game, and is fished exclusively by independent vessels. Year over year, Bristol Bay has yielded some of the most delicious, visibly carefully handled sushi-grade sockeye we've ever eaten. Salmon are a legendary fish, central to life in the Pacific Northwest for thousands of years and yet incredibly threatened by dams, overfishing and the pressures of human industry. Salmon sold to eat in many stores and most restaurants is often farmed Atlantic salmon that threaten local populations or otherwise unsustainable wild harvesting: we work exclusively with a few different single family fishing boats of Bristol Bay, either our buddy Gabe or father-daughter team Maggie and Don, as well as Luz and Jonah of Loki Fish who also fish further across the Alaskan Pacific.
Tuna: The St. Jude is a 95-foot troller that follows albacore tuna from the North Pacific in summer to the South Pacific in fall, 12 months a year. Jig-caught younger albacore near the surface of cold waters in the central and north Pacific feed on krill, and are both rich in Omega 3s and substantially lower in mercury. Albacore are exclusively individually caught on hooks, and lures dragged behind the boat. Each fish is landed and handled individually on a cushioned platform, brain-stunned (a painless step that stabilizes their body temperature) and immediately bled (essential for sushi). Each fish is then rinsed, processed and put into the on-board blast freezer in the shortest possible time. Says Joe, " None of the fish caught are wasted. In thousands of hours trolling, we never had a marine mammal encounter, we never killed a shark, we once gave a thrill ride to a three pound green turtle when he got tangled up with a jig line but he was released uninjured after we took a few pictures."
*Meat products are transported frozen in reusable insulated bags. Please return for pickup so we can sanitize for reuse.