Polymath

My wife and I bought a half a beef with another family last fall.  We’ve done that for the last couple of years and its worked out pretty well.  This year was a little different, though. 

They showed us a year-old fattened steer, but sold us, I speculate, a 6 year old worn-out breeder cow.  The meat is so tough that the steaks are almost inedible.  In addition to never trusting that meat packer ever again, I decided to get out my ½ horsepower industrial meat grinder that I keep around for reducing deer and elk to edible hamburger and grind up all the steaks and roasts into hamburger.  The benefit to tough meat is that while it makes shitty steak, it makes the leanest, bestest hamburger. 

So I defrosted it all a couple nights ago, and got the grinder out yesterday.  I ran it all through a rough grind, then reserved some of that for my chili (rough chili grind is hard to find in the local markets) and then ran the rest through a fine plate on a second pass to give it a more even texture.  Then, I used our commercial grade vacuum sealer to seal it all up and threw it in the freezer. 

The result is 48 pounds of hamburger in my freezer.  We took that meat, which we would not have eaten, and turned it into something that we will enjoy and will be very handy to keep around. 

Being a polymath, as Borepatch put it, is actually quite awesome.