Buying Bulk Beef? Learn How to Buy Freezer Beef! The Bearded Butchers

welcome back to the beard butcher youtube channel last night i messaged scott and spencer behind the camera and i was like hey i've got an idea for a youtube video people always ask when i buy buy beef in bulk how much can i expect to take home today you're going to find out scott's going to be doing a lot of the explaining a lot of the scientific part with the yield percentages and etc while i'm going to be doing the cutting we're going to get some b-roll of shawn doing some of the boning the grinders doing their work with grinding out the uh the ground meat and the patties let's get started this is our standard cut sheet here at white feather meats we used to do a lot of custom processing this is the sheet we used here's the cuts that you could typically get off of a half of beef keeping in mind some of these come from the same primals so you can't just get on the sheet and say i'll take one of everything because some of them are duplicates you have to choose one of the other like bone in versus boneless scott's going to fill me out some cutting instructions i'm going to put it on my clipboard we're going to get started we're going to cut you half a beef custom style so scott's going to fill that out for me that way i've got a blueprint to go by let's get started all right i want to make it expressly clear we're a retail butcher now we have uh all of our resources our focus to the front of our store while we have a lot of knowledge about custom processing and we previously sold what we call freezer beef that's no longer something we offer so if you're watching this video this is to help empower you the customer this is making a resurgence or a comeback when you like the cut wrap freeze freezer beef freezer pork and that's fantastic to see whether it was the pandemic people want meat in their freezer they want to know where it came from and they want to have this freezer full of meat so today we want to empower you the consumer on what to do when it comes time to fill out the cutting instructions um a few things to point out number one how much eating meat will i get frankly there's there's no exact answer to that um it starts with the livestock itself if we get a dairy breed that's going to have more bone it's going to have less muscle consider the fact that dairy breeds put their nutrition into their into their milk not into their muscle automatically you're going to take a hit right there black heighted typically we see you know in the industry angus as a standard for for for high quality um there's many beef breeds out there that can produce different things you can even go so far so like a piedmont teas um that's got a tremendous amount of muscle on it we've struck a balance here over the years um with what we have um they would be considered angus um but we've also worked with our producer so that we have a little bit higher muscle ratio and less fat because when you buy this you're buying it by the carcass hanging weight so what happened is the animal was slaughtered so you had a percentage of the from hoof to the slaughter hanging weight that was already the blood the bone or the blood the gut the high the things like that that went that were taken away and then you purchase what we call hot carcass hanging weight is right after that animal is butchered it goes on to a scale a lot of this stuff is is regulated by your state or your industry that carcass weight is what you pay the butcher now sometimes you'll have a two part where you'll pay the farmer for the carcass weight and you'll pay the butcher for a processing fee it it depends on whether the butcher has it set up to do it that way but you're always gonna be based off that hanging weight now 390 was the hang weight of this carcass and then the next step of it is um how long does it spend in the dry aging cooler now we recommend and for you processors out there find a way to go a minimum of five days just minimum or your you as the consumer asks can i get at least five days it makes a dramatic impact 7's better as a matter of fact 12 plus is the sweet range 12 to 15 days because what happens is moisture evaporates out of it and moisture is weight too so this carcass went from 390 when it came out of the cooler it was at 381 now we hang this close to 15 days here at white feather that gives us the best trade-off between tenderness flavorness not too much evaporation loss 381 pounds nine pounds poof it literally evaporated went out of the carcass now that's just part of it um it's worth it so one we take this now and we're gonna break this down and we're gonna we're gonna do what we would call like a standard processing or standard cut that cut wrap and freeze has been around for 40 50 60 70 years there are some hacks out there but generally speaking your butcher is going to do his very best to make sure you get all the eating meat you can get off this carcass so how much eating meat will you receive again it varies um this particular animal is probably going to be right around that 60 we're going to weigh the package of meat at the end of it the other thing to consider is how much bone was removed during processing how much bone was left in it so again don't get stuck too much because you bought it by the hanging weight and you're trusting your butcher to give you all possible eating meat out of this carcass so let's get started filling out some cutting instructions and fill your freezer one thing i do want to mention is scott makes out these cutting instructions is we have this the set of cutting info divided in half to where we have the front quarter of beef on the top part portion and the hindquarter on the bottom so remember if you call your local farmer and you order a quarter of beef find out if that's a front quarter a hindquarter or a combination of the two because there's certain cuts that you can get on the hind certain cuts you can get on the front necessarily you know depending on what you order you may not receive those so what you can see behind me here is this is the front quarter that's the hindquarter so keep that in mind when you make those cutting instructions what did you actually order so as seth pointed out front and hine today we're cutting a half of beef there's also what we call a half of a half where the butcher will take and he'll split exactly half of the cuts you get off of a half of beef and that's a true quarter so when i took cutting instructions and again just another one you're taking the butcher off the block a lot of times when you give your cutting instructions there's varying amounts of time he can spend with you he or she sometimes they'll give you a standard cut where it's just what they cut sort of the rip it and ship it method we got into highly detailed customized instructions for our customers it was a premium service came at a premium price you're going to fall somewhere in there so we just want to make you aware of that so you've got this this half of beef here first questions i and so back to the thing you know you you can't really take 45 minutes of the the cutter's time off the block to give your cutting instructions so we hope this helps you understand first thing you know and seth pointed out these cuts sometimes it's an either or and another thing i'll say it's like a loaf of bread if you're going to cut slices that are inch and a half thick you're going to have fewer pieces of toast than if you cut them three quarters of an inch thick certain portions of this animal give us a certain stake once you set your solid a thickness you cut to the end of that primal section you're out first question i i would ask customers you want your steaks bone in or boneless um a lot of times there's a charge for this because it it takes longer to make that entire animal boneless than bone in bone inner boneless what thickness you want the steaks if you do go bone in a boneless your steaks are going to change names you're going to go from a porterhouse and a t-bone to a strip and a fillet also you're going to go from a rib steak to a rib eye don't confuse retail cuts that you see in the store they came from a side of beef like this but a lot of times you're going to get bone-in versions so that's what we're going to go with today we're going to go with bone in we like to see somewhere in that three-quarter to one inch range three-quarter being the very minimum one-inch your standard inch and a quarter is fine too so one inch plus or minus a quarter of an inch if you go down to five eighths or a half an inch that puts a lot more work on on the cutter there's a lot more packaging involved so we're going with bone-in stakes one inch thick um so you've got your porterhouse your t-bone your sirloin and your rib steak your four prime steaks that come off of the loin of the beef and then we move into round steak round steak's a little bit different round steak is not typically your grilling steak a standard for that we like to do when we're doing custom processing is do a third regular round steak that's the big round bone steak the fred flintstone with the with the round bone in it um we'll do a third of it as a regular round steak we'll do a third of it as round steak tenderize where we take the bone out cut it in half tenderize it we'll do a third of it is cube steak those look more like a burger patty four to a pound those are really nice steaks so we'll do a third each of those another bone in wintertime type thing soup bones a cross cut of the shank the marrow bone in the center again if you don't want the meat on the bone as a soup bone we take the meat from the bone we grind in a hamburger and then of course your short ribs again a bone-in type thing we don't get into explaining much of the cooking but around different seasonal changes you might want suit bones and short ribs so those are those are two of those sort of auxiliary cuts along with your brisket and flank that need to be talked about again if they're not cut they're going to add to your ground beef and then we get into our roast how many roasts would you like off of your side of beef now anything that we don't cut as a steak or a roast can be turned into stew meat or of course ground beef every single piece of this eating beef will go into your your packaged meat whether it's as a steak roast or of course it'll add to your ground beef roasts you can get a total of 18 to 20 of the roast at two to three pounds each so suddenly you're right around 45 pounds of roast that's a lot of roast a lot of times what i would steer people to is say think how many times am i going to eat roast in a week or a month so winter time you're going to eat more roast but it typically falls into that dozen range so we like to cut the dozen or maybe 15 best roasts we like to make them about two to three pounds a piece so you're going to have your chuck roast which come off of the front quarter you're going to have your round roast to come off of the hindquarter chuck roasts naturally have more fat and bone hind roast they're leaner and they're boneless now that we've got our roast figured out the the remaining pieces of parts off this are your brisket your flank those are easy pull-off cuts keep in mind you only get one brisket one flank off of your side and then we get our stew meat or or we can do a few strips of fajita or stir-fry meat and then the rest is ground beef so ground beef you're going to have roughly half of your take-home weight as your steaks roasts and cuts and half of your take-home weight is ground beef so you should then determine if your butcher has the k the capability of making ground beef patties what portion of it do you want made into patties do you want to go with half of your your weight so we reduced this carcass by about i'm i'm guessing here but i think with this carcass we're going to wind up with about 60 or 62 percent yield off of that 381 that we have now and with this cut out i think and i'm just making it a guess here after years of experience we're going to have somewhere right around 100 pounds of ground beef that's a good safe estimate 100 pounds so now you think how much of that do i want into patties how much of it do i want into bulk what time of year it is if it's winter you're not going to be doing as many of the patties i typically tell people that the ratio that's best served them is three quarters of it into bulk and one quarter of of the total weight into patties if you don't feel like that's enough patties you do a lot of summertime grilling just it up to two-thirds of it into bulk and one-third of it into patties so that's what we're going to go with today we're going to do two-thirds of the ground meat into one pound bulk packages and one-third of the padded one-third of the ground meat into pre-made patties now that we've got all that figured out i can fill out my sheet stuff gets started cutting and you get to see what it looks like as this starts coming across the packing table and it's eventually going to wind up in your freezer so as i'm cutting shawn's going to be over here working at the table you guys have said you want to see more of sean so today we didn't only bring you one sean we brought you two so he gets to work with his silent partner over there today let's get started keeping in mind when we cut this custom cut half if you've watched our previous how to cut a beef video you're going to see a lot of cuts in there that maybe you don't see today on our table because we did more of a retail style cut we did the skirt stakes the flat irons the tri-tips all those things those aren't necessarily custom style cuts so today just keeping in mind we are cutting truly custom style you know one of the jobs in this industry that gets overlooked a lot when you're custom processing is this portion right here like our niece alyssa is doing the scraping portion the packaging portion this is all a lot of hard work attention to detail getting that product in a package that at the end of the day the customer is going to like what they see they buy it and it's something they're going to want to eat so get somebody that can do this job you'll be all set so talking about this round portion here for a second when you give your cutting instructions keep in mind this round is made up of three main muscles top round bottom brown eye of round and with those you can do round steak round steak tenderize or cube steak or you can save for london broils or you can do jerky or you can do stir fry you can do ground meat you can do canning meat there's many different things you can do today we are going to do a third third and a third which is going to be third round steak third round steak tenderize and a third cube steak so this boning table this is where we take out any large chunks of fat um and then we make our uh boneless pieces to be ground out into burger and then of course if we have any lean whole mussel pieces we'll make them into the stew beef so this is an important part of it because this is where we take bones out can't grind bones in your hamburger unless you want crunchy hamburger take extra excessive gristle or connective tissue out take excess fat like big chunks of this out and grind it all up into a nice lean ground beef [Music] [Music] all right let's check out the ground beef two thirds bulk one pound packages beautiful ground beef we don't know the fat percentage we don't analyze it it's going to be somewhere just looking at this about 85 15. beautiful so there's our bulk one pound packages we dumped the remainder of it in here we're going to form the patties again just just really nice beautiful grind so we'll make out these patties we'll marry up the cuts with the ground beef we're going to have a mixture of vacuum sealing roll stock packaging we'll get it on a cart we'll put in our freezer it's going to be beautiful and then we'll do a final tally by weighing it to see what our actual package yield was and apparently he thinks that's ideal hiding behind a table back there just trying to do my thing we have the half of beef processed it's time for an overview i took the cutting instructions that scott filled out i think i cut it to a tee but let's find out so the way i have this on my table is i have the front quarter on this side the hind quarter on this side so you can see the separation between the two if you were to buy a front quarter of a beef this is what you would get if you were to buy a hindquarter of a beef this is what you would get now if you buy a split quarter and what that means is you take a half and you split it right down the middle you do half of the front half the hein you could take all of these items on the table and mix them and then divide the two so hopefully that clears things up for you a little bit now if you were to order a whole beef take all of this simple math double it so that's the overview on that portion now let's just go down through the table we'll explain some of the cuts that we got off of this and then we'll go from there so on the front quarter we have three suit bones we have six of the chuck roasts cut two to three pounds keeping in mind if you cut them bigger you're going to get less roast if you cut them smaller you're going to get more there again simple math we cut four short rib chunks we have 10 pounds of stew meat now this stew meat is and the stir-fry is a portion from the front and hinds so keep in mind um if you got just a front quarter just a hind quarter you could most likely take this and split it in half since this is the entire amount of stew meat off that that entire half four arm roast two bone in two boneless we got 14 rib steaks like scott mentioned earlier the thicker you cut them the less you're going to get the thinner you cut them the more steaks you're going to get we also got a beef brisket off that front quarter this is a point this is a flat if we were going to cut this as quarters we would have to cut this in half and give a customer a portion of each of this somebody's going to get the point somebody's going to get the flat that's just the way it goes when you split stuff with a half of a beef moving on to the hindquarter we've got 32 pieces of cube steak we have three soup bones off that hind shank we have three round tip roasts we have a little stack of sirloin steak ends we have two rolled rumps we have six pieces of round steak tenderize we have three pieces of round steak and only because the reason why we have half as many is because we left these hole these were cut in half so we have six pieces and three pieces we have seven porterhouse stakes we have eight t-bones we have six sirloins plus those end pieces and then we also have a flank stake as mentioned earlier keeping in mind this is a custom style cut this is what you would expect to see this is the bone-in version you're not going to see tri-tips you're not going to see skirt stakes you're not going to see fancy denver cuts and and you know that that type of thing because we we simply cut this as a custom and we wanted to portray that to you out in front here on this table so that's the overview hopefully you gain some knowledge with this onto the final portion on the buggy scott's going to go over that with you that looks great it's on one of our freezer buggies everything's sealed up packed up and we put it in these wire baskets because that way it's going to flash freeze quickly and freeze throughout so we put this in the freezer come back and we'll box it up tomorrow it's the next day this half of beef has had a chance to sit in the freezer overnight on the buggy and freeze shawn and i are going to get it in boxes once we get it in boxes we'll see how many boxes it takes um to fit all of it in and then we're going to get it on a scale we're going to weigh it and then we're going to figure out the percentage of yield from the time it was hanging to when we put it on the scale to when it went in a box so let's grab the buggy you saw go in the freezer you saw it come out everything rock hard beautiful vacuum sealed packages you can see that when i cut these i knocked this bone off a little bit to keep from breaking the seal on that package one thing our dad taught us back when we did custom processing we would go through the buggy and we would count every single piece we always crossed our tees and dotted our eyes and if we counted every single piece and wrote it down on the customer's cutting slip if they called back in you know maybe they said hey i didn't get x amount of something we could go back and verify on the cutting slip and in fact they did receive that and nine times out of ten if not all time um they would be like oh yeah by the way i had an extra box that i wasn't accounted for or oh by the way i found it in my freezer so um just one of those extra things that we did is we went through and counted every single piece on this buggy just so we had some paperwork uh verifying what the customer was getting sean how many beef do you reckon you put in a box over the years and pork slaughter 7 800 cattle a year and a thousand pigs a year seven eight hundred cattle thousand pigs a year we used to put in boxes 25 plus years the man has boxed some meat over the years let me tell you so if you look at these boxes this is a 20 by 15 by eight box so that'll give you an id on the size of the box that we're using works really good patty's spinning it good bulk meat you know the ground meat fits in it really well so 20 by 15 by eight it's a perfect sized box [Music] four of the big boxes the 20 by 15 by eights the last box 19 half by 12 and a half by seven and a half so we got this meat this entire side in four of our bigger boxes and one of our smaller box now you do have to remember we didn't put any organ meats in we didn't put any dog bones or anything like that so check with your processor if you want um dog bones and oregon meats etc another thing that shawn's doing over here is he's marking on the end of the box how many boxes we have that way when the customer would have come pick it up we know this is youtube times five back where we all started yesterday right on the same scale where we weigh these this front and hind and let's get it back on the scale keeping in mind we do have to subtract the weight of the boxes so nine and a half pounds of our total weight we're going to subtract off for the cardboard so 275.30 let's do a little math so 275.30 minus 9.5 265.8 is our finished boxed weight so 390 was the weight of the half when it came out of the cooler that's the way we're going to use the eight pounds difference we're going to include that in the in the loss so 390 times 0.68 gives us 265.2 and if you remember right 265.880 was our finished box weight so we are exactly at 0.68 68 yield scott mentioned that this beef was gonna yield really well less fat cover more muscle not super heavy boned animal like a big holstein or something like that so a 68 yield is phenomenal um on bulk beef like this the fatter the beef the worse the yield big bony animal the worse the yield so keep that in mind this customer if we would have been selling this half would be extremely thrilled with 68 percent or in a retail environment like ours you know we're going to sell in the retail you always want a better yield because yield obviously um in return ends up being more money so 68 fantastic yield a little bit of a recap here figuring this steer weighed about 300 pounds live 780 hanging in the cooler we pulled out that half that weighed 390. we had a 68 yield leaving 265.80 in these boxes that's for a half if you wanted a whole beef double it if you wanted a quarter of beef split the half amounts in half so that's a recap 68 yield dress phenomenal we think it's going to taste great as well thanks for following along on the beard butcher's youtube channel we hope you enjoyed this one share it with your family share with your friends let's educate the consumer hopefully this video helps other butcher shops out as well because an educated customer calling in giving cutting instructions is the best customer you can have because a big portion of taking cutting info with a consumer is the education process unfortunately there's some butcher shops out there that don't even give people the option so hopefully your butcher does that way you get exactly what you want in your freezer to feed your families sitting around that dinner table thanks for watching stay tuned and don't forget hit subscribe follow us on facebook follow us on instagram there's a ton more to come have a good one [Music] [Applause] you

Channel: The Bearded Butchers

Views: 1,053,860

Keywords: The Bearded Butchers, Custom Processing, Freezer Beef

Id: UC3Yy6R7aqg

Length: 28min 31sec (1711 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 17 2022