How to Butcher a Lamb by the Bearded Butchers!

Hey guys, this is Perkins, one of White Feather's

bearded

butcher

s, meaning today I'm going to show you how we shred a

lamb

here in the shop, this may not be how everyone shreds their

lamb

, but this is how we do it. I was taught. by an old Frenchman about 20 years ago this method so we will show you our style. Come on, I'll show you how to do it. Let's go over a little bit of the tools I'll be using today. Our Victorinox 6-inch semi-rigid knife has our

bearded

butcher

brand logo right there. These are available on our website.

If you want to buy one, be sure to check them out. We've got our steel, just a polished smooth steel and my meat hook hand saw teeth on and then also today we're going to be using the beef butcher band saw model 16. I'm going to use it just a little bit so let's we've moved into our commercial atmosphere, dirty machinery, so let's use it, I'm going to show you guys, the first thing we want to do is break the hindquarter of this lamb, so let's separate it into primaries, we'll do the hindquarter. We'll do the paddle and then we'll do the chair, so we'll split it into three separate parts in this back room.

You can feel like this is where the hip bone is, the front of the sirloin where it stops and where it meets the tenderloin, you want to start right there and you want to cut it all the way through like this, so you need to grab your handsaw and make a cut. very simple clean to get those hindquarters off the back of this lamb, so let's go ahead and put that aside, we have two hindquarters. Now what I like to do is stick my hand inside this lamb and I like to count four ribs, so once I have my ribs, I move on. and I mark it with my finger I put a little knife cut there between those ribs cutting all the way through on one side 1 2 3 4 cutting all the way through the other side then we just take our handsaw and go ahead and remove the shoulder from this lamb, so Now, as you can see, I have a lamb shoulder and a hindquarter and now what we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and divide each individual section and I'll show you how to do that, so we're going to go ahead and start with the back of this lamb first.

I like to trim it a little bit, just a little bit, here, remove these pieces and whatever I'm cutting out. so, we'll put it here on our trimming table and then we'll listen to it a little bit, go over it, cut up some lamb, maybe make some skewers and trim this for our ground lamb, so let's go ahead and leave that there for a second . Now let's go ahead and break this back room. Now that we have these legs broken, you can see what we did here: we cut some lamb sirloin steaks and If you probably notice that I took my saw and made a notch in that bone right there and that's so I can trim them down a little bit more, but it's okay, let's start with these sirloin steaks.

I made that notch there with my saw. I'm going to go ahead and just clean them up, make a nice presentable cut for the retail box, leaving just a little bit of fat on the back, but not really heavy fat, just clean them like this, I usually get to about an inch to one. inch and a quarter thick, about four per lamb per side, that's usually what sets up some really good cuts in there, then the rest of this will go through there, we'll take out a little bit of stew meat and a little bit of ground lamb, etc., so let's go ahead and move on to the leg of lamb, just trim them down a little bit and what I like to do is start with the leg first by going through that tendon there, if you follow this seam down to this leg bone here, you can find this. knuckle cut that knuckle and remove your leg of lamb like this, do the same on this side and find that the knuckle just cut there.

I'm going to take these and cut out the hocks with the band saw here in a second, so I'm going to show you a couple of different options that you can do with your leg of lamb. First, I'm going to go ahead and pull this H bone out of here using the tip of your sword, as you can see, I have my chain. Put on a leotard today, if you are going to cut or stab yourself anywhere in your midsection it will be during this process while you are removing a bone like this at waist level, so remember where the proper protective gear is when you are. doing something like this, go ahead and just take that H bone out of there, now you can leave this bone, leave this as a boned leg like this, just trim it a little bit.

What I'm going to do today is I'm going to go ahead and remove the bone and make a boneless leg, so I'm going to start right here at this kneecap, going up along the top of this top round on the thin part, giving it the turn and staying as close to the bone as possible. leaving the meat on the leg, not on the bone, and just go ahead and remove it and here again we'll trim these bones a little bit more so they're nice and clean. Now what I like to do is here, inside. Off this leg there is a gland like on a deer, so I like to go ahead and get rid of that, so inside this little piece of fat here is a gland, so let's go ahead and just remove that piece and dispose of it like this which now we have a boneless leg of lamb that I'm going to roll up and tie and I'll show you how to do it here in a second, so I went ahead and made a boneless leg of lamb, this is I'm going to leave the bone on.

I'm going to go ahead and cut it in half. You can see him very cute, like a lamb. Go ahead and remove the bone dust. Make a really good roast leg of lamb so we have one that is bone-in. -on the cut in half option and on this one we're going to go ahead and roll and tie, so I'm going to show you how we do it. I like to start in the middle of the leg keeping everything nice and tight and even, pulling it tight and how you do that moving things around just so they stay in place and there you have it, probably around a leg of lamb four pound tied and boned, trying to keep the strings even, nice and tight, that way things cook evenly and it looks good, okay? it's time for lamb shoulders we're going to go ahead and remove the neck we're going to divide this in half we're going to save some legs we're going to save some neck slices and we're going to do some shoulder chops and a little roast so let's move on to the band saw, let's start right, so let's go back to the table and I'll show you all the different cuts of these shoulders.

Okay, now that we've got the shoulder broken, you can see what's done. some really good lamb shoulder chops we did some more slices some arm style shoulder steaks and then some roasted shoulders and then the front legs here these are the high legs he's the front leg so now what I'm going for to do is I'm going to go ahead and continue to break this down starting with these slices of lamb, the next slices I like to remove this yellow string from the back of these, it just makes a much better, more presentable cut, clean them up a little bit, make a Really nice lamb. stock up on some sumeet I certainly don't want to waste anything on this carcass, we'll use everything we can to get the next slice ready.

I'm going to go ahead and finish these shoulder steaks, we have the blade steaks here now. We're going to go ahead and make the arm fillets by just trimming them out now we're going to go ahead and move on to the paddle. Now in this you can leave this bone, which we normally do to get a delicious bone-in shoulder blade roast. roast lamb, so I'm going to go ahead and leave that one like this today you can remove this bone if you want, but today we're going to leave this portion of the arm like this, we're going to go ahead and remove these rib bones.

Clean it up a little bit, now it's time for the rack of lamb, so we're going to go ahead and take this chair, we're going to split it in half and I'm going to show you how we're going to do it. some lamb chops and then we'll do some French lamb ribs so check that out. You want eight ribs left on this rack, so count them one, two, three, four, five, six, seven eight, like that, so we'll have two lambs with eight bones. racks, we're going to go ahead and tie the bone on these, making sure we don't get the meat right there on that tenderloin and what I like to do is take my saw blades and make sure it cuts between those bones. now it's time for the French rib, now that we've signed the bones on the back of this lamb, let's go ahead and remove them, pull out this yellow string, now what I like to do is I'd like to take My meat hook goes in under this membrane on these ribs and peel that membrane, it just makes a nice, more presentable, more desirable cut at the end.

Now what we do is we start up here and you can see where this wine ends so you don't. I don't want to get any closer to the spine. I start here by cutting this soft cartilage, cutting all the way making a straight line and then just taking the knife, removing this piece that's going to go into the clippings pile, I move this little one around. bone soft cartilage bone here now I like to leave the covering on the back of these you can remove this you can remove the silver skin it's completely up to you this is a way that a lot of our customers like them so that's the way that we do Leave just a little bit of that coating and that fat after you've done that.

Now at this point continue cleaning between the bones, you want these bones to be nice and that way clean any meat that is left there. If you leave it there, you'll get a little rash when you cook it, so you want a nice clean bone that way, in the end your dish will have nice white bones, but just cutting between each bone the bones will be even and there. You have a very nice rack of French lamb that is eight bones long, perfect for the table, so let's go ahead and start with the second one and there you have two very nice racks of French lamb.

You can also take one of these and you can tie it. using some twine just place it between each bone this way you can tie it up and it keeps everything nice and tight during the cooking process. It takes a little more time, but it's definitely worth it for a final result, as you can see when I pull. These ropes tighten and pull each of these bones very nice and straight, so we have one lamb that is tied and one that is not, so it's your personal preference, maybe it's your style, whatever you want, that is now completely up to you with these pieces. right here, what you can do with these leftover ribs, you can make some lamb chops with these by cutting through this soft cartilage right here, with my larger Victorinox knife, peel the membrane off the inside of these with your meat hook, sometimes if you need to get a Hold it with your apron, remove that membrane and then just take your largest knife and cut between these bones for the lamb chops, so we'll go ahead and do the same thing on this side, finding that soft cartilage that pulls this membrane and then cut. every bone like that, okay, so far, what we've done starting with the hindquarter we took a leg of lamb, cut it in half, left it to bone, made a whole leg of lamb boned and tied, cut our chops sirloin. about an inch and a quarter thick we made our loin chops, some really good loin chops, there we made two fried racks of lamb from that loin and once it was tied, one is not off the shoulder, we made a bone-in roast, we made one bone in arm roast we made arm steaks we kept some next slices we made a blade steak so we have our blade steaks and our arm steaks here off the shoulder we have our lamb shanks in front lamb shanks in back and then also we have some lamb chops here a little rib sticks up from the inside of those French grills so that's all the cuts of lamb so go ahead and follow us over to the boning table and I'll show you how to trim the ground or the trimmings for the ground into this. lamb, so check it out now our lambs are all trimmed, we're left with the pile of trimmings, that's what we're going to do, we're going to go ahead and go through this removing any excess fat, any gristle, any bones, anything like that .

We're also going to cut up some lamb stew meat, so we'll put our trimmings in this tub and slowly work our way down here. You can leave a little bit of fat on this, but you definitely don't want to leave any big chunks of excess fat or anything like that as you carve this lamb. When you're working on something like this, it helps to know that maybe you have a friend or a family member or something. and help you because they can be working on the pile of trimmings while you cut the lamb, that's what we do here in the store, but since we're going to do the video today, I went ahead and went from the actual cutting to the trimming, so Just We will work up to here removing these bones, cartilage and excess fat.

Now you can save the bones if you want. That's what we're doing with this little stack here. Let's save those bones. Make some broth. a bit oflamb broth save them for the dogs whatever you want, you can definitely spend as much time as you want on this. Some people, you may know, go through it and pick out everything possible they can find. like you know every little speck of fat, the main thing is to remember the excess fat, cartilage and bone is what you want to remove, one piece at a time, working your way up until you get the bones as clean as possible and move on to the next , OK?

We went ahead and placed all of our cuttings into our lugger. Here now we're going to throw them into our grinder, as you can see, these are really nice pieces of lamb, not a lot of excess fat, no bone or gristle, so we're going to go ahead and put it in our grinder and show you that process, so now we're going to run this through our butcher mill. We have a thick plate, we will go through the thick plate until we reach the thinnest one. - Plate an eighth of an inch with our mixer grinder and from there we will turn it into a nice ground lamb.

Check it out, as you can see we have a coarse ground lamb. This is a mixer grinder, so it will mix the fat that we have. it's very nice there and then at this point we're going to run it through that 1/8 inch plate into our bunker and onto our tray so that you have 12 beautiful 1 pound packages of ground lamb, mixed really well. I can see that the fat that's in there is mixed very well, very, very well for the display case, so let's go ahead and add this to our pile here, finished product, we go over the lamb, all the different cuts of lamb, the back , the loin shoulder, saddle port portion and you can see I went ahead and added the ground lamb to our pile here, so this is what you would expect from a whole lamb, this one weighed 57 pounds, which placed somewhere in the mid 90's as alive. weight maybe 100 pounds of lamb what we have left here finished weight I suspect we're in the 35 to 40 pound range we have 12 pounds of ground lamb I didn't weigh all of these cuts but we'll be somewhere in that range about a sixty and five to seven percent yield final weight on the table ready to display and sell to our customer this is a local lamb harvested right here on site family raised we handle the entire process start finish USDA inspected we dry it in our Great , now we cut it, now it's ready for the case.

I hope you enjoyed the video. Stay tuned for more and don't forget to subscribe to Beard Butchers on YouTube. Thank you.