Meatcutting Week 14: Hogs, lambs & goats, oh my!

Week 14 (Feb. 7-11, 2011) brought some new "critters" to the cutting table. "Critters" is actually a term thrown around our shop to describe the animals we cut. The new ones this week were a variety of lambs and goats. They are very small and actually very easy to break down compared to a beef, of course. They are basically like mini-beefs. Most of the cuts are exactly the same. Their 30-50 lb. frames were a welcome relief to the 325 lb. beef halves we usually work with. It may sound weird that we are cutting goats, but this meat is getting more popular in the U.S. I would venture to say that more people in the world eat goat as a regular part of their diet than any other animal with the exception of chicken and fish. The meat is pretty lean, but it is usually a little tougher than lamb, etc. Because of this, most cultures have created dishes that involve very slow cooking with lots of liquid and spices. If cooked properly, it becomes a very flavorful protein.

Speaking of tough cuts of meat. I recently got my hands on a beef neck roast. This is a quite unusual roast, but Jeff did not want to use the neck for soup bones, so he took the neck with the surrounding muscle tissue and slow cooked it like a roast. There is a large amount of connective tissue in this surrounding muscle, so it has to cook for quite a while before it becomes gelatin and the meat falls from the bone. The resulting roast is just as good as any pot roast. I really liked it.

We also spent an entire day cutting hogs! This was the first time we were able to make a whole day out of cutting pork. I need this repetition to get the routine memorized. When we have cut them in the past, it was limited to a handful each time. I think I have mastered the basics of breaking the hog down for the saw. Exciting.

Unfortunately, this work did not leave us with a whole week of cutting. We put some finishing touches on the walk-in freezer and called it a week.

Spent the weekend shooting an AK-47, flying a kite, playing disc golf and drinking heavily. My buddy Mink got officially ordained as a minister somewhere in the chaos. I couldn't make this up.