First Taste of Bison

I finally cooked up some of the grass-fed ground bison meat I bought a couple weeks ago. I made Hamburger Helper, which I know is not very healthy, but it's what we had. A quick peek at the nutritional information on the side of the box reveals several mystery ingredients. Eventually I'm hoping to make a healthier homemade version of Hamburger Helper, but I'm not there yet.

I had a two pack of the lasagna, and we had eaten the first mix several days ago. That was made with regular ground beef from Wal-Mart. Probably not the best combination, but we're trying to get better. The first step is switching to grass-fed meat. I was hoping that by making the second mix with the ground bison, we'd be able to compare and see if there was a taste difference. It would have been better to used grass-fed beef, since bison tastes a little different anyway. But as you can probably tell already, this isn't really the most scientific of comparisons.

When I bought the bison meat, the lady there made sure to tell me that cooking bison is different than cooking beef. The bison needs to be cooked at a lower temperature and you have to be careful not to overcook it. Otherwise it will be bland and you'll be wondering why you ever wanted to eat bison in the first place. I turned the dial on the stove burner a little lower than I would with ground beef, and tried to cook it just until all the pink was gone. I'm not anything close to a chef, so I'm not sure if it was the correct temperature, but it seemed to come out ok. While cooking, I couldn't really tell any different between the bison and the Wal-Mart beef.

Once the bison was done cooking, I finished the rest of the Hamburger Helper preparation. The final product looked and smelled exactly the same as it had the last time we had it. The real test was the taste, though. Honestly, I couldn't tell a difference. My girlfriend liked it, and said it was a little better than the version with beef. Maybe if the two were side by side I could tell, but it seemed the same to me.

I found myself thinking that if it doesn't taste any different, then maybe we should just continue buying the Wal-Mart beef. It sure is a lot cheaper. But if my tongue couldn't tell a difference, I really hope my body was able to. Grass-fed bison (and beef) should be healthier for you than the feedlot kind. It's probably also better in other ways, since by buying this type of meat I'm supporting local, sustainable agriculture. Through that I'm also not supporting concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) and their associated problems (unhealthy animals, pollution, industrial corn, etc).

I'm hoping the Hamburger Helper mix masked the great taste of the bison, and that I'd be able to tell a difference in a different dish, but I'm not sure. We still have some bison burgers to try. Hopefully there will be a bigger taste difference there. Even though it's more expensive and I'm not sure it tastes better, I'll probably still continue to buy grass-fed meat as long as we can afford it. For us, I think the overall benefits outweigh the extra cost.