Just another Day on the Farm

I have lived with the fact that my lamb has been lean, as in if you want most hamburgers or meatballs etc, its a good idea to bake them, raither then fry them, as you need to add extra fat to them, now on hoggots (year old sheep, which are not mutton), you certainly have more fat and the hamburger has a little more in it..

I had read over and over again that Large Black’s are lard pigs, and given Angelo’s age, I expected a good amount of fat, I did get a bag of leaf fat for making soap (a number of posts coming on that in the near future I assure you) I was expecting fairly fatty pork mince, but was a big shocked to realize that it was still quite lean, and that I could see on certain dishes I would need to cook in certain ways and or add a little fat to the pan..

The second thing that I have found of note in the pork is that the fat does not come out easily, when you cook up the bacon, even on the very thin sliced peices, the fat cookes and crisps but very little comes out into the pan itself..

Now I don’t know if this was because it was a “he” or because I don’t feed corn? or what that he didn’t have a good big fat layer on him but it will be interesting to see what that finally month of finishing on fresh milk will do to the girls in the barn.

Which brings us to the Beef (Marty), this morning , I made breakfast sausage, little yummy meat patties and was really surprised to see quite quickly that I was going to need to add fat to the pan, now I will admit that I have not had Non-Grain finished beef in a good long while, even back home in alberta, most of the time when the beef comes in off the range its still “finished on grains”.

While I was a little surprised at the lack of marbling in the steaks, it didn’t matter at all because they were still so tasty and full of flavour, but this morning, working with the hamburger, I can see that I will need to careful on how I cook these, because I can honestly say that the beef hamburger is lean enough that fat will need to be added to make proper sausage with it.

So I had a little look at what percent my butcher did them at, and its to be right around ten percent, which according to my google search says that would be considered lean in the stores but let tell ya, cooking with it, it cooks more like a extra lean then a lean.

The second thing I find interesting is how little fat was on my beef boy overall, I said I wanted my fat in my mince, and if that meant a little less fat and or if that meant on the beef, I could not get fat to render, then so be it, and that is indeed what happened, I have read about the amounts of wonderful leaf lard that folks get from their fully raised beef and I didn’t expect that much a younger beef but I expected some.. but didn’t get any back..

I can see that just as I had to put aside my limited knowledge on how to cook lamb, I am going to need to set aside my regular knowledge of how to use “store and corn finished beef” and learn how to cook all over again with my own homegrown grass-fed, no grain finished one..

If you eat grass-finished beef or no corn finished pork, did you also really notice a huge difference compared to what you could get even in a good quality small butcher, never mind what you would get at the stores?