Butcher and Packing the Sheep

Tuesday, December 31, we cut up the sheep. This is our first attempt at butchering an animal larger than poultry, so we don’t know what we are doing. We have a book.

The sheep were chilled in a <40 degree shop overnight, wrapped in cheesecloth to slow water loss.

First step, remove the neck. Next the flank.

Then removed the sirloin from the loin.

Split the legs at the loin.

One sheep disassembled int he fridge. This took about two hours. far longer than it should have, but when you are learning as you go, from a book, thing take a while. The first lamb I cut up using the square cut method.

With the second sheep we used a second variation by removing the forelimb and shoulder. The flank we left attached to the ribs for a “Denver rib.” The second lamb took about an hour to cut down to primals. Then we moved into the second phase, breaking down into sub-primals and wrapping.

Evie did most of the wrapping, and did quite a good job.

For the neck I attempted to “butterfly” it for a boneless neck roast. The first one went so well I repeated it with the second neck as well.

Like I side, Evie did most of the wrapping. Each cut was wrapped in a double layer of plastic wrap first, then wrapped in butcher paper, taped and labeled. Hopefully this will prevent freezer burn for the next year while we are waiting to eat them.

The book said that the legs and loins could safely be aged for 3-4 days more, so three of them were wrapped in cheesecloth and left in the fridge. We have plans for this.

Finally, roughly 5 LBs of clean trim for ground lamb.

Some lessons learned:

• The saw we bought from Amazon is not much use. It skives badly to the left and won’t cut straight.
• I was using the diamond sharpening stones to sharpen the knives, which does an excellent job, but takes extra time. I underestimated how often I would dull it on bones and need to re-sharpen it. Next time we will have a honing steel at the cutting station.
• Other than that, we just need practice. Lots and lots of practice. Since raising the sheep was overall pretty low-input, low-maintenance, we will probably do another round of sheep, so eventually we will get more practice.