Got Beef?

A Denver Chef brought some buffalo burgers down to the desert.  He bar-be-cued some of them for a family dinner and a half dozen have been in my freezer, in neat frozen cylinders, for a few months.  I don't eat much meat, and I don't care whether you do or not.   I finally decided to pry one of the frozen buffalo patties off the frozen stack, defrost it, and cook it up.  I fed some of the burger to the dog.  He liked it.  I cooked the remainder of my burger through and through.  It was in a pan, stove-top.  I flipped it several times to get that well done, no red or pink at all, effect that I like.  It had a pretty good fat content for buffalo, but then I am not familiar with buffalo meat.  Not knowing how much fat might be in that burger, I started the pan with a modest pat of butter to be sure the burger would not stick.  Let's face it:  if you eat meat, why not add butter?  You evidently don't give a sincere damn about cholesterol.

I expected buffalo to be gamy tasting so I sprinkled it with garlic powder and cracked fresh pepper out of a well worn, foot long, wooden mill -- the kind in fancy restaurants.  Ketchup in a large squeeze bottle was available.  I considered hot sauce and decided against it unless the buffalo desperately needed a disguise.  I had not eaten meat in a while.  I put the burger on a plate, piled some ketchup on the side, wished I had a jar of jalapeno peppers to kill what I expected to be an unpleasantly strong wild meaty taste, and sliced myself a small piece of buffalo burger.

The burger was not bad and got better with each bite.  I quickly learned that a generous coating of ketchup complemented the meat.  It was a big chef size burger, and I felt its presence when I was done eating it.  Actually, the dog got the last few bites, sans ketchup.

After a while I sensed the "vibe" of the buffalo, North American colloquial name for the American Bison.  I did not expect this.  I was feeling that large, 11 foot long, 6 foot tall, two thousand pound herbivore presence.  Approximately half a million bison live on 4,000 private ranches in the US.  You have a dog and a cat and Ted Turner has him a herd of buffalo on the lower 40.  The total number in conservation herds is said to be 30,000 (and not 30,001 or 30,002); of those, only 15,000 are wild, free-range bison in North America.  In 2005 about 35,000 bison were processed (i.e., killed) for meat in the U.S.  And for all you kosher cowboys and city slickers there is kosher bison.  Bison is lower in fat and cholesterol than beef, ergo the beefalo, a crossbreed of domestic cattle and bison.  Although hybrids may look like pure bred bison, it is estimated that there may be only 12,000 genetically pure bison in the world. 

Twenty one states have cities named "Buffalo" and some have townships and counties named "Buffalo" too.  The word Buffalo is used in the names of an NHL team, an NFL team, college football team , rugby and soccer teams, Japanese baseball teams, US Navy ships, British Royal Navy Ships, steam locomotives, and a line of wireless routers and interface cards.  Even the old Indian Head nickle is, if you flip tails, a Buffalo nickle.  Money was money in those days.  Now we might coin a beefalo.