← Meat H41-02 · Module 2 of 7 · Pages: 21 · Worksheets: 6

Butchering and cutting meat

How a chilled side of pork, a lamb or a quarter of beef becomes joints for roasting, curing, sausages and the freezer, without waste and in an unbroken cold chain

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Butchering and cutting meat

In short

  • Cut only when the meat deep in the leg is below 7 °C (45 °F), in a room no warmer than 12 °C (54 °F), and only after a negative Trichinella result.
  • A 120 kg pig gives roughly 90–95 kg of sides: about 20–22 kg of legs, 11–13 kg of shoulders, 10–11 kg of loin, 12–14 kg of belly and ribs and 10–12 kg of back fat and leaf fat.
  • Decide before the first cut what goes for ham, what for sausages and what into the freezer.
  • Meat for sausages is sorted and chilled to 0–2 °C before mincing.
  • Into the freezer go portions for one meal, with no air, labelled: cut, weight, date.
  • Roughly 50–60 kg of meat per 100 L of freezer (about 3½ cu ft).

What's inside

Chapters

  1. Before the first cut
  2. Tools and work space
  3. The side of pork: the cuts
  4. What each cut is for
  5. Boning and sausage meat
  6. Lamb, kid, sheep and goat
  7. Beef from the abattoir
  8. Ageing meat
  9. Packing and freezing
  10. Hygiene and the cold chain
  11. Most common mistakes
  12. Printable checklist

Worksheets

  • Cutting and packing calendar
  • Carcass yield calculator
  • Freezer calculator
  • Plan for the side
  • Freezer inventory
  • Labels for bags

Fields and checkboxes can be filled in with Adobe Acrobat Reader (desktop and mobile), and the calculator adds up by itself. Filling in may not work in some browsers. A print version comes with the screen PDF.

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