Butchering, Taste and Age

[Pastor Dave]

I am weighing in late, but a processor in these parts makes no real guarantees you will get your own meat back. I have seen them do it with beef and deer. If your place was running through other sheep/mutton, you may have gotten someone elses meat. The place here wouldn't let folks observe the processing. They may have changed after complaints, but we didn't wait around to find out. Maybe it's not the case at all with your place, but I see you changed processors. Hopefully your experiences will be better here on out.

 

[The Old Ram-Australia]

G'day ,I agree with Pastor Dave,we used to have our goats,pigs and lambs processed by a small local abattoir,which we later found out was notorious for sending the "best" to the local butchers and private kill got whatever was left.A local wholesaler friend had at time got 2 left beef sides once and after that he followed the animal down the kill line and tagged it himself before it got hung.Do you have another killing works you can change to?....T.O.R.

 

[P0werUser]

Hi, I have no experience with sheep..yet, but in regards to this thread, I would say you are better off butchering the sheep/lamb yourself. If you've butchered deer before, then you should have no issues with lamb. I found that Scott Rea on youtube has been great at teaching butchery. When I switched to butchering deer myself versus taking it to a butcher, the meat quality has just been so much better, my wife and I are super impressed with the meat. I learned how to butcher a deer from Scott Rea and he shows some awesome steak cuts for deer and we have enjoyed them, so I think you'll be in good hands to follow his lamb butchery video.

On an extra note, if you are planning to butcher a male, you might as well whether them IMO.

 

[Latestarter]

Greetings and welcome to BYH @P0werUser . That's a great video, thanks for sharing. I've watched several that he's made. The pig/hog butchering one was good too. I have his main site bookmarked I personally never had a problem butchering a deer... Have done countless, but for some strange reason, have always figured to use a butcher for livestock. Doesn't make much sense huh? Biggest issue is I don't have a cold room to hang them to age... Anyway, browse around and make yourself at home.

 

[Blue Sky]

We once had a 2 year old ram butchered after he was injured in a fight. He was American black belly or Barbado as they call them here. He tasted fine and I've noticed they sell well even at that age. We have two Painted Desert ram yearlings in the freezer so far so good. Not all the PD sheep have color or horns, it's good to have options.

 

[Laidback1]

Awesome video!

 

[Eddy Winko]

I have recently dealt with a few of our own ram lambs, about 7 months old and fully intact, and they taste fine. The local method, which I follow as I only learnt how to do it this year, is to stun, cut off the crown jewels then bleed from the neck. Now I don't know if this method stops any possible taint to the meat, but as I say we have never had any problems.

 

[Workinthedream]

Hi if you can smell the meat there is definitely something wrong. Newly butchered meat has little to no smell IMO. We butcher all of our sheep ourselves (North Country Cheviots - NCCs) and it is not difficult at all. Maybe even easier than a deer. We put ours in a spare refrigerator for a week then process like the above video. We enjoy it so much I am asking for a meat saw for Christmas Hope you get it figured out!

 

[genuck]

We use a halal butcher, they always do a great job. The meat is delicious. They calm the animal before killing it. Just now we butchered our 6 year old Shetland ram, he'd been out with the ewes and no gamey taste at all. Though I will say we did a year+ ram before and to us he had no flavor at all.

 

[WolfeMomma]

Update!
Soaked the chops in butter milk overnight. MUCH better. Didn't taste anything like the ground meat that I had before. The only part that tasted weird was the fat, which can be avoided. So glad I found a solution to this.