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Aberdeen Has a Seat at the Restaurant Table The Aberdeen breed is leveraging its characteristics to leave a lasting impact on the average consumer eating experience.

F ood trends come and go, and consumer fads fade in and out. But when it comes to America’s all-time favorite, steak remains a staple cuisine. How a chef prepares steak may in fluence the consumer’s overall eating experience, but there are also other key factors taken into consideration as well. For example, the size of the steak served is an underappreciated trait that many consumers have to consider. Chefs must now worry about how thick to cut a steak, for fear of leaving it too thin. A thinner steak is much more difficult to prepare from a done ness perspective and will often result in it being overdone. As ribeyes become larger due to the increase in the average carcass size, most chefs are forced to cut steaks thinner to maintain the stan dard serving size. That’s where the Aberdeen breed has staked its claim. The Aberdeen breed is known for moderate-framed, high-quality cattle that produce an end product with a pleasant and satis fying eating experience. The Eating Experience Karl Hoppe, a fourth-generation rancher, North Dakota State Univer sity livestock Extension specialist and co-coordinator of North Dakota Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education, understands firsthand what it takes to produce a steak from pasture to plate. BY KATE HAGANS, FREELANCE WRITER The Aberdeen breed is known for moderate framed, high-quality cattle that produce an end product with a pleasant and satisfying eating experience. He recently encountered an un forgettable eating experience at the Lucky’s 13 Pub in Black Hills, S.D. So good, it kept him coming back.

industry where I don’t get paid a premium for small ribeyes, but yet the chef said he was paying more to get this product,” Hoppe says. Evaluating the Consumer Eating Experience The beef eating experience is an area of intense interest among researchers at universities. One of them, Travis O’Quinn, Ph.D., Kansas State University, is exploring con sumer trends related to overall beef palatability. Overall beef palatability can be attributed to three primary traits – tenderness, juiciness and flavor. O’Quinn’s recent study looked at how each characteristic contributes to the overall beef eating experience and evaluated the risk of total palatability failure due to the unacceptable level of one or more of these traits. Data from 11 previously conducted studies representing a wide range of treatments and levels of eating qual ity, including more than 1,500 beef samples and 1,800 consumers, were compiled and analyzed for this study. Consumers were then given a beef sample to evaluate as acceptable or Continued on page 19 

“It was a Saturday night, and we or dered the prime rib, and it was one of the best eating experiences I’ve ever had,” Hoppe says. “A month later, we stopped by the same restaurant, and I requested to speak to the chef.” Hoppe waited patiently. “You could just see the awful look on the waiter’s face as if I was about to complain or something,” Hoppe recalls. “I soon explained to the head chef that I was a cattle producer and just wanted to let him know how good the steak was that I had the last time I was there.” The chef began to open up to Hoppe, discussing his nightly food preparation process for consumers. “I wanted to know how he was able to cut his steaks so thick,” Hoppe says. Considering the average thickness for a steakhouse steak is around one inch, the inch-and-a-half thick steak made for a very unusual steakhouse eating experience. “When I buy loins, I request them to be under 15 pounds so I can cut them thicker,” the chef responded. Consequently, the chef is forced to pay a premium to get these types of ribeyes. “It’s interesting because there seems to be a disconnect in our

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