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Today was the last day of meat cutting. We had an exam and we learned how to breakdown a lamb carcass. I'll go into that later, it was fun.
We also watched a slaughterhouse instructional video. Wowzers
I'm going to go into great detail describing this, be forewarned.
There is a very elaborate inspection process before anything even happens. A USDA inspector has to approve of the facilities and then looks at the animal to be slaughtered. He looks at the face, the legs, the hindquarters searching for any abnormalities. If something seems wrong he can grade it as U.S. Suspect which require further veterinarian inspection or U.S. Condemned
The next step is stunning the animal, with a captive bolt pistol. It's a .22 caliber pistol that shoot a small rod out of the barrel stunning the animal. Ever see No Country For Old Men? It's a small version of that essentially. While the animal is unconscious it is transported to the slaughterhouse, literally rolled down a chute into a holding pen. The unconscious animal is then strung up and bled out. They keep the animal alive for bleeding so that the heart will pump the blood out of the carcass, more efficiently draining the carcass. Once it's thoroughly bled out the head is skinned then removed. The tongue is inspected along with the lymph glands in the throat.
Once the head is removed they tied the hole shut with a heavy string to prevent the rest of the carcass from being contaminated while it is skinned. Once the hide is removed the visceration process begins. The animal is strung up on spreaders and is split open down the belly. Starting from top to bottom the major organs are allowed to roll out of the carcass into a cart. The intestines, the stomach, lungs, heart etc. gently roll out. The reproductive organs are removed and the kidneys are exposed for inspection.
Finally with a giant saw the entire animal is split into two (we were watching a cattle slaughter, smaller animals would not be sawed in half) and cleaned for storage.
It was an eye opening video. And apparently the Eastern Market Wolverine Packing House in detroit is one of the better packing houses in the midwest. It is highly recommended that given the opportunity, I ought to pay them visit. Says Chef Doug. Very enlightening he says. I'm interested but I don't know if my nostrils and stomach are.
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No more slaughter talk. It's lamb time.
Chef Doug broke down an entire lamb into it's primal cuts. But we were only to be concerned about the rack. The rack is the 8 rib bones that start between the 4th and 5th rib and end between the 12th and 13th (Sometimes the animal will have 14 ribs but that's not very common). We had to clean the fat and french the racks. Simply put we pealed the meat away to expose the rib bones all the way down to the tail meat. The tail is a small portion of meat immediately above the eye loin, the eye loin and tail make up the rack chop. Delicious by the way.
With the rest of the demo animal that Chef Dog broke down we took the primals and trimmed their fat and prepped them for either stewing or grinding. I had the pleasure of trimming the foreshank and breast primal as well as the neck. It was rather enjoyable, since it was being used as stew or grind you couldn't really screw it up. Just trim the fat and cut into smaller pieces.
Today made me hungry for lamb, I've had rack chops before but apparently the braised shank is to die for.
Thursday is my last day for intro. I doubt it will be this exciting.
do you not get to eat what you prep?
ReplyDeleteYes and no. The lamb we fabricated probably will not end up being lunch for students somewhere down the road but that is not always the case.
ReplyDeleteToday for lunch there were some sausages that we had made last week served finally.
Also, it is more common that whatever some kind of cookery class makes becomes lunch for everyone.
So we do often get to eat what we prep just not always the same day, and usually actually eat something that some other class has made same day.