The Freezer Has an Echo

Opening our deep freeze lately tells a story.  In the compartment to the far right which you can't see, it is full of chickens we butchered early this summer.  The chickens will last us until next summer.  However, as you can see below, the two beef compartments are empty.  There is 1 two-pound pack of ground meat - the last of it, two briskets, and not much else.  The deep freeze is so empty it has an echo.

Fortunately, we are blessed to have two bulls in the pasture.  With the Covid-19 craziness, people have been concerned about disruptions to the supply chain and lack of supply of beef.  As a result, many locals are having their animals slaughtered to have provisions on-hand in the event of an emergency.  Months ago, we called to get an appointment to have our two bulls butchered.  We found it was a four month waiting list!!  Anyhow, December 19th was our date.

The first step was separating Rosie and Clarabelle from the two bulls, Aussie and Clarabull.  The two bulls are not halter broken.  Clarabull does not have a halter on at all.  Getting them into trailer was going to involve trickery, deception, slight of hand, and raw will.  

We lured them to the gate with buckets of sweet feed.  They walked to the end of the trailer and stretched their necks out.  The bucket was placed just out of reach.  Coaxing the bull with a taste here and there, we got one foot up, then another and then pushed from behind and pulled from his halter until Aussie was up!

Clarabull required a bit more time and effort.  He fell getting in the trailer, but we were finally successful.

We closed the divider in the trailer to push them all the way to the front.  They finished off the sweet feed that we used as a lure to bait them into the trailer.

My best guess is that each bull weighs about 750 pounds, but I can't tell for sure.  Their weight sure made the truck sit down in the back, with the weight of both bulls on the tongue of the old trailer.  The trailer looks rough, I know.  It is a 1978 model that belonged to my grandfather.  I have been patching up rust holes in it with Bondo and fibreglass patching kits.  I will soon sand, prime and paint it.  I'm thinking about a navy blue color.

We drove through Jennings, Mermentau, Midland and Morse and arrived at Elliott's Slaughter House.  It sits in the country in the middle of pasture lands, rice fields, and crawfish ponds.  We watched a crawfisherman in his boat baiting up his traps.

The building itself is unimpressive.  It is a plain, white cinderblock construction.  Nothing fancy about it.  What we did notice is that on a Saturday morning, IT WAS PACKED with people.  The parking lot was full.  The interior had a line of people buying fresh meat.  You can't get it much fresher than this.

We unloaded the two bulls into the corral.  The attendant filled the water trough.  These guys will be butchered on Monday.  The meat will age for a while in coolers, and then they will grind and cut up the meat.  We will be called when it is all packaged and labeled and we'll go pick it up.

Here is a photo of the Cutting Instructions that they get from us.  I'll explain further below:

First thing is that when you bring an animal, it is ALL YOURS.  You can have everything you want, except the moo.  This sheet shows you what we get:

We want everything cut to 3/4 inch thickness.  For the front: We want the neck and chuck steaks made into ground meat, we want shoulder steaks, seven steaks, rib steaks, short ribs and brisket.

For the back: We want 3-4 lb roasts, T-bone, sirloin steaks, round steaks, shank.  We want them packed 2-3 steaks per package.  We want ground beef in 2 pound packages, the tenderloin whole.  We want the flank/skirt steaks for fajita meat.

For the debris:  We want the liver, but no kidney.  I'm not interested in the "Rocky Mountain Oysters."  We do, however, want the fat for soap-making and the bones for making beef broth.  We opted to not get the hide.  I'm sure that the items we decline, they will have a market for it all.

Upon getting a call in a couple of weeks, we'll journey back to the slaughterhouse and pick up the meat.  It will be all packaged, labeled and frozen.  We'll carry it home and re-fill the freezer.  The deep freeze will no longer echo, but will be full of grass-fed, hormone-free, fresh, natural, non-medicated beef.  The good stuff.

Rendering Tallow

When you bring an animal to the slaughterhouse, the entire animal is yours.  You can ask for anything you want off of him and they will bag it up and send it home with you.  We always ask for the bones and the fat in addition to the meat.  The bones are roasted and boiled to make a nice beef broth.  That can be used as a base for soups.  You can use it in place of water when cooking rice to make your rice taste richer.

The fat is another thing we ask for as we make beef tallow from it.  In THIS POST FROM 2015 we take you through the steps of rendering beef tallow.  You can click on that link for the whole process, but today we'll show you the end result. 

The bull we brought to slaughter this year wasn't skinny, he was just real lean.  All muscle.  Not much fat.  A certain amount of fat is needed when making ground meat and half of him was used for ground meat.  In the end, we just had one small bag of fat for making tallow.  Tricia cooked it down on the stove until most of it liquefied and then poured it into a pyrex baking dish.  It was transparent at that point.  Then it was put into the refrigerator and it turned into a creamy white color with a tinge of yellow. 

We cut it up into chunks and put into a gallon-sized zip loc bag and then put in the freezer.  As needed, we'll pull out a square of fresh rendered beef tallow.

So what do you use beef tallow for?  Well, use it in place of cooking oil.  Tricia keeps a little ramekin of beef tallow by the stove that she uses.  Lately, we've been using it to make homemade soap.  We've made three batches so far and it has put a dent in our inventory of tallow.  Since Astro the bull was very lean and we were only able to render one pan of tallow, we'll have to contact a friend who brings calves to slaughter and see if he'll give us a big bag of fat.  Until then, we'll ration this tallow and/or slow down on the soap-making.

Picking Up the Meat

Several weeks ago we brought one of our bulls to the slaughterhouse in a neighboring town.  They butchered the bull and then dry-aged him for two weeks before cutting him up.  We don't have a scale, so we don't know his "on the hoof" weight, but we have a pretty good idea based on the receipt.  The receipt below shows a 284 pound hanging weight.  The difference between live weight and hanging weight is the blood, hide, hoofs, internal organs, lungs and heart.  A good rule of thumb is that the hanging weight is 40% of the live weight.  So this tells us that the live weight must have been in the neighborhood of 710 pounds.

You'll see there is a $0.45 per pound charge, plus a $50 butcher feel, plus a $12 fee to process the debris.  $189.80 plus taxes of $16.50, results in a total charge of $206.51.  That's a lot of money, but then again, it's a lot of meat.

After the bull was butchered, they packaged it and asked us to wait a couple days for it to get frozen solid.  Tricia arrived and there were about six wire baskets of meat ready for her.

The meat was all in a big walk in freezer along with everyone else's meat.  It was labeled and organized.

The ground meat, steaks, briskets, ribs, roasts, liver, tongue, fat, bones, and debris were individually wrapped and also put in big heavy-duty plastic bags.  They filled the trunk of the car.

The meat was moved inside by loading into a big ice chest.  Tricia weighed the individual cuts to determine how much of each we got.

Then it was all loaded into the deep freeze.  We're still in hurricane season, so we always worry a little bit about losing power, but if the worst case scenario happens and we lost power, we'd figure out a way to save it.

In separating out the different cuts and weighing everything, we got 249 pounds total for $206.31.  That's about $0.83 per pound.

This will keep our family stocked with meat for the foreseeable future.  We do have two additional bulls growing out in the pasture as well once this is gone.  While we'd rather have heifers, bulls provide much needed meat.  We enjoy the tenderness and flavor of our grass-fed bulls that have never been off the property and are free of antibiotics and medicines.

Using Everything Except the "Moo"

A couple of years ago when we butchered a steer, we asked the people at the slaughterhouse to save us all the fat.  We believe in using as much of the animal as possible.  We use everything except the "moo."  The steer was fat and we actually had too much fat!  Last year when we brought our Jersey bull calf to the slaughterhouse, we asked them to save the fat again.  Chuck, the Jersey bull, was a leaner animal.  A lot of his fat went into the ground beef, but we still were able to get some and freeze it in big bags.

This week Tricia thawed it out and began processing it.  She placed the fat in big pots on the stove and began heating it up, letting it cook for most of the day.  No, it doesn't look too nice.

Much of the fat liquefies into oil.  The remainder reminds me of cracklins.  This job is probably best done outside, but the mosquitoes are terrible right now and it is terribly hot.

We try to spoon out most of the remaining fat that wasn't converted to oil and then we pour the oil through a muslin cloth stretched over a colander to filter the rendered fat.

What we are left with is clean cooking oil rendered from beef fat.

While this is still hot, we pour into a Pyrex cooking dish and set aside on the counter and allow to cool.

The remaining 'nastiness' that is made up of fat, gristle, meat, cartilage, bone, etc. is gradually fed to Big Boy.  He seems to like it, despite the fact that it doesn't look appetizing.

As the beef tallow cools, it loses its transparent quality and becomes as white as a bar of Ivory Soap.  The work is almost done.  We now cut up the beef tallow into squares.

Using spatulas, we scoop the tallow out and place into zip loc bags where they will be frozen in the deep freeze.

As we need cooking oil, we'll pull a square or two out of the freezer and heat in a cast iron skillet.  With heat added, the beef tallow becomes cooking oil again and can be used the same as any other cooking oil that you might use.

Using beef tallow reminds me of what many people grew up watching their moms and grandmothers do.  I can remember bacon grease being poured in a coffee cup or can to be used as cooking oil later on.  It would turn snow white and then a spoonful could be scooped out and put in a skillet to add wonderful flavor to whatever dish happened to be on the menu.  Fat doesn't have to be a waste product that is thrown away. 

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!