When you have a whole side of beef that you need help cutting up, you really find out who your friends are. Some people tell you, “Dude, this is what I live for! I’m like totally there!” yet at the appointed time and place they are in fact nowhere to be found, and their cell phone has been conveniently turned off. It’s like my neighbor and good friend tells me every time he gives me a hand with one of my crazy projects: “Anytime you need a hand, just be sure and forget my phone number!” So, many thanks to the kind and adventurous souls who came through last night to lend their expertise, their workspace, their muscle, and, in the end, their hungry maws to this project.

Bob said it was the first time he had butchered beef in about 20 years, but he got right to work and broke the carcass down in what seemed like no time. Working with a whole side, and cutting it down with just a hand saw and knives reminded him of the old days, when he started out meatcutting. By the time he retired, he said, it was all “box beef”: beef already broken down to the primal cuts at the slaughterhouse, boxed up, and delivered for final cutting on the store’s power saws.

The whole experience reminded me of what I used to witness, when we would go to England for the summer to visit my grandfather, who was the butcher for his small village in the Cotswolds. When the delivery truck came, I remember men hefting hundreds of pounds of meat onto their shoulders, hauling the carcasses into the butcher shop (which was a converted 16-century stone spring house), and hanging it up in the cooler. When someone came in for a cut, they would get out the appropriate piece of meat, lay it on a massive butcher block, and cut it to order. It was a small revelation that a pork chop was called that because they literally chopped them off the loin with a cleaver. But I was too young then to ever be allowed behind the counter. My summer job was clearing all stinging nettles from the apple orchard. Ugh.

After last night’s hands-on tutorial, I know my way around a beef carcass a lot more, know my top round from my bottom round, know where the sirloin tip comes from, know where the porterhouse steaks start and the t-bones end, know my brisket and plate, and know where the seven-bone chuck roast gets cut from. Add to this that I actually knew the Dexter bull from which the meat came (he’d usually be romping in the next pen when I went out to the farm to shovel manure for my compost pile), and that’s a lot of familiarity, a lot more up close and personal than most Americans want to get to their meat.

Every now and then, I remember that most people find it strange that I would be willing, let alone interested, in doing stuff like this. But most of the time I think it’s weird that other people don’t want to know more about the meat they’re eating. To me, it just seems like basic knowledge, basic skills, that everyone should cultivate. Because if you don’t know anything about animal breeds, how they should be raised, how they should be processed, then you have no choice but to buy whatever the big meat packers and supermarkets want to sell you. That’s one of the reasons why I still find Italian food culture so congenial. There, it’s still expected that people would know, care, and debate about issues like this, expected that you have relatives who are still butchering their own animals on the farm, expected that you have a grandfather who still cures hams and salamis for the family.

So what are the plans for all this beef? Here you see Bob trimming the tenderloin off the whole loin. Chuck Stites, over at the UI Meat Sciences Lab, had advised that this piece would probably dry out too much with the extended aging we had in mind, so we cut this off last night, after a mere three and a half weeks, and delivered it to a chef we know at a nearby restaurant. He was so pleased to have a piece of beef like this in his hands that he put together a special tasting menu for us that built up to this grand finale: medium-rare filet medallions, served on a bed of greens with roasted root vegetables, spiced up, of course, with just a dash of Larbo’s Libacious Steak Sauce. So how was it? I avoid filets from conventional beef because they can be tender to the point of being mushy. Because this was from a frisky, fully functioning bull, the meat retained a fair amount of texture; not tough, but toothsome. If it had a little more marbling, it probably would have had a little more flavor as well as seeming more tender, but in general we were surprised how lean the beef was even though the bull was a full three-years old.

The meat had a nice beefy flavor (just looking at the deep, purplish-red color, you can see how much flavorful, myoglobin-rich muscle there is) but still fairly mild compared to what I hope to obtain by aging the loin and rib cuts for another few weeks (but then the filet is always milder). The plan for these primal cuts is to slather them with lard and then wrap them in cheesecloth (which will keep them from drying out too much and discourage mold from growing) and age them in a refrigerator for another few weeks. It’s just like what I do in the woodshop to prevent green lumber from drying out too quickly at the fresh-cut ends and splitting: I brush the ends with paraffin to prevent moisture loss. Around New Years’ Eve (when they’ll have aged for a total of six weeks), I’ll saw the rib section into rib roasts and the loin into strip steaks. This week, I’ll use the brisket to make a pastrami and the eye of the round to make bresaola (Italian air-dried beef). Some chuck will go into salamis, but it will be months before those are ready to try. All the bones and the trimmings went into the oven, where I roasted the hell out of them. They’re now simmering gently in a six-gallon stockpot, and the whole house is beginning to smell beefalicious.

Tags: beef, butchering

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