Principals

The last two weeks have been packed: light shed on technique, a tour of the kill floor, and still growing familiarity with beef and pork.  Also, the soup was a colossal bust, but not in the way I expected.

My first few days on the processing floor, I was mystified by the effortless movements of the experienced butchers.  I'd stand at a table as sub-primals were passed out for boning and trimming, and a piece would end up in front of me, and I'd stare at it as though it were an alien artifact, turning it over and trying to imagine where to begin.  Things move quickly on the floor, so before long another butcher would pull it away, slice into it following some imaginary dotted line, expose a hidden bone, and have everything neatly separated with a few practiced swipes.  After a couple of these incidents, I started cutting haphazardly into whatever came my way.  I reduced many pounds of meat to ragged scraps, exploring for bones and connective tissue and large seams of fat, but I'm starting to recognize the patterns.  Another watershed discovery was the flexible blade on the boning knife- by bending the flat of the blade against a bone, if the knife is well-honed and the angle is right, you can zip up and down the surface and elegantly separate the meat.  This is a hard principle to explain, but even executing it as clumsily as I do makes an enormous difference in time, effort, and cleanliness of the deboned meat.

Spending those weeks in processing, trying to wrap my head around everything I had to learn, I barely had any time to be curious about how the beef got from ruminating on four legs on a farm somewhere to hanging from a hook, headless, skinless, gutless and footless in the cooler.  I mentioned my ignorance to Robbie, our plant's food safety coordinator, and he let me tag along on his rounds on the kill floor the next day.  He handed me a hardhat and we walked up the loading chute at the back of the building, where two heifers stood behind the gate to the knocking pen.  Ian was working the bolt-gun, and he gently nudged one heifer into the pen with a plastic paddle Robbie called the "babier."  The gate closed behind the animal, and restraining bars folded out to keep the from pulling its head away, though it could still move its head within the bars.  Ian moved deliberately and patiently, lining up the bolt-gun with the heifer's forehead.  The sharp crack of the .22 caliber blank sounded as the bolt shot a few inches into the animal's skull and it collapsed, eyes wide, to the ground.

The side of the pen opened and a chain hoisted the limp body up by the hind legs over a bucket.  Ian reached under its chin and cut an artery to drain the blood, which fell in a wide, consistent sheet.  Soon the flow ebbed and it was lowered again.  Gradually it was skinned, the head, anus, and feet were removed, it was hoisted onto the rail, gutted, examined, and cut in half down the length of its spine.  At a final station, another check, any remaining hair or bruises were removed, an inspection stamp applied, and lactic acid sprayed onto the carcass to preserve it as it rolled into the cooler to age.  The operation was larger in scale than anything in the processing room, and the men working under the watchful eye of the USDA inspector did their jobs quickly and thoroughly.  There was a lot to take in, and I'm still digesting it all.

What I'm not digesting is soup.  My eagerness to avoid procrastinating led me to start my stock making process prematurely, and I didn't realize that roasting bones and boiling water for hours in a small kitchen in August wasn't the most considerate move toward my housemates/landlords.  So the soup plan was aborted, and I'm still working on my next move.  Whatever it is, it'll need to be grillable.

Processing

I mentioned my unfamiliarity with cuts last time.  I'm becoming much more informed about the geometry of animals as it applies to how we eat them, and being able to see the process, from side on down to steak, has been enlightening.  I've spent a lot of the last three days handling, packing, and even cutting.  I can now, with some degree of accuracy, identify things like briskets, skirt steaks, sirloins, and others.  As the beef comes apart, things start to come together.

For the most part, I try to observe the other butchers on the processing floor to get a feel for how things get done.  But they're practiced, efficient old hands, and many of them are too quick for me to glean any technique from watching.

Al, a grumbling but friendly butcher, is patient with his answers when I ask what he's doing, and even put me to work on my second day cutting up trim pieces (after Octavio, another butcher, supplied a metal glove to protect me from my own haphazard knife skills).  But when Al demonstrated how to cut 12 ounce ribeyes from the meat, his first slice was consistently within an ounce of the target, and he was on the mark with another deft cut.  Left to the task, I executed uneven, sometimes ragged cuts and took up to six trims before I could reach an acceptable weight.  You've got to crawl before you can walk, they say.

During lulls, I practice honing the spare knife, working each edge of the blade against the bar at a 30 degree angle.  I feel like I'm only mimicking the actions of the other butchers, but even in my novice hands there is a noticeable difference when I run the sharpened blade through a piece of scrap lamb meat.  I notice the butchers never saw back and forth, instead making swift, single slicing motions in one direction.  I fumble to hang on to the meat I cut away, then watch the others using their meathooks to hold the slippery meat more surely, and keep valuable fingers safely distant from the keen blades.

My understanding grows slowly as I watch these techniques, but I still don't have a frame of reference for the finished product.  I spend a lot of time labeling and packaging cuts into vacuum-sealed bags, and sending them off to customers or up to the retail counter in the store, and the story ends there.  Ribeyes sell easily, and pounds of fresh ground 80% lean beef are in high demand. Christopher, the sales manager and a veteran of several Madison restaurant kitchens, recommends top sirloins as his favorite cut, preferred for their flavor.  Bone-in pork chops, tenderloin fillets, chuck roasts, everything in constant rotation.  I try to think of questions to ask, but the answers are subjective and opinionated-  marbling, how the meat is cooked, the tenderness of one cut measured against the flavor of another.  The variables go on, and I lose focus.

So I have determined that, to better appreciate the disassembly of an animal into cookable, edible pieces of meat, I have to start cooking and eating meat.  If I'm going to be any kind of butcher at all, I'll need to have my own experience-based opinions on this meat business, in addition to understanding where it all comes from.

My best friend Bryan is a cook, and he recommends I start basic.  To that end, there's a beef soup bone in my freezer waiting to have something done to it, and I'm thinking beef barley, or maybe french onion.  My cousin Isaac wants barbecued ribs.  My roommate Sisi has requested a lamb shank, which it may take me a while to build up the confidence to tackle.  There is talk of carpaccio.  We'll see how the soup turns out.

Black Earth Meats

I had done some research to prepare for my new job, but I still wasn't sure what to expect when I stepped out of the morning rain and into Black Earth Meats for my first day as a butcher's apprentice.  Eight hours later I stepped out into a sunny afternoon, tired, sore, and delighted with all I had learned.

I've worked a few different jobs.  I like learning about things, and I'm a firm believer in learning by doing.  When I interviewed to be a butcher's apprentice for Black Earth, I told them upfront that I had no experience with meat cutting, but that didn't bother Joe, the manager.  They'd train me from the ground up, he said, and wouldn't have to un-teach me any ideas that disagreed with the ethos of the company.

That was important because, in a lot of ways, Black Earth Meats stands apart from the national norms regarding meat.  One of the company's goals is to be a "proof of concept" for a butcher business that promotes a more sustainable, humane, and healthy way of consuming meat.  Black Earth eschews preventative antibiotics and genetically modified feed, and tries to embrace a more reverent attitude toward killing and eating animals.  For Joe, my agreement with those principles outweighed my inexperience.

In addition to being a rookie meat cutter, I didn't have a whole lot of experience with meat eating.  I'm no vegetarian- I'll try a bite of just about anything you put in front of me.  However, I never established my favorite cut of beef, and I never learned the difference between New York, hanger, strip or skirt.  Fine meats were for big gatherings and special occasions, and they were always good, but spaced far enough apart that differentiating was never a concern for me.

I expect that will change soon.

In my first eight hours, I'd learned about a lot of new things, from dry aging and curing processes to mangalitsa pigs and belgian blue cows, and even the use of beef suet for skincare.  But I was also discriminating between beef clods and briskets as they were being tossed at me from across a stainless steel table, and starting to piece together the puzzle of how a cow comes apart into different things, and what those different things can become.

So I'm writing here to chronicle the de-mystification of meat as I experience it.  More to come.