The Accidental Agrarian

It has been six months since Maple was born. In that time he lead a grand life, in the high style….for a male dairy calf, that is. Hazel, his mother, was ill just after his birth‚Äîketosis‚Äîso we weaned him a week earlier than were going to. At first we bottle fed Maple, but within the week we had him trained to drink out of a bucket, because that’s just easier all the way around.¬† With Hazel having just freshened she was putting out more than twice the amount necessary to feed her little boy, so we saw no dent in the milk we needed for cheeses, butter, drinking or the pigs. We gradually worked Maple up to a couple gallons of milk a day–real milk, not artificial milk-replacer. Meanwhile he got all the hay he wanted as bedding in his pen and fodder in his feeder.

During sunny weather he was let out into the corral or tethered in the shade, on the lawn behind the farmhouse. We tried running him with the sheep in a small yard, but they got too rambunctious and it was like wooly tumbleweeds had been scattered across the barnyard with the Tasmanian Devil doing the scattering. We didn’t try that again‚Ķ.¬† Meanwhile, the months passed, the weather turned colder and Maple’s days of sunning himself in his paddock or the yard were numbered. Due to a heavy schedule of workshops, winter weather and other livestock butchery, and partly because I liked the little monster‚ĶMaple’s day of deliverance kept getting delayed.

Finally, the the time was right. The weather was fantastic all week. Sunny & cold‚Äîin the mid-teens. Perhaps a little too cold for this sort of work, but as the day progressed, the work and sun warmed us to the point of almost feeling hot. Because Maple had grown into such a big boy‚Äîat least 600lbs by rough estimate‚ÄîI had my friend John come over to help me. John is a veteran farmer and had dressed out moose by himself, so I knew he would be the right hand at the right time. At the appointed hour John came to the farm and we proceeded with the task at hand. Perhaps because I had been sitting in the kitchen over analyzing my emotions, or perhaps because I had drunk umpteen mugs of coffee, when I climbed up on the barn stairs to get a better shot at Maple I found it hard to draw a beed on the exact spot on his forehead where I knew a clean shot would render him senseless without any suspicion on his part. Maple in his part was excited to see me by shy about John, a stranger. When I squeezed the trigger and heard the bark of the .22Mag I watched John head to the gate to open it and begin the bleeding‚Ķ.but‚Ķ.nothing had happened. Maple stood there unfazed. Gazing at us with his goofy, love-sick calf look. I had completely missed him!! He probably flinched, I probably flinched and the shot went completely over the top of him. Without another second’s pause, and not on the stairs any more, I drew my beed and dropped the calf. It was quick. Painless. And my heart could stop pounding. John leapt in, opened the gate and slit the jugular veins so we could get a good bleed out.

It was all the two of us could do to drag Maple to the barn door so we could hook him to the tractor to lift up for good blood drainage and so we could get the skinning, eviscerating and quartering done. Initially I wasn’t planning on quartering the carcass. In my eyes, Maple was still the little calf I’d carried down from the field on a bright, sunny summer day. Instead, his hanging weight was more than two of us could carry half of. I never did weigh it properly, but I reckon there was over 400lbs of meat. Once quartered, we hung the carcass up in my cold-storage room and sat down to a much needed cup of coffee and lunch. I left the meat sit for a day because it was so cold. Normally veal isn’t aged because it has so little fat. I knew I didn’t want to let it hang any longer than necessary. Two days later I began a three day process of cutting it.

Now, normally, a butcher can breakdown several carcasses in one day. This job is made easier by standardized cuts and the use of a band-saw. But I don’t have a band-saw‚Äîprobably wouldn’t use one even if I did‚Äîand I didn’t want standardized cuts. The cuts of a veal carcass lay somewhere between those of a full grown beef and lamb. They also vary on US cuts, UK cuts and French cuts‚Äîas do most carcass cuts. Because veal is valued more in the UK and France as a culinary item, there are more recipes, variations and dishes one can make. In the US you can have chops, cutlets and shin, or Osso Bucco. Occasionally in the market you can find stew meat, but rarely outside of the restaurant world can you find any more cuts other than ground veal. This is because commonly most of the cuts not valued in the US are ground.

So, I found myself with several cut guides and recipes breaking down each quarter slightly differently. I have eaten plenty of veal, but had actually been steering clear of it for a long time, based on the grounds that I didn’t care for the treatment of veal calves. Veal has earned a very bad name for itself in the past few decades. This is largely due to the fact that the calves are fed a poor diet and live short miserable lives in order to make sure their flesh remains as white as possible. They are frequently pulled from their mother the moment they are born and spend their lives chained to a hutch where they cannot get any exercise. Because their immune system has been compromised by not getting any of their mother’s essential collostrum, they are fed antibiotics and other drugs regularly so they don’t scour (get diarrhea) and they are isolated from other calves so they do not make each other ill.¬† This is, to my mind, in direct opposition to being humane and creating good quality meat.

Several years ago I stumbled on the British idea of raising humanely treated, more mature Ros?© Veal. These veal calves are older, spend their life among their fellows, drink real milk and eat hay. They are also raised free in airy pens big enough to move around in and open to the outdoors but sheltered from the weather. To my mind this is far more humane and provides the calves with the best quality of life possible for what it is. This in turn makes for a better flavored, although darker pink‚Äîhence ros?©‚Äìmeat. In the US raising calves to this standard has been slow to catch on. In fact, I believe in most areas no one has even heard of it. Until I produced my own, I had never eaten Ros?© Veal. I am now¬† even more of an advocate than before.

And so, as I broke down the carcass I explored different muscle groups, a great many cuts and created many specifically for future recipes. I also went beyond just ground veal, cutlets and chops. The other night we ate a stuffed breast of veal which was amazing. I also have whole flanks waiting for stuffing and braising and rolled shoulders ready to create something special with. I also played around with making some Wiesswurst sausages using ground pork, veal & herbs. I want to use these cuts and ingredients to help people learn that veal can be sustainable, humane, profitable for the farmer who sells them direct to the public, and delicious‚Äîeven if it ins’t the endemic, sickly white veal that everyone has come to believe is the norm. For that, let’s try and substitute rabbit‚Ķ‚Ķ

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This entry was posted by Podchef on Thursday, January 13th, 2011 at 1:04 pm and is filed under Farming, Livestock. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.