Nebraska Star® Beef: Raising, eating and storing beef for 4 generations we’ve learned that CONSISTENCY is EVERYTHING. After our cattle are killed, we hang age the carcass for at least 35 days – the traditional way. Then we break the carcass down into retail cuts. It is then packaged in specialized high barrier material and flash frozen immediately. The beef is very literally “frozen” at its peak of perfection. Beef is then stored in a state of the industry cold storage facility at -10ºF until it is shipped. When shipping beef we use dry ice (-109ºF) to maintain this very low temperature as long as possible. This helps to maintain the product integrity created in the flash freezing process. As long as the time is taken to thaw beef slowly, each and every product from Nebraska Star® Beef will be very consistent from steak to steak or year to year. Delivering frozen beef in special packaging to the customers door allows the customer to keep the beef frozen for months – much, much longer than beef purchased fresh.

Beef from the store: Cattle are killed and quickly broken down into boxed beef. Within days, boxed beef moves quickly into the retail market where it is cut into steaks or ground into burger and placed on the shelf. The amount of aging can vary widely from a few days to a few weeks; the goal being to get it on the shelf quickly so that it has maximum shelf life. If the steak doesn’t sell for some reason or another, it’s ground and blended with other ground beef and other trimmings to create burger or ground beef patties. There is nothing wrong with this system, and it’s perfectly safe, but it makes it tricky to buy consistently aged product, and aging is critical to a premium beef experience.

3. Frozen steaks and burgers are placed into the thermal bag, then dry ice is added and the bag is sealed completely.