Our Own Grass Fed Beef - Organ Meats (Part 1)

We have cattle at our farm that roam around on a number of acres eating grass. They are given no hormones or antibiotics.  The only medicine that they get is Ivermectin once per year.  Ivermectin is an anti-parasitic used to combat worms. "Wormy" cattle don't gain weight and are sickly.  For the longest time, we've had a cattle round-up each year and culled older cows, cows that have a bad habit of getting out of the fence, and bull calves from the herd.  We bring them to the Livestock Auction and split the proceeds.

We've never brought any of these animals to the slaughterhouse and consumed the grass fed beef ourselves.  We have always gone to the grocery store and purchased our beef.  Because of rising beef prices, to be honest, we eat mainly our home-grown chickens.  We wanted to change that this year. We had a round-up and sent some to the auction, but we kept one nice steer for ourselves.

After a couple of attempts, my Dad got this big steer into the trailer and we accompanied him to deliver the steer to Elliott's Slaughterhouse & Meat Market in Morse, Louisiana.  Rural Louisiana used to boast a slaughterhouse in almost every town.  Now that's not the case and they are few and far between.  The staff at Elliott's are knowledgeable and patient and helped us go through the 'Cut Sheet' to determine the different types of cuts, thickness, length of aging, etc.  It was a learning experience.

Grass Fed Angus Steer

We opted for a two week dry aging process.  Dry aging causes the moisture to evaporate from the meat, resulting in shrinkage, but it also causes enzymes in the meat to begin breaking down the connective tissue of the meat, resulting in tender meat.  One thing that we learned that might seem too basic to mention is that the entire animal is yours.  Anything you leave with the butcher is essentially money you are leaving on the table.  As a result, we asked for, not all, but most of the organ meats, fat and bones.  We'll eat the the majority of organ meats, use the fat for making soap and make beef stock with the bones.  Some of it will be fed to the dogs.

The organs won't last during the two week aging process, so Tricia was called to go pick them up once the animal was slaughtered.  She came back with an ice chest containing a big bag of  the offal all iced down.

Offal

As we opened the bag, we realized that the evening was going to be a long one.  All of the offal must be washed, some of it must be cut up or sliced and then bagged.

A Grab Bag of mystery meat

The first item out of the bag was the tongue.  Beef tongue is a delicacy that we've not eaten, but we're going to shortly as it is very common in Tricia's heritage (Mexican) as well as mine (Cajun).  We're using the 'nose to tail' technique of using almost every part of the animal except the 'Moo!' and the tongue starts at the nose.  Later we'll chronicle cleaning and cooking the tongue.

Beef Tongue

Here is the heart of the steer.  It was huge.  Frequently, people grind up the heart with the ground beef.  Since we couldn't do this, we sliced the lean heart muscle into into steaks to freeze.  It was a very interesting biology lesson seeing the ventricles, atrium, and valves.

Beef Heart

The biggest surprise of all was how extremely large the liver was.  I cut away some of the hard fat, and prepared to cut it up for freezing into individual meal-sized portions.  We had a 'dog food' stack of trimmings and a 'fat for soap' stack of trimmings.

Beef Liver

I sliced the liver into thin serving-sized portions.  I really like chicken livers; however, in the past, I've had to force myself to eat calf liver and didn't really enjoy the taste.  Maybe we'll try some new recipes.  All the organ meats are supposed to be really good for you.

What am I?  Chopped Liver?

Here is the remaining contents of the offal bag.  Starting at the 12 o'clock position and the middle of the photo below, we have the beef kidneys.  Just to the right of that are the sweetbreads.  From the 1 o'clock position all the way to the 6 o'clock position is the tail.  Remember the tongue to tail comment?  We'll use this to make ox tail stew.  Finally the long organ stretching from the 8 o'clock position back up to the 12 o'clock position is called beef melt.  It is actually the pancreas of the steer. We sliced this up and will use it for crab bait when we go crabbing this summer.

Remaining Offal

By the time we were finished, we truly had a mess on the island, sink and floor.  It required some serious clean-up.

Finally made it to the bottom of the bag!

We labeled all of the bags and froze them for use later.  In a couple of weeks, the dry aging of our beef will be complete and we'll go pick up the cut and packaged ground meat, steaks, and roasts. We'll share Part II of this post with you at that time.  We can't wait to try it.  Grass fed beef is supposed to be much leaner than corn-fed/finished, so there are supposedly different cooking techniques that you use when cooking it that we will have to learn.