Butcher Box October 2016 Subscription Box Review + Coupon

Butcher Box is a subscription box service that delivers premium quality meat for $129 per month. Each box comes with a selection of meat (about 15-20 meals worth) that has been carefully cut and prepared. The Butcher Box brings back that unique experience you get when you visit your local butcher shop. Their specialty is 100% grass-fed beef, but they also provided mixed subscription options that include heritage pork and organic chicken, too! You can also have the box delivered every two or three months depending on your needs.

The outer packaging is Earth-friendly.

The meat is vacuum sealed in plastic, packed in an insulated bag, and then kept frozen within the outer soft-side cooler padding and box with a large dry ice pack. I liked that they packed the dry ice bag with the warning label facing upward – I’ve had a bad experience in the past that resulted from another vendor’s failure to do so.

This month’s box came with a custom, reusable cooler bag!

I like that the cuts are labeled individually.

A short welcome note.  This month and next they are featuring some specially-sourced pork in their mixed boxes — we chose the all-beef box this month.

There are also recipe cards included for the Bavette Steak and Beef Brisket cuts.

The back of the recipe card gives you more information about the cut and instructions for thawing and prepping the meat.

All the delicious bundles of meat included in this month’s Butcher Box!

Beef Brisket: A huge two and a half pound brisket! Lean, with a thin shell of fat along one side. Grass fed, this looks like a 100% edible cut with no waste post-cooking.

I dry-brined our brisket with a salt-based rub overnight. Then, I browned it quickly in a dutch oven and braised it (still in a covered dutch oven) in the oven at 250 degrees for four hours, partially submersed in a mixture of onions, garlic, beef broth, old Spanish red wine, a squirt of cayenne honey, and some leftover blueberry juice cocktail.

I loved the texture of the meat – any chewiness had completely melted away, and it was just solid enough to slice without it disintegrating. The brine left it a little salty, but every bit was tender and edible (it was lean enough that there was no waste, just a thin layer of fat). Our kids went nuts over this one and begged for more.

Beef Tri-Tip Roast: Two thick tri-tips. Each twelve-ounce steak will easily feed two people. I marinated these briefly in olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and Ken Rathburn Elements Steak & Chop Garlic Salt from the July 2016 CrateChef, then I seared and oven baked them in my awesome cast iron pan from my August 2016 Bespoke Post.

We served it along with our pasta carbonara from Plated.

Bavette Steak:  Three steaks.  Also known as a “bib” steak, this cut is perfect for marinating and grilling. This cooked nicely on the grill after marinating in some soy sauce with ginger, garlic, green onion, and apple cider vinegar, plus a drizzle of Mike’s Hot Honey from our June 2016 Bespoke Post!

The grain of the meat made it look like there was a lot of connective tissue, but it was extremely tender.  We served it with our squash chilaquiles from Plated!

Stir Fry Beef: Two bundles of grass fed beef cut for quick frying. Similar in concept to buying stew beef, but the cuts are more like strips than cubes.

Ground Beef Brick: Two one-pound bricks of ground beef. Just guessing by appearance and the amount of flame when grilling, I’d say this is probably an 85/15 blend.

We gave the ground beef a bit of the down-market treatment, serving it with some frozen store brand french fries. The fries were horrendous, but we did spring for the name brand potato rolls, so all was good.  The beef was great – lots of flavor and enough fat to grill nicely and get a tiny bit of char. It was also very moist and tender for grass-fed beef.

I loved the beef – it had the nice flavor I expect from grass-fed, but it was also much more tender and buttery than is common for such lean beef. After a gamey experience with grass-fed beef a few years ago we’ve shied away, but this beef was delicious!  It arrives in a deep freeze, and it is portioned into manageable sized cuts.

This box is of course expensive. Each box comes with 7 – 10 lbs of meat, which is enough for around 20 individual meals (at a 5 – 8oz portion size), which works out to about $6.50 per portion for the meat – and there is no difference in cost between getting all grass-fed beef or mixing your box to include organic chicken and heritage pork. You may see those as “filler” items or as valuable variety.

You can save $10 on your first box plus get free sausage – just use this link to sign up.

Visit Butcher Box to subscribe or find out more!