Mark was in charge, of course. Our neighbor's 16 year old son J., Mark's aunt, and memyselfandI were his humble minions.
Mark does the cuts, J. helped with boning, Aunt scraped, trimmed, and usually plastic wrapped, & I mainly did freezer paper.
The big cuts are done either with a hand meat saw or the band saw. The steaks and roasts are also cut with the band saw.
Whatever's not cut into steaks and roasts, etc. is boned out and made into ground meat. It's run through the grinder twice.It took us about 6 hours to do one beef. I believe that was approximately 600+ lbs of hanging meat.
See that scale he's using? I have to check my facts with him, but as I recall, his great-grandfather, the blacksmith, made this scale. I'll correct that if I'm wrong.It's a pretty non-stop process, so I didn't get as many photos as I wanted. And Mark was too busy to get any photos of my fantastic paper wrapping. The goal with the freezer paper wrapping is to make it as neat and tight as possible with only a minimal amount of tape required to keep it together. It's like origami with meat inside.
So that's one down, one to go.
4 comments:
I love the meat, but the butchering is too-much-like-hard-work.
Still - I bet it was satisfying work.
There use to be a local place where we bought a side of fresh beef each year-but it closed down. Oh how I miss that good fresh meat-you are lucky!
Try the word "harvested" It's what I like to use. Farmers harvest corn and we harvest beef. Good job! I wish we had those facilities at our house!
"Origami with meat inside"--I bet there's a market for that. Tasty!
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