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.