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.

If We Make It Through December

Around 1976 we moved from a house in town to a house that sat on 5 acres in the middle of some piney woods.  It was quite a change for us.  We had room to roam, build forts in the woods, ride a mini bike on trails we made, dig sassafras roots and make homemade 'root beer,' hunt and fish.  It was a neat childhood.

In town we walked to school as we lived right across the street from it.  However, when we moved to the country, we rode the bus to school.  We'd wait at the bus stop in front of the house.  Mrs. Pitre was our school bus driver.  She had an 8-track tape player on her bus, and she introduced us to classic country music - Ronnie Milsap, Conway Twitty, Merle Haggard, Charlie Pride and the list goes on and on.

I remember a Merle Haggard song we learned on Mrs. Pitre's bus, "If we make it through December."  Merle sang, "If we make it through December, everything's gonna be alright, I know."  Good memories.  Windows down in the bus, with a breeze blowing through your hair as you were heading home in the afternoon.  Merle Haggard blaring as we sang along.  Getting dropped off and hearing Merle's voice trailing off as the bus drove out of sight, "If we make it through December we'll be fine." 

Speaking of December, even though tomorrow it will be July...  Above is Aussie.  He is Rosie's bull calf.  His Daddy was a registered Jersey bull from Australia.  We also have Clarabull.  He is Clarabelle's bull.  Get it?  Well, beef prices are very high in grocery stores due to processing issues caused by Coronavirus.  I had a gentleman that stopped in our driveway this weekend wanting to buy one of our bulls.  I had to tell him they are not for sale.

Because... I asked Tricia to call and make an appointment for them at the slaughterhouse.  I was surprised to learn that the soonest we could get them in is December 23rd!  All the slaughterhouses are that backed up.  I assume with high beef prices, everyone is taking their own animals to the butcher shop.  Our freezer will be just about empty of beef by that time.  I know it is a long way away, but like Merle sang, "If we make it through December, we'll be fine...."

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.

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!

Yellow Fat from Grass Fed Beef

We have been enjoying the beef from the steer we butchered back in April.  There really is a difference in the taste of grass fed versus store-bought meat.  We should have done this a long time ago.  The only thing about having a freezer full of beef that gives me pause is the fact that we don't have a generator to back up our deep freeze and with Tropical Storm Danny brewing way out in the Eastern Atlantic, it makes me a little nervous, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

We really like the beef short ribs.  Tricia will bring them to room temperature and add some kosher salt and pepper to them.  

She puts them in a cast iron dutch oven and sears them.

The picture below highlights the topic of this post.  Notice that the fat is yellow.

Why is fat from Grass Fed Beef yellow and why is the fat from store-bought (feed lot) beef a pearly-white color?  Good Question.

I learned the answer from reading THIS ARTICLE and it was what I suspected, but before we get to what causes the coloration, the article said this:

Fat can be a wonderful thing.

Fats can be the most nutrient rich part of your diet, or they can cause numerous diseases – depending on which fat we’re talking about.  What an animal eats will change the kind of fat in its tissues.  If an animal eats a suboptimal diet including grains and legumes, its fat loses much of its nutrient quality in surprisingly little time.  

That sounds like crazy talk, doesn't it?  We've been accustomed to hearing that fat is bad for you.  To avoid fat.  Fat is unhealthy.  But the above study runs counter to that.  Hmmm...  Also, verses in the Bible seem to confirm that fat is a good thing. Take this one, for example:

Then Pharaoh said to Joseph, “Say to your brothers, ‘Do this: load your beasts and go to the land of Canaan, and take your father and your households and come to me, and I will give you the best of the land of Egypt and you will eat the fat of the land.’ - Genesis 45: 17-18

The Pharaoh liked Joseph.  He wasn't telling him that his family was going to get the scraps.  The fat of the land is a Good Thing.  Fat, if the animal ate a good, grass-fed diet, is a good, healthy, nutritious part of your diet.  I can remember being a young boy and we'd slice all the fat off of the meat.  My great-grandmother would sit at the end of the table and say, "You're not going to eat that? Pass that down here."

My great-grandmother was onto something!  The article mentioned above states that their study showed that grass-fed beef contains more Omega-3s and Conjugated Linoleic Acid (CLA) than grain fed meat.  There is also Omega-6, Cholesterol, and Transvaccenic Acid (TVA) as types of fat. Interestingly:

Trans-vaccenic acid is metabolized into conjugated linoleic acid, and performs similar functions.  It can speed fat loss, fight cancer, and improve brain function. It is technically a naturally occurring “trans-fat” but it does not cause the same the negative health problems that margarine or hydrogenated fats do.

Wow!  Fat from grass fed beef is good for you.  So finally, the answer to my question: Why is the fat from Grass Fed Beef Yellow?:

The grass-fed meat had higher levels of carotenoids, making the fat appear yellow.  Generally, the more carotenoids in a substance, the more nutrients it contains.  Yellow fat (like grass-fed butter) is a sign of high nutrient density.  One of the things you’ll notice when cooking grass-fed meat is the yellowish color of the fat.

More carotenoids = more antioxidants+nutrients (and more flavor too).

Generally, colors in food mean that it is healthier for you.  Speaking of colors, I liked the colors (and flavor) of the beef short ribs.  Here's a picture taken before Tricia stirred it all up:

Healthy AND Colorful!

To sum up the article (read it if you get a chance), their study said: 

When it comes to meat, grass-fed and grain-fed don’t even compare. Go grass-fed, every time.

We're sold on it.  Grass-fed Beef.  It's whats for supper.