Hanging weight

I get a lot of questions regarding how buying beef direct from a farmer is different than buying from a store so I thought I need to explain a few things so everyone is on the same page and can understand the lingo. 

Hanging weight refers to how much a half cow ( side of beef ) or whole cow weigh after the time of slaughter. 

When a cow is slaughtered the skin is removed; all the bodily fluids are drained; the horns and head are removed; the lower section of the legs are removed and all the internal organs are removed. The animal can then be weighed on an inspected/certified scale as a whole hanging beef or it can be split down the middle and be weighed as 2 sides of beef. NOTE: nothing that was removed during slaughter is weighed as part of the hanging weight, therefore if you received things like liver, heart, tongue etc as part of your order you are not being charged anything for those items. 

One last point before moving on is weight. I'm going to assign a real number here so everyone can follow along. Let's say the cow weighed 1200 lbs when it stepped off the trailer I delivered it on. After the butcher slaughtered it the new weight was 700 lbs hanging weight. Since the butchers scales are certified as legal for trade all billing is based from the hanging weight. I pay the butcher's labor based on hanging weight and I sell the beef based on hanging weight.

From here the sides of beef are kept in a special dry aging cooler for a minimum of 15 days, some slaughter houses charge up to $20/day for cold storage. At this point grocery store beef and farm raised dry aged beef start to become 2 different things. Remember apples vs oranges. Dry aged beef will begin to gain flavor as it loses moisture. Remember moisture is water and water weights 8 lbs per gallon. Mass produced beef will never enter a dry aging process, instead it will be cut into whole sections and packed in large vacuum bags where water and preservatives are added and sent to local grocery stores where it's cut and wrapped and put out for display. 

Here's a thought to consider. Let's say you pay $8/lb for a dry aged steak and $7/lb for a grocery store steak. Which one is cheaper? Let's say the dry aged steak at $8 has already lost its moisture and the grocery store steak has to cook out it's moisture and lose 20 percent of it's weight. If we add the 20 percent loss back to the $7 store steak then we see we are now actually paying $8.40/lb . In this example we see the dry aged steak comes out the winner. On a side note consider the same example with cheap ground beef vs farm raised. Ground beef can be stretched out using more water, adding in fat from many different other animals back into the mix ( in many cases this fat may even come from another slaughter house or a mixture of several animals that were slaughtered) or possibly even other items like colorings or pink slim.

Yield

On part 1 of beef talk we discussed hanging weight of beef and we discovered the difference between live weight and hanging weight for a beef cow. I'm going to continue to use our weights from part one as we move forward learning the rest of the process. As a reminder, in part 1 we started with a live cow that I delivered to the slaughter house that weighed 1200 lbs when it was unloaded and after slaughter it had a hanging weight of 700 lbs .

Now we are going to discuss yield.

Yield is the percentage of weight of the beef after it's dried for at least 15 days as compared to the hanging weight of the beef just after slaughter. Yield is measured after the moisture has been allowed to evaporate out of the meat and the beef has been trimmed and cut into individual cuts of meat. 

The dry aging / cut and trim process will reduce the weight of the beef by 25-28 percent. The meat didn't disappear and the butcher didn't steal it. Remember from part 1 we discussed water weighs 8 lbs per gallon. Store beef isn't dry aged therefore it never goes thru this process so you are actually paying for water when you purchase fresh store beef. 

Ok let's think back on that 700 lb hanging weight, with a 28 percent weight loss from moisture/cutting we know have 504 lbs of beef. 

The example above assumes the butcher cuts everything as a bone in cut. We process all our beef as boneless with the exception of tbones. I would prefer that tbones be cut into NY strips and filet mignon however that's not a very popular set of cuts. 

The reason we choose boneless is because we want to give the best customer experience as possible so we can build relationships with returning customers. A bone in cut has a much higher package failure rate in the freezer especially if the meat is just poured into a deep freezer and shuffled around each time someone is looking for a certain cut of meat. Cuts that have bones left in the meat will quickly cut the packaging from the inside out and rupture the vacuum sealed bags. Once the seal is broken it doesn't take long before the meat will freezer burn and lose it's flavor. There are products such as bone guards that can be added to protect bone in cuts but they don't seem that effective to me.

Another point to consider is boneless beef also weighs less because the weight of the bone has been removed. We saw that our yield for bone in beef was around 72 percent. Boneless beef will yield around 65 percent. Let's look at that 700 lbs of hanging weight again. With the moisture removed, the meat cut/trimmed and the bones removed we now have about 455 lbs of dry aged beef. 

Ok, we have one last thing to consider. TRIMMED FAT! Besides dry aging,  another big factor in producing a good tasting steak is MARBLING. Marbling is fat and it costs money to fatten a cow. Think Waygu beef, that's a lot of expensive marbling right there!

I'm unaware of any way to have marbling in the muscles ( steak ) and not have excess fat around the rest of the cow. The secret is balance! Knowing when the right time to harvest the cow is key. If you harvest too early then there will be less marbling. If you wait too long you'll have to trim away too much excess fat on the outside of the cow. Fat is good and useful. We blend 20 percent of fat into our ground beef especially since we have so many people on specialty diets like keto. Any fat that exceeds the need to blend the ground beef into an 80/20 blend gets recycled by the butcher. There are times when excess fat trimmings can also lower the yield of the beef but that's rare as long as you control when you harvest the cows.