First ever beast sent for slaughter . - carcass weight

[John C]

My bull was only hung for about 8 days . When I questioned the butcher about this he pointed out that there was a little bit of extra wastage involved if the beast is hung for a few weeks. By this he meant that the bit on the outside that goes black is generally trimmed off.
When pressed on the matter he advised me to take a joint out of the freezer to defrost and that if I wanted it to be more mature then I should leave it hanging around in the fridge for a few days.
Was this good advice , or do people think that I've been fobbed off ?

[Issy]

Our butcher hangs for 14 days as he says you can start to loose meat after that and the beef we had back was outstanding but we had done everything we could to minimise the stress for them at slaughter. I have never heard of maturing beef once defrosted so don't know wether that would work or not but it sounds a bit suspect to me. ???

[ann]

Ref butchers and possible not getting all your meat back, I took two animals of a very similar size in once, very close together and one came back a lot less than the other, as I was putting them over the weighbridge before I took them in to get an idea of the weights, I queered the big difference and did not get an acceptable answer, however as this is a good butcher who also kills and is very close, I still use him and have never had a problem since. Mind he does charge me by dead weight so that’s probably an incentive to send it all back.

So if you have a weighbridge near to you, pop them over until you get a feel for the live weights, and then insist you get the dead weight from your butcher and if you think you are getting fiddled ask him in a very nice way, why some don't kill out as well as others.

HOWEVER it is a fact and Penny will bear me out on this one that sometimes animals don't always turn out as well as would be expected, and sometimes it works the other way, which does make it a bit difficult to give customers and accurate guide to cost when the book meat. I have just sent a very small Dexter into the butchers and he has come back at 162 kilo's dead weight, which did surprise me in this case.

Ann

[John C]

I hope that my butcher is honest.
First of all I havent got the skills or experience butchery wise to argue my case and secondly, for geographic reasons I havent got a choice as to where I send beasts for slaughter nor for butchery.

[Kathy Millar]

Oh boy, we sure don't want to get into the theiving butcher topic. I think every butcher around here has had that levelled at him at sometime. I think they take one look at my tiny Shetlands and pass them by....

I am finding the terminology of meat cuts here interesting as we don't use some of them in Canada. We have Porterhouse steaks (from the loin), chuck roasts, pot roasts, T bone steaks and probably a few others I can't think of.

Sure wish that butcher would hurry up with my steer, I'm getting hungry :laugh:

By the way, my favorite beef dish is beef stew :D

[AndyHarvey]

This is a useful UK site Kathy - help you to follow the different terminology for cuts.

http://www.beefyandlamby.co.uk/cuts/cuts_beef.html

[Liz D]

Hmm butchers....had a lamb come back with one back leg! a beef with no prime rib! That was 15 yrs ago when we just started sending in animals and it didn't take too long to understand exactly what was supposed to be there in little brown packages! I think that there might be a little 'test' amongst some butchers to see exactly what you do know about the carcass. Lousy thing to say, I know, but once it is established that you do weigh and check the problem seems to stop! As Penny said, every job has its beneifts...but I think I will be the one deciding who has my bit of tenderloin with their tea, thank you! Liz

[Inger]

We've had around 180 kgs of meat returned from each of the three Grade 1 and 2 cows that we've sent in. They were about 6 years old and all long legged. The next one we send in will be a short legged Dexter, so that will be interesting for a comparison. She is about 8 years old and a Grade 1 cow. But she is suffering from arthritis, so as soon as her heifer calf is weaned, we will have to give her permanent pain relief. We don't expect the meat to be all that good, but we can't waste it.

I might ask the butcher how he identifies each carcass that comes in from homekill. Once we have eaten our way through the older cows and start on the prime grade steers, I'd like to be sure we're getting the right meat back.

Oh, and the reason that the butcher might not have wanted to hang the carcass for very long, may have been because of limited fat coverage. The last cow we had done was quite thin (13 yrs old), so there wasn't much fat cover. He would only hang it for 1 week. Normally that butcher hangs the meat for 2 weeks.

We tried another butcher once, he said he couldn't hang the carcass any longer than a week because he didn't have enough room in the chiller to keep all the carcasses that long. We haven't used that butcher again.