Eight Acres

Before we had our last steer butchered I went to great trouble to source an organic sausage mix for the butcher to use.  Ideally I would just make a sausage mix, but there are a few problems with this when you do a homekill beef steer. Yum :) Firstly the butcher doesn't have all morning to fiddle around with bespoke sausage recipes.  He likes to just tip in a premix, add the water and churn  out the sausages.  Secondly, when you have 50 kg of sausages to make, you get ONE chance to get your special sausage recipe to work, otherwise, you ruin all those sausages.  So while I'm all for experimenting with my own sausage recipes, butcher day is not the time to do so!  The alternative to buying a sausage premix was to buy a sausage maker and make our own after the butcher had packed up.  Have you seen a butcher making sausages though?  That is a SKILL that you need to work at.  We have attempted to make sausages before with our auger j...

When we have a steer butchered we like to try to use every part of the animal.  We eat the meat and some of the offal, the dogs get the bones and the rest of the offal, we render the tallow and tan the hide.  The only waste is the head, which we bury, so at least it enriches the soil. Tanning the hid is a big job.  This our third hide, so we are getting better at the process every time.  I posted some detailed instructions ( here and here ) when we did the last hide this time last year.  The most important thing to get the hide spread out somewhere safe and dry and covered in salt as soon as possible after the animal is skinned.  If the hide is dried out sufficiently it will last for months, and we have found that it actually improves as it dries.  This hide was in the shed since August, so it was about 5 months, and it was very stiff and dry, which made it easier to work. In the past we have fleshed the hide using a scraping tool, which took seve...

When we had our steer killed back in August, I asked the butcher to keep some of the fat for me, so that I could render it to tallow.  With the previous animal, I had attempted to render in a large pot over an open fire.  This is not how to render fat, I just made a big black sticky stinky mess.  So this time I put the fat in the freezer and did some research first.   This post was very helpful and I decided to use the slow cooker to render the fat.  We don't have a food processor that I could use to chop the fat, so I fed it through our mincer/juicer, which was very messy, and would have worked better if the fat was more frozen at the time. preparing the fat is rather messy I forgot to take a photo of it in the slow cooker, but you get the idea, a slow cooker full of minced fat, turned on low and left for several hours until all the fat had melted.  Pete then helped me to pour the melted fat through a sieve and into old homebrew cans.  From ...

The other week we had a butcher come out to Eight Acres to kill Bratwurst the Limousine-Fresian cross steer.   We had to use a different butcher because our last one had sold up and gone to work in the mines!  Fortunately we found another good one, he was punctual, clean, hard-working and friendly.  Last time I wrote some tips about preparing for a homekill , this is just a few notes that I thought of this time. Pete had the Tuesday off work for day one of the butchering.  The butcher turned up around midday and Pete had Brat ready in a separate paddock so that the butcher could shoot the steer and then work on skinning, quartering and then hanging him in the mobile cool room.  I left the camera for him, but in the rush he forgot to take photos, the butcher uses a giant tripod to lift up the carcass, which is really quite clever, so I'm sorry I can't show it to you.  Maybe next time! The butcher at work in our car port more butcheri...

Thanks everyone for the comments on my first post about tanning  our first two steer hides.  I was asked a few questions and I've done some more research since then, so I thought it was time for an update. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I was asked to provide a photo of the fleshing tool, so here's the one we got with the kit.  My husband made I similar tool from metal, so we'd have one each.  If you're not a metal-worker, then you can probably use any blunt tool (or bit of metal) that's large enough to grip each end. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Also, because I only described our process, I didn't go into detail about the other methods available for tanning hides.  From my research (google and books I mentioned in the last post), the following methods are possible: chrome tanning (the method we used...