A buyer's guide to butchery

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October 30, 2024

The process of going from a live animal to meat in your freezer doesn’t have to be mysterious to you as a buyer. To the contrary, the more you understand about the process, the better you can make decisions as to how you buy. We're here to help our patrons make informed decisions about their food. In this post, walk through the processes our animals take to go from our lush pastures to your home.

Poultry

Most of our poultry gets processed on Polyface. Our summer stewards, our apprentice team, and our full time staff help with this throughout the year. If you are visiting the farm, we welcome you to come observe the processing as it goes on. Some of our farm workshops even teach you how to do it yourself.

Our chickens are packaged either as whole birds or are cut up into parts and you can buy: leg and thigh quarters, boneless skinless breast, tenders, wings, livers and hearts, necks and backs.

Cutting up chickens is more labor intensive than packaging our birds whole, which means that buying your birds whole will always be the more economic option. If you don’t have a specific recipe that you need a certain cut of chicken for (wing night!), consider trying a whole chicken.

I like to roast them in the oven, then after you have used the meat off your chicken, you can use the bones to make chicken broth! You can also learn how to cut up a chicken all on your own, there are plenty of videos to show you and it is a helpful and fun skill to learn!

Beef

Our grass fed and finished cattle are sent to our local abattoir straight from our farm. After the initial kill, the beef is skinned and gutted, and the carcass is hung in a cooler before being cut up. First, the beef is cut up into "primals" (eight large sections) and is then cut into roasts and steaks.

When you buy a whole beef or half beef, you will hear the term “hanging weight”. The hanging weight is the weight of the carcass that is hung in the cooler (about 60% of live weight). Additionally, when the beef is then cut up, the final product is about 65% of the hanging weight because of the bones and fat that have to be removed.

Beef purchased from our online store is sold either as one bundle or or by the piece - this means that you will receive beef within the weight range you select for a set price.

For each beef that goes to the butcher, we can only get a certain amount of steaks, roasts and organ meats cut and packaged. For instance, we only get one heart and tongue from each animal. This is helpful to keep in mind when you're looking at our available inventory. There are some items that will sell out quickly due to demand.

As you do your online shopping, consider trying different cuts that are more in abundance, and definitely enjoy snatching up your favorite cuts that might be more rare!

One of my favorite hacks is to use roasts and just cut them differently depending on how I am cooking. I like to chop a roast into cubes to use in stews and soups. Or I like to slice them thinly to make fajitas or Philly cheese steaks. Get creative!! If you ever need inspiration for how to use a particular cut of meat, please email one of our farm team! We have so many great cooks among us. :)

Pork

Pork is similar to beef in its journey from farm to fork. The hanging weight is again about 75% of the live weight and the meat you get at the end is another 75% of the carcass weight.

Pigs have lots of yummy cuts to enjoy. A lot of pork also gets ground up to make our different varieties of sausages (both ground sausage and links). There are lots of cuts on pork that are very often overlooked though that have such great flavor and fat content.

Another pork product is their amazing fat that can be easily rendered to make lard which is such a healthy and awesome animal fat to use while cooking.

Some products like bacon ends, are similar to the popular (and oft snatched up!) bacon. I enjoy using bacon ends in recipes that need bacon to be diced because it saves me a step. I love frying bacon ends up with some caramelized onions and eggs to make a yummy breakfast scramble.

My other favorite pork cut is pork backbone. This is such a yummy and easy cut of pork that I had never heard of before I came to Polyface but it is now my go-to pork based meal. I love putting pork backbone into the slow cooker with a simple rub and letting it simmer all day. Usually right before I get finished cooking it, I like to add some barbeque sauce on top, then I can either shred it and use it as a pulled pork or eat the whole cut. It is so simple and easy!

I hope that these “insider” tips have been helpful to draw back the curtain a little bit and show you the process of a live animal going to the butcher then to our online inventory of yummy meats.

Maybe as you do your online shopping, you can now understand the “why” behind what you see! Try out one of my favorite cuts and try a new recipe. As always, this post is by no means exhaustive and we would love to answer any questions you have about our meat. Please reach out to our team!

Priscilla

All Related

Happy Thanksgiving, Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year--that's a lot of stuff going on kind of lumped together. Which brings me to my thought this month: it's all related. Perhaps the signature difference between Polyface and current mainline food thinking is integration versus segregation. I could use numerous words to describe this basic concept, like parts versus wholes, but I think these two are as good as any. Conventional industrial food systems break things apart. We see it on farms that grow only one or two things, without regard for the greater inter-relatedness of ecology, all the way up to packaged and processed food. Modern processed foods don't use whole ingredients; they use pieces of things. They strip out the germ of the wheat, for example. They refine things to the point that the food bears no resemblance to its natural state. Then they put all these pieces together and call it food. But these pieces came from widely divergent places, and the beautiful unprocessed original no longer exists. When Dad and I were brainstorming what to call this farm venture that would eventually become Polyface, Dad's assumption was that we'd call it Salatin Inc.--you know, like Ford Motor Company or Chrysler (named for Walter P. Chrysler, the founder). I was adamant that it NOT be our family name for two reasons. First, I suggested there may be a day when a Salatin isn't at the helm. Secondly, I wanted the name to recognize integrated thinking. I came up with the name "Interface Inc." to recognize the three great environments: water, land, and forest. For 20 years, during what I call our experimental homesteading days, we'd been planting trees, fencing out riparian zones, fencing out the forest to protect it from cows, and developing a landscape plan with these various zones in mind. The State Corporation Commission rejected the name because, unbeknownst to us, Virginia already had an "Interface Inc." It was a labor arbitration company to work out disagreements between labor and management. I was milking the cow when Dad told me the bad news, and I spontaneously blurted: "If we can't be Interface, let's be Polyface--the farm of many faces." Dad laughed, but we both liked the idea, and it stuck and was approved. The point here is that from the outset, all our thinking was about how to leverage the various assets of the diversified ecosystem and then harness the distinctives of the various animals. As a result, we looked at symbiotic natural patterns and have done our best to duplicate them. The Eggmobile follows the cows so the chickens can scratch through cow pies. We use pigs to aerate compost. Our small flock of sheep is like a glorified weed eater, cleaning up fence lines and around farm buildings to reduce mowing. The animals move through the pastures, paddock to paddock; they don't stay in the same place. Illustrative of "conventional-think", Virginia Tech veterinary professors who judged my son Daniel's 4-H talk titled "Symbiosis and Synergy in the Racken (Rabbit-Chicken) House" at the state contest nearly 30 years ago couldn't restrain their skepticism. "Aren't you concerned about diseases with two species that close to each other?" I was never so proud. He was about 15 and, without batting an eye, looked those professors in the eye and replied: "We've learned that most pathogens don't cross-speciate." Folks, I had not prepped him for that question. When he responded like that, those three professors slapped their legs and laughed at the audacious notion. They had no further comments and immediately tried to recruit him to enroll at Virginia Tech and major in Veterinary Science. Instead, he stayed with me on the farm and scaled up these simple integrated relationships to the thousands of animals we have now--with virtually no vet bills. Meanwhile, conventional experts wring their hands over bird flu, screw worm, African swine fever, blackleg, and a host of maladies that attack places where an integrated approach toward biology is severely lacking. Pediatrician Dr. Sharon Goldfield, director of population health for the Murdoch Children's Research Institute, wrote a fascinating op-ed in the Wall Street Journal last week titled "Baby Food and Youth Obesity." She slammed "packaged baby and toddler foods" because they fail even rudimentary nutrition standards. Their surveys indicated that "80 percent of children are eating packaged toddler foods, many of which are ultra-processed, from an early age, with 43 percent of them eating these foods at least five days a week." Kids are eating out of boxes and slurping from concoctions created by a segregated mentality from field to stomach. This segregated thinking even permeates parental decision making, divorcing overall health from food and assuming whatever happens, pharmaceuticals can fix it. At Polyface, everything we do assumes that everything we do affects something else we do. It's that simple. Both land health and people health occur when we realize everything relates to everything. You can't just eat well and not exercise. You can't dismiss the value of sunlight on your skin; especially early morning sunlight. Hydration. Sleep. Stress. Forgiveness. Gratitude. It's all part of us. As we celebrate all these holiday times and imagine the relatedness of Thanksgiving with the Christmas story with the eagerness of a new year, imagine all the things going on in your life and how they work together. Or how if you pull them apart, things fray. Be assured that here at Polyface we're trying to integrate ecology, people, and economy in an overall symbiotic whole to deliver you the best food at a reasonable price. And we thank you for helping us build an integrated whole that respects earthworms all the way to our dinner plate and microbiome. We're not feeding you earthworms, but be assured they play an ongoing role in every bite you enjoy from Polyface. Thank you. Joel

A buyer's guide to butchery

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