Meat in the Freezer

After the three weeks hanging time, Guv'nor got a call from the processor that our meat was ready to be picked up. The meat is frozen, so he brought it home in the back of the pickup. It was a cool day, so it was fine.

It was a lot of meat.

We had bought a freezer about a year ago when we had first started thinking about dealing with the bulls, but somehow it got filled with other things. My fault.

This reminded me of an old saying, so I looked it up. It's a variation of Parkinson's Law:

"work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion"

So we had to buy a second freezer for the meat.

Good thing, too. Because we completely filled one freezer and had to put about 30 pounds in the other freezer.

We organized the meat by cuts and tried to stack it as best we could.

The meat is wrapped in plastic wrap and then paper wrapped. And labeled with the cut, but not the weight.

A few days later, we used the kitchen scales and weighed each cut and wrote it on the outside of the package. I also wrote it all down on paper, and later transferred it to a spreadsheet. If you know Guv'nor you'll know why this is a good thing. He loves spreadsheets.

According to my calculations, the total weight of the meat was 390 pounds, a little less than we had hoped. We had been told we might expect to get half the weight of the animal. The bull had weighed 1200 pounds, so the non-consumable materials lost in processing was about 800 pounds (so 2/3 not 1/2). Overall the costs of processing were $780 which includes processing, hanging, cutting, and wrapping costs. 

So far we've made burgers with the ground beef, stroganoff with the round steak, casserole stew with the cube steak, fajitas with the flank steak, and grilled ribeye steaks. The meat has been tasty but does  require chewing. Not like the pink slime you might get at a fast food place. Grass-fed beef takes a little more care and preparation when cooking. It's real meat. The rule of thumb is "low and slow" - lower temperature and slower cooking.

Having the different cuts of beef to cook is definitely going to expand my cooking abilities.