Excerpted from “Home Again On the Kitchen Range” by Marian Burros
Nick Ottomanelli has been watching buffalo muscle in on prime beef at the three Ottomanelli Brothers butcher shops in Manhattan and Queens his family owns. Prime beef sales have gone down 8 to 10 percent. Mr. Ottomanelli said. Bison took off, and sales have increased 15 percent over the past year. The change is especially striking because a buffalo rib-eye steak sells for $18.95 a pound at his shops, while the prime rib-eye is $16.95.
I cooked four rib-eyes, two of them grass-fed, two grain-finished. Ottomanelli Brothers’ grass-fed was the best: more than an inch thick, tender, full of beefy flavor.