[quote=“Telemark, post:28, topic:853803”]
This is a pretty cool video showing what you get from a side of beef and how it’s all cut.
[/QUOTE] Thanks, that's a really nice video. He makes it all look so easy!A friend of mine coordinates half a cow every year, to be split with a few friends. Last weekend, she and her dad drove 3 hours to Wisconsin to pick it up at a small local processor. The price isn’t much more than what supermarket ground beef costs, but it’s from a small family farm, and we get some steaks and roasts in there too. The processor is currently booked through the end of the year! Glad we bought the separate standing freezer when we bought the house 3 years ago.
Another friend’s family in Pittsburgh found a small Amish slaughterhouse that does the same for any hoofed animal.
If The Plague leads to more people supporting a more humane, sustainable, and local food chain, I guess at least it’s a bit of a silver lining?
From the title, was I the only one who thought this was a masturbation thread?
Well, I certainly didn’t think that.
Back on topic - I wonder if one of the silver linings to this pandemic will be people eating less meat than before, which would likely have some positive health effects. This could be due to both supply issues, and increased costs.
Certainly, because over the past couple years I’ve been reducing my meat intake while increasing fruits, vegetables, and grains the current issues with obtaining meat products have been much less stressful for me than some other people I’ve seen.
A friend of mine’s family buys half a cow every year from a relative who owns a farm. The meat from it gets its own freezer. When I moved up by them my friend’s mother gave me a housewarming gift of a couple pounds of ground beef and a few steaks. Most delicious housewarming gift ever.
Yeah, I like meat, and I’m worried about sustaining my meat-eating habits. I had previously mostly shifted to higher-cost meat that was locally reared and slaughtered in smaller facilities, so perhaps my meat sources will be less impacted (except by higher demand, of course.)
On the other hand, a lot of the things that other people are struggling with (haircuts, pedicures) are things I’ve long been in the habit of dealing with on my own, and I’m even reasonably comfortable wearing face masks. So I suppose we all have different trials.
Maybe? I assumed it was about food when I clicked the link.
You’re looking for the “Waking up in the middle of the night and ruminating” thread.
Don’t you run the risk of getting stuck with a lot of not so great meat? If I buy a steak at the grocery store and it turns outto be not great when I eat it, I chalk it up to bad luck getting a steak from a not so tasty steer. Tomorrow’s steak probably will be better. But if I have hundreds of pounds more in my freezer…
What, like the entire animal tastes bad? Doubt it.
If I cook a steak and it tastes not so good, I assume that I seasoned/cooked it wrong, or let it sit too long in the fridge. Possibly that it wasn’t refrigerated properly before getting to me.
Some farms have some way for you to get a sample before buying an entire quarter or half.
In any case, if you buy consistently from the same place, they’re probably using the same breed and the same feed so the flavor should be quite similar.
If you’ve no experience with the place, you can ask about breed and about feeding practices and about the age of the animal in question. But the chances are pretty good that you’ll be getting better meat, not worse, than you would from a standard grocery.
If you’re getting some species less commonly eaten in your area, make sure that the slaughterhouse/butcher has experience with the species. I once got some seriously screwed up lamb from a place that had probably never handled lamb before. They hung it too long for lamb and cut it really oddly; it was edible, but not very good.
I once had a steak from a place that raised a small number of “pet” cows on pasture. (It’s a tourist farm, and they like having animals for the children to pet and stuff. But they process the excess animals as meat every year.) It tasted really odd, and I didn’t care for it. It wasn’t spoiled or anything. I believe the meat was properly processed. It just tasted… odd. I assumed the cow ate something strongly flavored late in its life, and I was tasting the residual of some plant I don’t like the flavor of.
Bumping this since I found a somewhat similar video about butchering a pig. The first 7 minutes are unrelated to butchering but pretty good nevertheless. The link below should start at the right time:
Big Jim really knows how to handle a hog, he tosses a 180 pounder up on his shoulder like nothing.