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!

Got the Bull Loaded and Delivered

A while back I posted about making cheese and explained how rennet is used in the cheese-making process to separate milk into curds and whey.  I talked about how rennet is obtained from the stomachs of unweaned calves when they are butchered. I also mentioned that there are non-animal based sources of rennet for those who are vegetarians.  I was not prepared for an email response to the post from someone VERY unhappy with me.  The writer called me vulgar names for supporting the killing of calves for making cheese and said they were vegan and I was barbaric for eating meat. This was a very angry person.  (Good thing they didn't read my annual chicken-butchering posts!!)  I believe in freedom.  Personally, I eat meat, but if someone chooses to be a vegan, to each his/her own.

The preceding paragraph serves as background for the following disclaimer:  If you are a vegan or are offended by eating meat, read no further.  In this post we'll talk about loading up our 2 year old Jersey bull and bringing him to the slaughterhouse for processing.  Over the previous week, I had fed the bull in the trailer.  He was getting rougher and rougher by the day.  When he would see me coming with the bucket, he would run at a full clip and try to hit me with his head.  I would run into the trailer with him in pursuit, I'd dump the bucket of feed and then I would exit the side door in the front.

Friday night I repeated those steps, but then circled back and slammed the back door shut.  After Friday night, there would be no more crazed animal on the pasture.  I wouldn't have to worry any more when the neighbor kids wanted to go pick up eggs.  No more buckets destroyed or electric fence reels knocked around. No more water troughs being turned over.  This bull was always breaking something with his hard head!

Saturday morning we took him to Elliott's in Morse, Louisiana and had to get him there by noon. After a teal hunt where we killed nothing but mosquitoes and time, we hooked up the trailer to the truck and departed.  It didn't take us long to get there.  The sign is not very impressive, but they do a great job in processing grass fed beef.

An attendant came out of the shop and directed us to back up to the holding pen. We opened the back gate and unloaded him. In some ways you might say that it was sad dropping him off, but this was the same guy that terrorized the barnyard for quite a while.

When I was a young boy and in 4-H, I showed sheep in the livestock shows.  I worked with them daily and named them and they were very tame.  I can still remember their names to this day (Fluff & Snowball, C3P0 and R2D2).  The problem was that these sheep were market lambs.  I didn't really understand this until the day of the auction and I learned that my sheep were being sent to a slaughter house.  It was very hard to deal with as a youngster.

This taught me a valuable lesson - Never name an animal that you are going to eat. We incorporated this with this bull to a certain extent.  We did call him "Chuck" from time to time, realizing that he was intended to be food.  Speaking of food, we went inside and talked to the gentleman behind the counter, explaining how we wanted the animal cut up.  Two years ago we brought a steer here and didn't request enough ground meat.  We remedied that this year, increasing the percentage of ground meat and having it packed in 2 lb packages, while getting roasts, steaks, soup rounds, oxtail, liver, tongue, bones, and fat.

The animal will hang and dry age for a little while and then they'll cut him up and package him and we'll go pick the beef up and transfer to our deep freeze.