One of the advantages of running a cattle ranch is knowing exactly where your beef has been from start to finish. We know what we fed them, we know how we treated them, and we know how they ended up on our plate.
This weekend the family got together to cut up a heifer that we had killed 3 weeks earlier. The meat had aged for three weeks while hanging in the cooler over by my place. We used to do this everytime we had a heifer or steer ready (or fat enough) to butcher. We allow the animal to gain weight until we think it is a optimal weight to provide good quality meat for the family. This time, because of the drought, the heifer was finished out at a feedlot my cousin helps run. The majority of the time we now have a locker plant process the beef but when my dad started calling locker plants in the area, they were all booked until basically after Christmas.
So, we rounded up our help, and had a workday on Saturday. I'll show you a little of the process I have come to appreciate so much. It's a bit more fun if you have more help, but it was a good time.
First thing we do is take the quarters of beef out of the cooler and we cut them up using the big saw. Some cuts of meat are ready right after we have cut them with the saw. Others need just a bit more work to get them to the right cut and size of meat.
We trim some fat off, but not all of it. A lot depends on which cut of meat it is. Some cuts you want to leave a bit more fat because of how you cook them. Usually you don't want to take all of the fat off because that is where a large part of the flavor comes from as you cook it.
Our dogs and cats appreciate it when we cut up meat. The scraps become food for them for quite a while. We try not to waste anything. One year we actually packaged up a lot of the scraps so we could freeze them and feed them to the dogs and cats later.
Some of the pieces of meat that might not be as tender or have a specific use are turned into chunks of meat for hamburger. Once we have cut the meat up into relatively small chunks, we feed them through the hamburger grinder. I missed this first part of the process so I didn't get pictures. As a kid, one of the jobs we were entrusted with was to run the hamburger grinder. We would push the chunks down in the grinder and watch as the hamburger came out in long strands and landed in the clean 5 gallon buckets. Then we would put those buckets back in the cooler until we had a chance to package it as bulk hamburger and also make it into patties.
Now we have pretty cool little attachments for the grinder so we can actually feed the burger straight into one lb. bags. This next contraption is the newest. This is how we now make our patties...and it is WAY faster.
It attaches right onto the front of the grinder. As someone slowly feeds the meat into it, another person mans the patty maker.
As it fills up, the person needs to be ready with a piece of wax paper and once it fills up they slide it over to start filling the next section. This empties the full patty onto the waiting wax paper.
This one is falling apart a little bit, but THAT is what I call one heck of a hamburger patty.
I quickly learned this time that I am not very good at wrapping the meat. I was bogged down from the beginning and just don't have the technique down...and of course I was complaining about it. My mom showed up, after spending most of the morning preparing food for us, and very quietly sat down and DID WORK. This woman is highly impressive. It didn't matter what shape of steak she was given, she managed to elegantly wrap the packages. I, on the other hand, fought with the paper, fought with the tape dispenser, fought with...well, pretty much anything that I was supposed to be working with. She bailed me out before lunch and then after serving us lunch, cleaning up all of the leftovers and dishes, she came back out to help me out again. THIS WOMAN IS AMAZING!
(Sorry some of these pictures are weirdly placed. Sometimes I don't know why the blog format does what it does.)
After the meat was packaged, it moved on to our youngest member of the work force. He did a great job labeling our packages of meat prior to them being placed in the freezer....but sometimes, he had a bit too much free time on his hands ;-)
We have had a tape machine for probably 40 years or more and it simply was not working. Despite the efforts of our young helper, we never really got it to work again. So we used a damp sponge to get the paper tape wet. Then it was used to hold the packages shut.
After a long day, there is just nothing quite like looking in the freezer and seeing a rib-eye steak that is bigger than your hand (yes, that is my hand, and that package is a rib-eye.) Despite a long day, knowing we completed the process all on our own brings a big sense of satisfaction...and a lot of tasty beef ;-)
