(no subject)

[unicornduke]

butchering talk below



So the deer is done. It took me an hour to skin and quarter it, which was a big improvement in time over last time and I hardly needed my instruction list.

I have realized a minor issue, and that is that I'm relatively short. This buck was much bigger than the last one and we got it hung six inches higher than previous and they both nearly touched the ground. So I had to stand on a milk crate in order to reach the hind legs.

I also have to literally hug the hindquarters because I can't balance them in one hand and cut them lose and then remove the lower legs. It's pretty absurd to be honest. Dad was running to pick up straw so no help around.

There was no time improvement in cutting the meat from the bone and cutting it into pieces. It took me around 3 hours again. This whole deer is for ground meat and so I tried to hurry through the processing because it doesn't matter what the cuts look like as long as most of the fat and sinew are off. I also tried to hurry through it because I was doing it in the unheated garage and it's kinda chilly. I wasn't in the wind at least. My back is sore because I was looking down the whole time.

Grinding went really fast.

Comments

[dragonlady7]

Not too shabby!
I am super jealous of your meat grinder.

I'm trying to remember how my bil cut the hindquarters when he butchered deer. I think he just cut the front of the deer off just above the pelvis (with loppers), and then cut the legs free still hanging. IDK, but he managed to get blood all over himself at one point, so there were definitely some un-graceful moments.

He has a whole collection of nice knives and a saw, but he wound up using one of the slaughterhouse knives for most of it. Those knives aren't anything special but they are sharp as hell because we re-grind them pretty often and then use a steel on them basically constantly.

[dragonlady7]

oh, i see above you were asking about knife sharpening.
This is what was in the slaughterhouse and what we use for parting chickens: Victorinox 6" Wide Stiff Boner yes it's really called that, I knew because one of the packages was still there and we tell constant jokes about it.
Just this year, one of the long-time slaughterhouse volunteers (she works for chicken feet) bought us new, shorter knives for eviscerating, because the 6" one is too long. I cut the shit out of one of my fingers on the second of our turkey processing days; I was out on the finish pluck table removing necks and I had to dissect the skin to get the neck free, and somehow after doing 174 of them I just plumb forgot how to not cut the shit out of myself.

Annie and I did a load of research about knife-sharpening a couple of years back. She's generally familiar; they have some grinding stones and they regularly sharpen all the harvest knives, the shovels, the spades, and so on. She's even got a little stone to sharpen her pruners with, and does.
But generally, we only bother hitting the knives with the stone on a very infrequent basis. They mostly only need that level of sharpening if they've not been maintained, and if they've hit a lot of bones.
We have a steel that lives in the barn, and one of the longtime slaughterhouse workers (he's a friend of the previous owners) uses the steel on the knives before every slaughter session, and that's generally enough.
I just poked around YouTube and this is exactly what Pete does with the steel; he does it to each knife for a good twenty to forty seconds.
Zack usually repeats the process immediately before starting work to cut up the chickens; he usually cuts 20-30 chickens in one session, while we're packaging the others, and he will prepare two to three knives and keep them by his workstation. Cutting up whole birds is the #1 thing that dulls our knives, because he has to cut through bones, and bone dings the edge of the blade. He's got techniques that minimize the amount the blades contact bone, but it's inevitable that he's going to hit bone sometimes.
But, the steel is largely what you need.

We have some of those plastic doohickeys you just pull the knife through, and one of these fuckin' things, and they're better than absolutely nothing, but we generally only use them when nobody knowledgeable is free, we don't have enough knives to just not use the nicked/dull one, and it's that or struggle with the dull knife. There's one in the house and sometimes in desperation I use it when all the knives in the kitchen suck, which is often. (For some reason Annie only has either shitty little paring knives that never get sharpened, or these huge butcher's knives I can barely hold onto. I keep meaning to buy her a nice, like, six inch chef's knife, because there's no reason to have two fourteen-inch chef's knives in one kitchen.)

Oh, the Spruce has a nice tutorial on how to use a steel if you don't know how, that seems very manageable. As long as you're doing it somewhere you've got a countertop, that method could be fine!
They've got a reasonable tutorial on using a whetstone, too, which lines up with the other research we did. I'm still no great shakes with a whetstone, though.

[graydon]

The Grohmann 6" utility knife is more like a 6" paring knife than a 6" chef's knife but good for pretty much all small-or-vegetable kitchen tasks. The Lee Valley "peasant chef's" knife (the name of the style in France) is the closest thing I can think of to a 6" chef's knife. Really general purpose; high carbon tool steel, so it will rust, but takes a lovely edge.

Sharpening steels are halfway between a swage -- squishing the edge back into shape -- and a file -- stripping metal off. This will work fine for your standard cutlery stainless knives but with some modern fancy hunting knives they don't work well because the knife is made out of some ridiculous tool steel that's both harder and tougher than the sharpening steel. (Some Bark River knives in 3V got bad reviews because of this; reviewer didn't like the knife because it won't sharpen using traditional means.)

I have a bias against sharpening steels because they take off far more material than strictly necessary when used on modern knives. They are however very fast and totally ubiquitous among butchers and chefs.

I'm still a strop-and-hone sort of guy, because I am never in that much of a hurry with knives.

[unicornduke]

Neat!

[unicornduke]

I brought it back to NY with my in case I want to make sausage at some point. So if there is grinding to be done at the farm, you could borrow it no problem. I ran some real sinewy stuff through it and it did decent, if noisy. I did the whole deer worth in maybe 20 mins or so. It took much longer to package it up than grind.

Yeah, I ended up cutting the hindquarters off around the joint and just losing a little meat there. So I had it hung from the back legs, cut one leg free, let it hang, cut the other leg free and promptly dropped the head/spine/ribcage assembly on the ground. Very dignified all around.