Filling the Deep Freeze With Meat

In our post ON DECEMBER 20, 2020 we talked about bring our two bulls to be processed at Elliot's Slaughterhouse in Morse, Louisiana.  After being slaughtered the meat is dry-aged and then cut/processed according to the instructions we shared in the post from December.  They package, label, and freeze the meat and then call us to go pick it up.  My wifey made the short drive in the pickup truck and brought it home.

She actually made a couple of trips, first filling the deep freeze at our house and then filling the one at Russ' house.  Here are photos of the meat picked up and brought to our house prior to fitting it into our freezers.  The bags are huge!  It doesn't look like much meat, but it is.  Here is the ground meat, steaks, roasts, ribs, etc.:

Here is a big bag of bones:

Here is a big bag of fat.  (More on this bag tomorrow)

So, it is a shame that we don't have a scale to weigh the animals prior to slaughter.  That would really tell the story.  But what we have is interesting nonetheless.  

Clarabull, we estimate, weighed 725 pounds.  He yielded 284 pounds hanging weight after shrinkage from dry aging.  Processing cost $0.49 per pound.  The charge for butchering him was $75 and debris (liver, heart, tongue, ox tail) was $12.

Aussie, we estimate, weighed 775 pounds. He yielded 310 pounds hanging weight after shrinkage from dry aging. Processing cost $0.49 per pound.  The charge from butchering him was $75 and the debris (liver, heart, tongue, ox tail) was $12.

Total cost + tax was $486.35.  Taking the cost of processing divided by pounds of retail cuts of meat gives us an average cost of $1.14 per pound.

For comparative purposes, the cost of butchering back in 2017 was $25 and $0.43 per pound of hanging weight.  The cost of butchering this year (2020) was $75 and $0.49 per pound.

Now that we have almost 600 pounds of beef in the freezer from our bulls and 47 Cornish Cross Meat Birds in the freezer, we are seriously considering investing in a generator.  It would be a tragedy to have a power outage and lose that meat!  We have an addendum to this post tomorrow.  Stay tuned!