Filling the Deep Freeze

Tricia made a soup with the soup rounds that were at the very bottom of our deep freeze and that was the end of the steer that we had butchered two years ago.  There was an echo in the bottom of the freezer, but things were about to change.  After dropping off our bull at Elliott's Slaughterhouse, he hung and dry-aged and then was processed according to our instructions.  Tricia called today and the beef was ready for us to pick up.  She and Russ made the 14 mile drive to Morse, Louisiana to pick up the beef.  She backed up to their freezer while they assembled our order.

The beef was packaged and was frozen and ready for transport home.

Tricia had our large ice chest in the back seat, a big blue molasses tub in the front seat...

and a tarp laid out in the trunk.  The car was quickly filled with meat.  She was thinking that she might have to make a second trip, but one trip sufficed.

She and Russ quickly brought all the meat inside and began stacking it in the deep freeze.

A couple of years ago, I made some dividers with plywood to segregate and better organize the freezer.  On the right hand side is the hamburger meat.  With the steer from two years ago, we learned that we didn't order enough hamburger and we ran out quickly.  This year we ordered 68 two-pound packages.  There is also the liver and debris separately packed in the hamburger compartment.

The photo below is before we got it all loaded, but the central compartment contains brisket, roasts, fat (that we will render tallow with) and bones (that we will roast and make beef stock with).  The bones and fat weighed 45 pounds, 36 lbs. of it bones and 9 lbs. fat.  The left compartment contains T-bones, ribeyes, soup rounds, and other assorted steaks.  Once it was loaded, the freezer was completely full.

The butchered bull weighed 358 pounds (hanging weight).  It costs $0.43 per pound to process, plus $25 to butcher and $12 for the debris.  That totaled $190.94 + $17.67 sales tax, bringing it to a grand total of $208.61 for a large deep freezer full of meat.  We enjoyed some of the delicious hamburger meat tonight.  I may be biased, but fresh grass-fed meat has great flavor that is hard to beat!