Get to Know Beef Cuts from Your Local Butcher

Join Lindsey, owner and butcher at Blondies Butcher Shop, as she takes you through the intricate process of breaking down a beef carcass into various cuts, including chuck roasts, short ribs, and more. Follow along as she and shares tips and techniques along the way.

What You’ll Learn:

• Learn the anatomy of a beef carcass and how to identify different cuts
• Discover expert tips for optimal cutting techniques to maximize meat yield
• Insights into the precision required when managing large carcasses to craft perfect cuts

Transcript:

Lindsey: Okay, as long as we’re going with it this morning and I’ve got this beef on the table, let’s cut some arm roasts and some chuck roasts. Let’s see where they come from. I have a beautiful 920 pound beef carcass on my saw right now. We just removed the brisket. Let’s pull some chucks and some arm roasts out.

So what I have is the head is actually right here. This is the neck. This is the top of the spine here. This is the front leg where the leg came off. This is where we pulled the front leg and the brisket off at this point in time. And then this is cutting the half of beef off right behind, well, we’re a little behind the shoulder, but yeah, a little behind the shoulder and the front leg.

I do about a two inch margin cut on all of my rows. So bring your saw down to two inches. Sometimes on a bigger beef than this, I’ll go maybe a hair under two inches because I know I’m gonna get a really long chuck roast. Maybe if I have a smaller animal, I’ll move my inch up to about two and a half inches and that’ll give me a really thick, but it’ll be a smaller shoulder, but I’ll get equal amount of meats. But then your number counts are gonna be off. So remember your counts for your roasts and steaks all depend on the confirmation of balance of your animal, bottom line. And breathe.

Okay, so there’s two arm rows for every side of the beak. So there’s four rows total on an entire beak. So what you saw me do is I trimmed some of my front neck off because it was catching on my saw and not running through. So when you’re working on the carcass, make it manageable for you. I’ve not built like a big six foot 200 somehow man. I’m five foot three on a good day and really have to break these down so I can handle them without hurting myself. So now we’ve cut the armroast off here we’re gonna flip it and go to the back and we’re gonna pull chucks from this angle.

So we hit kind of the base of neck, the front of the animal. When I hit the knuckle bone, the front shoulder knuckle bone here, it’s usually when I stop and you’ll see that in your roast. So this is a big old chuck roast, but you can see we got a big bone in here. So there’s not much I can take out of here. If I needed to pinch another roast out, I could keep going and just take the upper neck portion off here, but in this case it’s a big beautiful animal so we don’t have to do that. Most of the time we’ll last neck piece, we’ll bone it out. I do have people request neck, so you’ll see the spine right down here, we’ll cut that out for soup bone, really whatever people want. So, let’s break some chucks down. And remember you can always move your saw blade to control your blade better, you can work a little faster that way.

Cut the bottom spine off. I like to square it up, get rid of your front tendon here. Throw it to your boner. This will be trimmed off. That’ll be hamburger. Check your external fat for any damage or waste that could be cut off. I like a nice square chop.

So I always feel like I’m brushing a horse. I feel like this is like a meat curry cow. So you just want to make sure you get the bone dust off, the fat dust, all of that. There you go. There’s your perfect chuck roast.

So now we’ve got the middle section of the beef. We’ve already broke the arm, the chuck, the shoulder, and the brisket off. So now we’ve got the prime rib up here we’re gonna cut. We’ve got short ribs, and then we’ve got the plow plate. This person wants short ribs and ribeyes.

Big carcasses are hard to handle sometimes, especially for my size. Don’t be afraid to break them down, make them manageable and structured for yourself.

We’re going to break the plate off now at the bottom. We’re cutting short ribs.

Now this is the ribeye, we have to remove this top spine. Mind you this carcass has been hanging for 5 weeks in my cooler.

So I have a rookie splitting right now who’s still kind of learning the ropes. This isn’t wrecked. I wish this had all the, I call them the phalanges, but all the vertebrals going up where he kind of got off to one side, but it’s not wrecked. It’s not damaged. We can fix a lot when it gets up front. But traditionally I would like to see a lot more bone on the back side of this ribeye. We’re just gonna clean up that rounded look and remove this bone.

I prefer to cut my ribeyes and then clean them up on the saw later. Going at about an inch standard. First cut is always your clean up cut. Size of my head.

You see how huge this is? I am going to trim this top off to make it look a little prettier. This is the rib eye cap, if anybody ever asked you that or if you’re looking for what a cap is. I will probably cut into that a little bit and remove it for some deboning. This is a really beautiful rib eye and this is actually rib steak, I apologize, because they wanted the bone left in the rib bone. So we did a rib steak on this one.