A Day in the Life of Whole Animal Butcher Heather Marold Thomason — Clocking In

[Music] i don't know that i'll ever not be hands on i think it's really just my personality the thing that people don't realize is how much work goes in behind the scenes the butchery is beautiful but there needs to be i think a greater understanding of what it takes to get food to plates my day usually starts check my emails check slack hope that something didn't go wrong with a truck or a slaughterhouse or a farmer and if that's not the case then i'm off to the start of a great day i pretty much try to start my days at hq it's a 6 000 square foot facility there's a lot of things going on here it's where everything starts and finishes hi jeanette morning chef hello all right definitely one of the most important things is to be on top of inventory every day and how the meat's looking come on in all of our meat is sourced directly from local farmers that i have individual relationships with they know from when the animal was born that it's raised for primal supply and when it's at market weight it's going to go to the slaughterhouse we receive a delivery every week from our slaughterhouse approximately six whole beef every week and 12 whole hogs every week we've still got four beef tenderloins remaining out of the original 12 that we received these are the short rib plates we had 12 of these to start it looks like we're through about half of them so i work with the slaughterhouse and i actually reserve and hold all the slots that primal supply will need the different farmers on my schedule they just simply show up at the slaughterhouse on the date that they're scheduled and they go back to their farm and they focus on farming so the pork was over here you can see the magnificent wall of heads this is a rack of all of the pork rib loins those are the short loins got lots of whole pork bellies down here our beef take two years to raise to market weight the pigs could take anywhere from eight to 12 months depending on the season you know what do i think that i need now what do i think i need six months from now what do i think i need one to two years from now and that's an ongoing and constant conversation with myself and the farmers within the week it's really interesting to watch this space swell this is the beating heart of everything where it comes and goes so let's go into the cut room and see where they're at open gently so the cut room at hq is definitely a major hub of activity there's so much planning and so much work that happens in that room every day this is kind of how our stuff comes from the slaughterhouse like that's just the entire beef shank that's why the name primal exists like when you take a whole animal and you break it into kind of this initial part they're called primal cuts so that we still have a lot of flexibility about how we butcher them this is like a very complicated spreadsheet that we use for our cut orders they know that they need to use five of these today to produce um 25 single pork chops to fill butcher's club shares and then for the web store it's like we're sold out of whole pork butts so we're going to prep some of those today some spare ribs because we've been sold out of them we just got more in from the farm and slaughterhouse this is our process and the way that we'll work through the day in here we're raising pasture-raised animals they're going to be consistently inconsistent but we're still trying to kind of keep them within a spec so autumn is going to start with something like this that has like way more of a fat cap than a typical customer would want and then portion them down to something beautiful like this which is like exactly the amount of fat that you want on a pork chop but we do end up with all of this this is like the excess fat that's being cut off of those pork chops that's what we'll grind that's all passed to the kitchen and that becomes large so that we don't that doesn't become waste for us i like to keep three knives the first and like my desert island butcher knife if i had to only choose one it's this so i always have a six inch bony knife it's semi-flexible you can kind of like use a little pressure and it'll sort of follow the thing a little bit more this is called a breaking knife it's really nice with larger things to be able to have a knife that's like this one but longer so i can get in and like cut the whole way through something and then this knife which i guess is technically a scimitar it is big i like big knives for cutting large steaks i can get into it and i can draw with one solid knife movement you know the best butchery is like your knife is invisible and then this is something called the bone scraper and when you cut bones with a saw it creates something that we call bone dust so this tool is pretty cool you just kind of run it along it you can see how it just kind of picks it up in the gaps and takes that bone dust off of the meat but yeah so if i was just kind of setting myself up for success for the day these are all the tools that i'd have on the station this whole animal craft butchery is something that there is not a lot of so since starting primal supply almost five years ago i've actually trained a lot of butchers that's yali yali has trained with us from green knowing nothing so they can uh definitely cut and finish all of the parts and pieces but we haven't worked on the whole animal thing so we're gonna just like spend a little time working on that today so when we start with a whole animal and we break it down into kind of the largest possible parts and pieces they're called primal cuts so on a pork we have four primals a leg which is a ham a shoulder the top half of it is the loin and the bottom half is the belly before we break this into the primal i'm just going to do one thing which is to remove the tenderloin this is the most tender muscle in the body because it doesn't really do anything americans we equate convenience and tenderness with value it's the money right here i can find the natural seams between the muscles see i'm just like barely even using my knife i'm just sort of pulling this out so this is like the most valuable part of the pork is this top the loin it's where all the money is the sub primals are going to be a rib line a center cut or short loin and sirloin or like quite literally end of the loin right butchery is hard it takes some time for your right hand to learn where your left hand is it's like learning choreography there's 10 steps you know first you remove this then you debone this and all the time as you're doing this in whole animal butchery you're also trying to piece together you know this this anatomy um so yeah so now we have our three primals so really like we've got our strip loin our short loin and our rib loin i bet autumn's cutting a short loin today yeah uh using a bony knife removing all of these bones you get down to this single barrel of a muscle and that's exactly what they're making this into they're tying these into loin roasts so yeah we start with this and we end up with this like gorgeous tray of cuts a lot of times as we're working through the day like we're just trying to kind of get through the cut list and we'll keep bins under the table this is our waste we do save a lot of fat and render it but the stuff that's exposed on the outside and then he's got some bones you know so we can remove the meat between them but then we'll cut these down on the bandsaw into smaller pieces that are roastable and these will end up in the kitchen this is all the trim this is something that we'll go through it and we'll double check the fat ratio we want it to be 80 20 meat to fat and this ultimately will become our ground beef we produce tons of this off of like an 800 pound beef we could generate up to 200 pounds of trim so we make all of our sausage in-house whole animal butchers the trim that comes from pork and beef we are making fresh sausage almost every day i'm sourcing about six whole beef every week they average about 700 pounds per carcass the usable part of that animal is maybe 70 percent our chef dama is probably one of my most important team members always managing the meat he's intentionally creating to help us use things that uh wouldn't otherwise sell in a high enough volume fresh so we also have this cooked inventory of product working with a butcher as opposed to a restaurant is great because all the meat is as fresh as it could possibly be it's coming direct from the source and i can also troubleshoot with them a little bit if i wanted a little fattier or a little less fatty ground just a little different you know it's kind of like immediate results we generate so much of these kind of byproducts that if we didn't have a kitchen it would be really hard not to waste them the broth trend is the best thing that could ever happen to a whole animal butcher making a beautiful beef stock so we roast off trays and trays of bones about an hour and a half in the oven and then we do them overnight and we end up with about 40 to 60 quarts of beef stock a week so i'm rendering out uh pork fat rendering it into nice clean lard this is a small batch oftentimes the butchers will generate this pot full of just pork fat and then we sell it in large format for wholesale customers and we sell it in 16 ounce containers for retail customers the tallow is beef fat the lard is pork fat and the tallow does tend to have this it's more like a coconut oil or something right when it's cold and the pork fat tends to be softer anything i could guys start with this we do have customers that come and shop at this location and we open at noon on weekdays so we're just kind of like in the final steps of making sure that everything is pretty and set for the day these are the types of things that come out of the kitchen meatballs and pasta sauce and chili these are all things that use like ground beef broth as a base all right so we're headed to the south philly butcher shop it's pretty important to me that as many days as possible i can get down there and just kind of check in and see what's happening and make sure they feel supported we are able to cut me to order on site at this location which we love kind of just realized that we needed a place to connect to customers in person anything else so he's got actually a beef flap it's quite literally the belly of the beef and we get two mussels and steaks off of this what he's actively peeling out right now is a flank steak smooth long grain pretty lean most people know a flank steak it's definitely desirable there's only one of these on each side of a beef so the other mussel that he's going to pull out of this is called the bavette and we're always trying to teach customers about alternative cuts not everybody knows above it it's actually a really awesome steak kind of looks like a really big skirt steak or maybe like a skirt steak and a hanger steak had a baby everybody's going to walk in and ask you know if we have like rib eyes and strip steaks but you know you can introduce them to top sirloin or you can talk to them about some of the lesser known things like copa steaks or ranch steaks some of my farmers joke that they talk to me more than other people in their lives because you know we're all busy we're all business owners and we're all small businesses and we're trying to kind of support each other they're looking at an animal on the ground and i'm looking at a carcass or a piece of meat you know we focus on genetics we think about feeding and diet they're working so hard on those inputs but they don't know what it's producing so i can let them know if it's successful or if it's unsuccessful and i can give them that feedback that they need to improve all right we're headed back to brewery town hq [Music] this afternoon the butchers have been cutting all day so we've got a ton of meat here moving into the packaging station that we're gonna check in on as the butchers work throughout the day they will just continually rack up cuts on these speed racks and get these guys into packages we've got uh pork sirloin steaks we've got some beef baseball steaks we've got some beef shanks pork loin roast some pork copa safe some things that are more like these are one pound bags of beef stir-fry they'll get bagged here they run through the machine they get sealed so everything gets its final like a packaged label that includes a lot of information for us it's the identification it's the day that it was packed so that we can track how many days it's been in vacuum seal for freshness so we guide our customers to use it within a certain date and then obviously the pound weight and price we do a lot of like meat math around here and we try to collect as much data as possible because it's really helpful for us to be on top of like exactly how many stakes we yield on average out of a muscle and be able to plan distribution to all of the programs and locations i have never existed in the industrial commodity meat system i just really don't know another way i came into butchery because i wanted to find new ways to improve and support a local supply chain that supports pasture-based farmers so i've worked really hard since the start of primal supply to kind of diversify our market our butchers club is basically it's kind of modeled off of a csa this idea that our customers commit to an ongoing subscription where they want to get a box of meat every week it's super cool for us because we have several hundred members in the program as we're bringing meat in that a certain amount of it is no matter what it's already sold it's already basically reserved by these customers we do tend to prioritize them i like to reward their commitment to us by making sure that they get some of the better stuff you know so basically we're down to like all of the parts that are left after we've extracted the merchandisable cuts so now autumn is going through all of this and turning everything into trim we definitely count on restaurants having burgers and ground beef because you know the trim and the use of ground beef is definitely what makes our world go round some of the smaller you know higher and fine dining restaurants might buy beef loins to cut into high-end steaks so i'll work a lot with local chefs who are looking to have locally raised traceable meat on their menus but it's a lot of work for them to bring whole animals into the restaurant so they can participate in our whole animal program by sourcing primals and sub-primals from us so yeah so it's the end of the day here pretty much cleaning and wrapping breaking everything down getting all the meats put back away and into their places to go to sleep for the night everybody walks through and says goodbye to me and walks out the door and goes home and i'm like thanks see you tomorrow [Music]

Channel: Eater

Views: 393,068

Rating: 4.900631 out of 5

Keywords: butchers, butcher shop, how to butcher, how to run a butcher shop, small business, business owner day in the life, day in the life of a butcher, business owner, meat, meat shop, best butcher shops, butchery, butchering, women owned businesses, female butchers, meat industry, butcher industry, beef, whole animal butcher, whole animal butchery, whole animal butcher shop, primal supply, Heather Marold Thomason, eater.com, food, restaurant, dining, dish, foodie, chef, food show

Id: HTUvbILga58

Length: 15min 0sec (900 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 31 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/DangerousFriend9862]

This has always been one of my dream jobs. I let it go because of mass production. Being a butcher isn't that great anymore. Not like Kroger is going to actually pay you a decent wage.