 |
 |
 |
|
Beef showing various cuts. |
 |
How to Cut up a Carcass And How Much You’ll
Get of Each Cut After You Do
No doubt if you’re looking into direct marketing your own
beef you’ve talked to a butcher about how a carcass is cut
up, and how much of what cut you can expect from a carcass. If you
have and walked away feeling totally mystified, join the club. There
are a million ways to cut up a carcass. If that isn’t bad
enough, different people call the same cuts by different names.
What’s the difference between a top sirloin and a T-bone?
Or a Kansas City strip steak and a New York strip steak? Or a breakfast
steak and a cube steak?
I even went in and watched them cut up the carcass, thinking it
might help to visualize all this stuff. Actually, it did and I would
recommend it highly. Even more, the biggest help to me was a book
called The Beef Buyers Guide. This is a secret club kind of thing.
Everybody in the industry pretends that this is a holy writ, but
you won’t find it in a bookstore (although you can order it
online). This book breaks down the carcass into different pages,
tells you all the cuts you can make from a certain section and provides
helpful pictures.
For instance, with the rib section you can make a rib steak/bone
in/tail on, or rib steak/bone in/tail off, or boneless rib steak,
or tied rib roast, and so on. It is a bit of overkill, but it will
give you a working knowledge. Plus, it contains the codes that restaurants
use, so you’ll know when someone calls and says he wants a
1139a (whole tenderloin, ¼-inch trim, lip on).
In actual practice, it turns out no one really knows all of those
codes. There are regional differences in what meat people will call
the same cut, both in name and in code (a New York strip and a Kansas
City strip are the same thing). But if you know them, it will make
you look smarter than the conventional meat salesperson.
As I mentioned, you can cut up a carcass many ways. It all depends
how much, and of what, you are selling. If you’re just starting
out and aren’t that sure of your quality, start with cull
cows. They’ll give you excellent hamburger and store-quality
tenderloin. The next step up is young cows and steers, which give
you tenderloin, stew beef, marinated roasts, jerky and hamburgers.
If you’re really good, you have the slaughter steer or heifer,
which gives you everything.
As a rule of thumb, a 1,000-pound live animal will give you about
300 pounds of saleable beef or, in industry lingo, your “boxed
weight.” You might hear people talk about getting 50 percent
yields (versus your 30 percent). What they are talking about is
the “cold carcass” weight, or how much your carcass
weighs on the rail. This weight is meaningless; what counts is the
weight of the beef you sell. If you are cutting steaks or making
hamburger for people, there is a lot of bone you don’t get
paid for.
Of course, you can divide a carcass into many different cuts (right),
each of which contributes to your bottom line. Your actual weights
may vary 5 percent each way depending upon your genetics and slaughter
weight, but this is generally about average.
Previous Section
| Top | Next Section
|
