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.