How to Butcher a Bison | ENTIRE BREAKDOWN | The Bearded Butchers!

[Music] we're back and we want to do a video today on processing an entire bison we did one on beef a year and a half two years ago everybody seemed to really enjoy it it's sitting at almost 13 million views we want to duplicate that with a bison we're going to go through we're going to do some comparisons we're going to do bone in we're going to do boneless scott may talk a little bit about some yield percentages as long as he doesn't get too winded on me i never would do that because he does like to get to talking sometimes but it's okay so we're going to get started on this we're going to break down the front we're going to break down the hind we're going to get into both halves what you see here is one half of bison now we did already break this down on the rail between the fifth and sixth rib right here and the thirteenth and fourteenth little fun fact for you bison have an additional rib cattle you break them down between the 12th and 13th to separate that front from the hind on bison you break them down between the 13th and 14th so you can slip this down you can go between the sixth and seventh here but what that does is that shortens your rib we don't like to do that we like to get that extra rib steak in there so we always break them down like the beef between the fifth and sixth even though there's additional ribs so the original og bovine of north america the only bovine that is native to this continent so if you're eating beef you're eating a european descendant that was imported here bison just a couple of the obvious differences they're awesome they're covered in shaggy hair and they have sharp horns and they toss people around in yellowstone um they are they've never been domesticated they're still wild in the sense that even if you have them on your farm they they keep that fight or flight instinct they they really cannot be tamed um hump so bison this this is going to be quite a bit beef will stop like somewhere in here so you've got a hump we'll probably cut out a hump roast and they're leaner so bison that we butcher the males are never steered they are intact so this would be a bowl however they're still super tender uh generally with beef if you don't steer them and turn them into a masticated weak animal i'm just joking bison they stay tender even though they're a bowl but you'll see it's much leaner doesn't have a lot of fat cover and that will lead to what we would see probably about a 75 percent yield off of this carcass from the carcass hang weight to the cutout weight we've been eating bison since like 1987 so pretty much you know our teenage years and our adult lives so we love it if you haven't had it you should try it highly recommend it so that's going to be using um as you know our beloved victorinox six inch rosewood handled boating knife we use this across the board almost exclusively only grabbing our larger breaking knives for very select cuts the number one question we get on our videos is what knife do you use so scott's going into explanation of just that we don't use them on the processing floor but if you're in the field like on our elk hunts we love the the leather sheath and then of course you're going to need a sharpening steel we like the combo steel also by victorinox it's got a little bit more of an abrasive side and a smooth side all that's going to do it's not going to take any metal off of the knife it's just going to straighten that edge from where it gets curled over but it's microscopic you can't really see it to where it's straight again so whether you want a single victorinox six inch moaning knife from our website or you want that three-piece kit like scott just showed go snag yourself one so now that we have this broke down between the fifth and sixth rib we're just going to take our hand saw cut through part of the shoulder blade there and just go all the way through the vertebrae breaking this rib from the chuck thing you have to remember about bison everything about them is harder raising them loading them feeding them butchering them processing them everything everything's more difficult however the eating experience is definitely worth it we owe our butcher um foundation to bison it was our father that began raising bison 1986 and he was getting them butchered here we did not yet own this butcher shop he bought that in 1994 but bison are the reason we are butchers i feel like somebody's creeping up behind me so josh steiner you've seen him in some of our videos some of our butchering some of our cooking videos him and his brother jeremy do excellent barbecue so today josh is going to be doing some of the precise trimming the skirt steaks some of the ribs and things like that he's been training here now for what six seven months about seven months he's doing a fantastic job um so wanted to bring him in and do some of the of the trimming etc i'm gonna be doing the braking scott's gonna be doing uh some of the the breaking down of the primals pulling flat irons chuck roasts flanks stuff like that let's just get started so the first thing we do just like a lot of the stuff you that you you're gonna see you've seen us do with beef too so this is the skirt steak this is the outside skirt so right here you have an outside and an inside the inside lays right inside that plate so the first thing we do is we start with removing that outside skirt this is going to josh he's going to peel the membrane off of it and then we'll cut it into steaks so i'm going to start with removing this plate the first half of bison that we do we're going to do bone-in version so bone-in are your tomahawk chops your porterhouse t-bone and things like that so with this we're going to chop this plate off here and then we're going to leave these long rib bones and we're going to turn these into tomahawk steaks [Music] i typically like to shorten these bones up just a little bit you can save that for a short rib so when i cut short ribs typically what i do um just cut count over four bones and then we'll cut these down to make make them smaller but that's your little short rib chunk this part right here can get a little dicey sometimes trimming these this vertebrae off of here so what you want to do here is you want to break this vertebrae so you can trim these bones off so that's all i'm doing is using this band saw to be able to cut through those for a tomahawk steak [Music] see how that looks now now i can get my knife down in there the whole way down through and then we can cut in between these for our steaks this is the chuck we have the shank brisket arm there's some ribs in here we're gonna pull then we have our flat iron our chuck eye scott mentioned the hump roast earlier this is the neck so what we want to do is we want to get this up on our band saw and make a few cuts with our band saw we start by removing the shank and the brisket [Music] now it's time for some arm roasts the bison arm roast [Music] typically what we do is we we trim this and i'll show you how we do that we cut these in half that gives us a pot roast with a bone in it and then a boneless arm roast and then we'll save these ribs for shore ribs so typically on a half you get five arm rows so two four and then this one we don't save this portion because it's larger so there's your fifth roast right there let's remove the neck [Music] this portion i'm gonna hand over to scott he's going to pull flat irons chuck eye things like that we're going to do some cross-cut shanks [Music] [Music] keeping in mind throughout this process that we do save all the marrow bones some of the knuckle bones they make excellent soup stock so when you see us put these bones over onto the boning table we save the trimmings for ground meats and then the bones get saved for soup stock this is the bison brisket certainly a lot leaner than a beef as you can see they're fantastic on the smoker you do have to be a little bit more careful because they're leaner you don't dry them out but what we want to do is just pull the sternum bone out here so once we get that pulled out trim just a little bit of this fat off of here like i said they're pretty lean so it doesn't hurt to leave a little bit then we usually just trim them up just a little there you have bison brisket ready for the smoker throw some beer to butcher black seasoning on that you're in for a good time onto those arm rows so typically what i do is i separate these short ribs we usually make our short ribs four ribs long so just do like that then i'll take this silver skin right here i usually take that off there because it's not very pleasant when you go to cook it and then josh i'll hand this over to him he's going to peel that little thin membrane off of those get them ready for the meat case and then with this one as mentioned earlier we don't save this roast right here because it just has the bone to meat ratio is not good so we don't save that one other than for trim for ground meats but this one will make a fantastic boneless bison arm roast and that's as we get these items cut we're just going to get them laid out here on our table and then further in the video we'll do an overview of everything that we processed so now this one i'm gonna save a bone in it's a nice pot roast got that bone in there for all that flavor and a boneless so there's our five arm roasts off that first half now we do go down through here with a meat scraper before these go into our package we scrape this bone dust off there because one you have to make it look nice with your cutting and then two appearance goes a long ways when it goes into a package with your consumer so we just get them all cleaned up all right let's watch scott there's all kinds of fun things to get out of here any scots hot tips there's got to be a hot scotch hot tip in there somewhere have a sharp knife so we're going to do flat iron and then under there is going to be the chuck pull the chalk roll and then we're going to do a hump roast you can also get denver or ribs out of this so we'll just kind of show you i like to start there's a a bit of a line here that tells you where your flat iron rests pull this cap off the top here right here is where my flat iron lays so i can cut right down to the bone right here and on this bone i've got to turn my knife back in just a little bit get under that bone that's where our flat irons are coming from this would be the shoulder blade bone here this is what's referred to as the mock tender because it resembles in appearance the tenderloin there's our shoulder blade now that we've got at this point we're just going to cut a line right across here separate our chuck roll it's going right down along those blade bones that's where we have our either our denver stake or our uh our ribs in this case we're gonna we're gonna do ribs now what i like to do here because because of this hump right here now the hump roast was a prized piece because it has um all this fat storage in there so it's got a lot of energy in there so i'm just going to start right here and we're cutting right through that yellow tendon so that's what the animal picks picked its head up for munching the grass peel this out of here there's a nice squared up chuck roll i'll show you what this hump roast looks like i like to do then is just square this up nice little hump roast we're going to work simultaneously here i'm going to do the flat iron scott's going to do the mock tender i'm going to save these as steaks and he's going to cut some maybe some kebabs or stir fry or something out of that it is a pretty tender piece of meat that he's working on so we want to utilize that into some different cuts now if you've ever trimmed out a flat iron steak they're sort of difficult and bison are even harder just because the meat's a little bit sticky they're super lean they can be a little bit of a challenge but they're worth it once you get it done because they are ridiculously delicious let's go into a little bit of the fish fillet method so we do have two things going here once we don't want to move through this animal too fast but we also understand that you know what we're doing what we're going to achieve here is going to be quite a bit for a video so we don't want to get too long on our video because we know it's already going to be pretty long as it is so once we get that trimmed down we're just going to go ahead and chop this in to some steaks so we got three there three there there's your flat irons scott's doing stir fry bison chuck roasts these are incredible first half we're going to do in a chuck roast second half we'll do into some chuck eye steaks but we like to cut these you know a nice two to three pound boneless roast and then we'll run them through our netter put a real nice netting on them look at those beauties delicious throw that in a the old slow cooker whether it's a dutch oven or a crock pot throw your favorite veggies in it some bearded butcher blend seasonings sounds like a sunday afternoon lunch to me so we just take our netting stretch it over the end of our cone here and just run these through these are really nice because it keeps the meat all together when you put it in your crock pot and then once it's cooked you can pull your roast out and separate your veggies if you want or or however you want to do it they just they look really nice in the netting especially in the vacuum sealed pack so i'm going to take this leftover piece from this chuck that scott did we're going to get ourselves a real nice set of ribs off of these [Music] time for some bison tomahawks first thing we want to do is start with pulling the membrane off these rib bones i like to use a meat hook get started with a meat hook that way you can pull the rest of these off of there might need to help it a little bit as you go once you get that membrane removed if you remember me saying about making the cut right here with your bandsaw this is why because now i can go down through here every single bone is detached from the vertebrae you can just run your knife down along strip these bones right out of there once you get these bones off we'll take this and flip it over and we want to so right here is where that that rib eye is right here and we want to come just above where that rib eye ends and just leave a little bit of a tail on there so we want to go from this point we want to come just above where it ends here so you can just draw a little line there then you just take your knife run it all the way across down to those rib bones now we can do just peel that meat off those ribs just like that now we want to take this cap off of here a lot of this can be done just by a little bit of knife work and then of course just pulling on it thing with bison it's sort of like elf when you cut it because the consistency of the meat is sticky compared to beef so everything just kind of sticks and the blood just dries up on your hands it gets a little bit pasty so we'll just cut this off now we'll remove the rest of that yellow cord that paddy whack the old timers used to cut that up in pieces and chew on it like bubble gum last the entire day if you wanted it to now what we want to do is we just want to go down in between each of these bones i usually just make a cut at the base where you want when you trim it where you want your trimming to stop so it doesn't run into the actual stake and then just come down along each side of the bone just taking that meat out from in between those rib bones so once you get them cleaned up to about right there we'll come back through and clean them up a little bit more here in a second but once you get them to that point we can just take our big knife and go down in between each bone that doesn't scream carnivore i don't know what does i think you could eat one of those it's about a two and a half pound three pound steak best thing to do with these i mean you can eat it yourself but get one do a nice reverse sear on it share it with a couple guests those are fantastic and then what i do is i just go down through and just get these bones nice and clean any meat you leave on them when you cook them it almost kind of graze the bone up a little bit it doesn't look quite as desirable so we try to get the bones cleaned up as best we can on to that hindquarter we're going to start by pulling our flank take the rose meat off so once we get this rose meat off of here we'll pull this flank steak out so located right inside here you have your flank just trim this bristle off the edge peel the membrane exposing that flank steak follow right along that seam remember when you cut meat that a lot of these muscle different muscle structures they they reveal themselves just by following a seam so once you learn the anatomy of the animal you find that seam you follow the seam it's like a it's like a road map or connect the dots if you will because then you you get the cut and the way it's supposed to look if you follow those so now that see like right here you can see this kind of this natural break in this fat and the seam right there that gives you the shape of what the flank is supposed to look like there's a bison flank let's go ahead and pull this round tip out this round tip consists of the tri-tip and the round tip roast so we just start by separating that knuckle come down to this ball joint right here just above that ball joint you don't want to get into that tenderloin here again finding the seam just using the tip of your knife there's a seam right here between the sirloin and the tri-tip that you want to find and just putting pressure with my left hand just pull that round tip and tri tip right out of there let's remove the knuckle peel this membrane off give myself a handle there's your round tip roast sirloin tip either one keeping in mind anything that we trim off of these cuts is either going to be stew meat stir fry etc or going to ground meat so when you see us trim something it is getting utilized for a different product in the end so look at those just absolutely gorgeous lean pure protein bison meat bison tri-tip just going to get it trimmed up a little bit you do want to take the heavier fat off of this and that silver skin so i usually take the silver skin off like this what you see here that way when you cook it and slice it you don't get an unpleasant gristle chunk that you have to chew on there is a little bit right here on the end so i like to just trim that off beautiful bison tri-tip roast kidney makes some excellent dog food that's what we use it for now bison have a smaller amount of kidney suit this kidney fat right here we'll pull this out keeping in mind that that tenderloin is located right behind this fat so you want to be real careful you don't make big hack marks in that because nobody wants to buy a porterhouse or t-bone or a filet with a big pack mark in it peel this fat out once we get the fat removed so right below this h-bone right here there's a ball joint that connects that h bone to that top of that sirloin so you want to just take your your knife and find that ball joint right there and just make a cut all the way through that sirloin right where that ball joint separates right there then we just take our hand saw just cut right through that joint [Music] now in this section what you have is your sirloin um so we're going to do bone in and boneless the first half we're going to do bone in the sirloin portion on bison we always make boneless regardless so we're going to do a little chunk of tenderloin we're going to do boneless sirloins and then we'll do porterhouse and t-bone on the rest of it and then on the second half we'll do the boneless version which will pull the tenderloin cut into fillets and then we'll do a sirloin fillet strip onto the round portion and then we'll get into cutting the porterhouse and t-bone and then after we break this round down so we start by removing this hind shank finding that knuckle these will cut into the thor's hammers we've been cutting those and they've been real popular for us so that's going to be a thor's hammer i'll show you how to do that we start by pulling the h bone it's a little oyster steak if you want to save it by all means go for it a little bison oyster just want to take your knife and follow around this h-bone finding that knuckle once you find that knuckle you can just pop through it time for a thor's hammer maybe you saw the video that we did on these when we did the beef thor's hammer if not you'll have to refer back to it and watch that video just trim it up a little bit let's take the knuckle off take the hock off do a thor's hammer we're just gonna leave about you know three and a half four inches of meat on this put all the way around the bone keeping a nice straight cut start at the top of the shank cut down the bone until you meet your cut you previously made trimming that bone up a little bit there you have a bison thor's hammer cook it low and slow cook it long you know smoke it long enough to get those connective tissues to break down you have some fantastic barbacoa make some great tacos some sandwiches you'd like that one so now we're gonna cut some steaks if we were gonna do this boneless which you'll see on the next half i would peel this whole tenderloin out and then i would i'd break it down that way but since we're going to do porterhouse and t-bone i'm going to use my band saw to cut this sirloin chunk off so we'll just set it over on my bandsaw right here at this last knuckle before it makes the turn on that hip that's about where we're going to cut that's the sirloin let's cut some porterhouses and t-bones you want to leave just a little bit of a tail on there this first steak [Music] just to square things up i always pulled a little chunk of tenderloin out of there we'll solve that as a fillet we're gonna cut these about an inch and a quarter [Music] dandy porterhouse steaks we'll use the scraper to get the bone dust off of these as well [Music] you always get a few more porterhouses than you do t-bones on bison they just have a bigger tenderloin that runs down through there compared to beef [Music] six quarter houses and five t-bones we'll get these all scraped up and get them looking pretty for the table now onto that sirloin just pull this little bit of tenderloin out of there just fall down along that bone get that trimmed up and get it cut into some fillets let's make some boneless sirloin steaks you want to just stay right up along that bone on that h bone so you could save the pecan out of this if you'd like we typically leave those on our boneless sirloin steaks we don't have a lot of requests for pecan we don't typically save them separate from the sirloin but just do a little bit of trimming now we have a whole boneless sirloin roast and let's cut it into some steaks squaring it up just a little bit so we like to cut some like this pork this part right here is not super desirable it's got a lot of gristle in it so we like to cut some half sirloins as well that just makes a lot better steak so if you see me cut some of these in half that's why it's just a really nice steak cut about an inch and a quarter thick now we have this little fillet piece this little tenderloin this is the butt end of the tenderloin we're going to go ahead and make it into some individual fillets just start by removing the silver skin staying nice and tight to that silver skin we don't want to leave too much of that meat cut it up into a few fillets and i will add the chunk i saved earlier when i squared up that porterhouse now you have a four real nice bison fillets that that would happen to be my knife you know the golden rule and butchering grab any knife you find and use it until it's dull never get a hold of another man's knife that's why i put that little mark on there so that i know it's grab that one mine i know it's sharp hold out your fingers this is what we know as a steamship round i'm gonna go ahead and break this bone out of here we've got inside round also known as the top round we've got a bottom round an eye of round heel of round so it's going to cut right down along this bone loosen this up all the way around here all the way around the round big old femur bone pull this heel out of here i understand you can't see that from that angle then we can start to break down the different muscle sections here there's our inside here's our eye around it's nice because as you become more proficient butcher you get you sort of just look at the road map all the different ways that an animal just cut it along those seams is our bottom round also known as a flat i'm going to break this down further right along that seam right there flip it over bison since they are so lean we don't dry age them quite as long because as you can see that really has no fat to cover it prevent it from drying out there's that trim up our eye around here a little bit cut a couple of nice eye around roasts and then on our top or inside i'm just gonna get this ready a couple different things we can do here cut you a nice couple of london broils and then that's going to make the rest into some jerky square this up a couple nice london broils there's some stuff for jerky more jerky more jerky so with jerky you can see the grains are going this direction you want to cut against the grains when you make your strip so just cut it this direction and then come back and just cut some nice thin pieces like this and then you're left with those grains that way when you chew it it pulls apart first half is complete this one was our bone in and i'm gonna i'm just gonna do an overview show you what we have keeping in mind some of the stuff is boneless like round tips and stuff so let's start up here at this front corner we'll just get started um bison skirt steaks we have some stir-fry out of that mock tender we have the hump roast we have some short ribs cross-cut shanks we have that thor's hammer flat irons bison filet boneless sirloins a couple iron rounds some london broils we have a brisket these are the arm roasts bone in and boneless we have those boneless netted chuck roasts here are some round tips we have the bison tomahawks t-bones porterhouse t-bones always have the lesser portion of that little fillet in there you can see a porterhouse has that big chunk of tenderloin so t-bone porterhouse we have a tri-tip we have a bison flank we have a pile for some bison jerky we have some stew meat and we also have some bones for some soup stock so that's the first half we're going to cut the second half a little bit a little bit different we want to run through on a whole bison for you so let's get started with the second half so a lot of this you've already seen us do on that first half that's why we're going to run through it fairly quick and then we'll just slow down and we'll highlight those pieces that are going to be boneless on this one so in the last half we did tomahawks this one we're gonna do uh rib eyes so we're gonna be removing all these bones that you saw leave on previously and to do that i just cut all those short ribs those bones right off of there so similar to the tomahawk but we don't have those long bones on here [Music] but you still want to be able to get your knife down there [Music] and trim all these off so get those bones off of there pull and peel now something that's a little bit different when you're making a rib eye is these back ribs we're just going to take them all the way off so with the tomahawks we obviously we left these on we left the bones long we're going to make this rib section completely boneless there you have a boneless bison rib section ready to get cut into stakes first half we did the tomahawks now we're doing the bison rib eyes just a beautiful beautiful steak so if you want a steak that's not as thick as the tomahawks and doesn't have that big bone on it grab a bison rib eye 16 bison rib eye steaks cut about an inch and a quarter thick you wouldn't love to have those in their freezer so the one thing that we are going to do a little bit different with this chuck is we're going to be cutting chuck eyed stakes instead of chuck roast so scott's going to do the normal fabrication of this front but instead of cutting that chuck eye in the roast we'll do stakes so there's your arms [Music] here's that truck portion for scott [Music] so on the first half i did boneless chuck roasts and we netted them this one we're going to do chuck eye steaks so a little butcher's tip for you little tricks of the trade i did put this in the freezer for a minute just to tighten it up because it's easier to cut that way so i do that with the with the chuck eyes and the rib eyes because it keeps a more uniform piece that's easier to cut when you freeze it so just doesn't have to be frozen solid just just to tighten it up a little bit these are fantastic just a grills of steak you can make burnt ends you know you can do whatever you want with them but bison chuck eye steaks all right allow me to present the peons now before they get upset and you get upset it's an endearing term that sean self-labeled now peon a spanish american day laborer or unskilled farm worker in south and southeast asia a low-ranking worker such as an attendant orderly or assistant the elder son is a peon at nearby school so the boners are which is a better term a boner or a peon they they like peon so the peons are deboning so removing any uh cartilage connective tissue and then obviously the bones now all humor aside one of the most important jobs your neck gets sore you spend hours and hours and hours of just doing the mundane work certainly not a peon this is what turns out beautiful ground meats you're not gonna have gristle pops in it you're gonna have it nice and lean so much appreciated job that these guys are doing over here so about 40 50 of what comes off of that carcass comes to this table to get further trimmed out great work peons [Music] so [Music] so on the first half we did porterhouse and t-bone this one we're going to do boneless which is sirloin fillet and strip so you'll you'll see we're going to do this a little bit different we want to pull this tenderloin out hole staying nice and tight to the vertebrae just gonna peel that whole tenderloin out of there just like that and then we'll get it all trimmed up now we want to separate the sirloin from the strip by doing that we just go through here break the snuggle downward pressure that will separate the sirloin from the strip this one will be pretty similar to the last one that you saw me do trim it up a little bit [Music] so with the strip steaks we have to prep those bones where you can get your knife through there just like that we start by similar to the rib eye stakes just removing all the bones these will all get cleaned up on the bone and table trim just a little bit of that tail off of there now you want to take these little bones out works really good to set your thumb on it and just kind of carve around the bone it just pops out of there just using the tip of your blade there's your boneless strip section so we have strip sirloin onto the tenderloin whole bison tenderloin this is an awesome piece of meat like the creme brulee of the bison so i remove this chain off of here once you get the chain off we'll just get the silver skin tenderloin sirloin strip time to get started cutting some steaks let's cut some fillets so with these we usually cut them about an inch and a half thick man this is just so tender my knife just barely have to push on it just cuts right down through there any of these ends we'll use for some kebabs makes great kebabs so there's some bison fillets and i brought a porterhouse over just so i could demo the differences between the two so there's your fillet so you can see right there there's your fillet there's your bone now if i cut some strip steaks that strip steak lies right there so boneless we have a filet and strip bone in we have a porterhouse there's your difference so fillet and strip now on to the sirloin [Music] there's that half sirloin those nice big full sirloins and that's your difference between bone-in and boneless we'll get them on the table we'll do an overview and we'll show you a side-by-side [Music] [Music] all right you saw the overview on the first half now we have the second half so what you see is everything from an entire bison except the ground meats on these two tables we thought it'd be pretty cool to get everything on two tables that way you could see you know what a whole bison produces like i said you saw the overview on the first half with the bone in on the boneless we have skirt steaks short ribs we have a back rib some stir fry hump roast flat irons we have those cross cut shanks we have the thor's hammer a brisket we have arm roast round tip stew meat some bison for jerky we have a tri-tip a flank steak let's move down here so these are the rib eye steaks we cut tomahawks on the first half this one we have the ribeye steaks there's some iron rounds we have our chuck eye steaks we have our strip steaks if you remember strip steaks strips and fillets equals a quarter hour if you left the bone it would be a porterhouse so moving over here we have our london broil we have our fillets and then we have our sirloins so that pretty much wraps up a whole bison cut bone-in version boneless version we thought you guys would enjoy seeing a bison be cut up you certainly enjoyed the beef it's sitting at almost 13 million views let's see what we can get this one up to we'd appreciate it tell all your friends and family to subscribe to our channel watch our videos if it wasn't for you guys we wouldn't be able to do this this is what we love we love feeding america that's why we're doing it and we love teaching you so stay tuned for more until then see ya [Music] you

Channel: The Bearded Butchers

Views: 1,572,243

Keywords: The Bearded Butchers, Bison

Id: layHe1BFnm4

Length: 58min 1sec (3481 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 06 2022