🥩 Beef, Sheep and Goat Cutting

Before you touch a carcass with a knife, read it. Five minutes of looking will tell you what the carcass is worth, which cuts it will yield, whether it can be aged, and where you will lose weight. Cutting first and thinking afterwards is how carcasses get turned into mince.

Start with the architecture. A beef carcass is split down the backbone into sides, and each side divides into a forequarter and a hindquarter. The conventional primals are chuck, which is the shoulder, rib, short loin, sirloin, round, which is the hind leg, brisket, plate and flank. The forequarter carries chuck, rib, brisket, plate and shank. The hindquarter carries loin, sirloin, round and flank.

Understand one thing about those names before you rely on them: cut names are commercial conventions, not regulated facts, and they vary between countries. What one market calls a sirloin another calls something else entirely. Learn the anatomy, which does not change, and then learn the names your own customers use.

This course also does not give you percentage-of-carcass figures for individual primals, for any species. Those figures could not be verified from an authoritative source. If you need them, obtain a national meat board's cut manual or a national meat-cutting standard. In the meantime, generate your own by weighing every primal as you cut it, which is the capstone of this module and is more useful anyway, because it describes your animals and your cutting.

What you can rely on is bone. Bone accounts for 15 to 20 percent of the carcass. That is the weight boning removes, and it is the reason bone-in yields of 65 to 70 percent sit so far above boneless yields of 55 to 60 percent for beef.

Now read the muscles, using the single most useful principle in meat cutting: tenderness follows work. A muscle that did heavy, repeated work in life is tough and full of connective tissue. A muscle that mainly held the animal up, and barely moved, is tender.

Apply it. The neck, shoulder and shank drove the animal forward and carried its weight over rough ground all its life, so chuck and shank are tough, richly flavoured, full of connective tissue, and they need long moist cooking. The muscles along the back, either side of the spine, did comparatively little, so the rib and loin are the tender, fast-cooking, high-priced cuts. The round worked hard but is lean and large, so it gives you lean roasting and braising joints and good mince. The belly muscles, brisket, plate and flank, are coarse-grained and layered with fat and connective tissue, and they reward slow cooking.

You do not have to memorise a chart. You have to look at where the muscle was on the animal and ask what it was doing.

The third thing you read is condition, and this is where money hides. Look at colour and feel the cut surface.

• Normal beef is bright cherry red, firm, and binds well. It can go anywhere: ageing, vacuum packing, curing, mince, fresh sale.
• DFD, dark cutting, is dark purplish red to almost black with a dry, often sticky surface. Its pH is 5.9 to 6.5 and sometimes as high as 6.8, against a normal ultimate beef pH of 5.4 to 5.7. It is safe to eat, but it has reduced shelf life and supports microbial growth more readily. Sell it or process it fast. Never age it, never vacuum-pack it for long storage, never cure it. High-pH meat above 5.9 is also the meat that goes green from hydrogen sulphide in low-oxygen packaging.
• PSE, pale, soft and exudative, is mainly a pork and poultry problem but you should know it: pale, soft, weeping fluid from the cut surface, poor bind, useless for anything requiring water-holding.

A carcass sorted this way before cutting sends the right meat to the right process. A carcass cut without looking sends a dark cutter into your vacuum packer and you lose the lot three weeks later.

Last, the room. Your cutting room ambient should not exceed 12 degrees Celsius under the European rule reproduced here as an example of how such a requirement is written. Your national regulation sets the number that binds you. The principle is unarguable regardless: the carcass warms while you work on it, and every degree you let it gain is shelf life you are spending.

A worked case. A butcher in Kisumu, Kenya cuts every carcass the same way, into the same cuts, in the same order. Two carcasses in a month come back as complaints for smell inside a week. When he starts looking before cutting, he finds both were dark and sticky at the loin, and both had gone into his vacuum packer for the restaurant order. He now marks dark carcasses on arrival and routes them straight to fresh bone-in sale within two days. The complaints stop and he loses no weight doing it.

Breaking a beef side is a sequence, and the sequence exists to keep the valuable muscles whole and cold. Work in order, work fast, and do not let the primal you are not cutting sit out warming.

The side is divided into a forequarter and a hindquarter. From the forequarter you take chuck, rib, brisket, plate and shank. From the hindquarter you take loin, sirloin, round and flank. Those are the conventional primals; your market may name them differently and may divide them differently, and it may be right to do so.

The working order most small butcheries use:

1. Split the side into quarters between the ribs, at the point your market convention dictates.
2. Take the hindquarter first if your loin and rib are going to a premium customer, because those are the cuts that lose the most value if they warm up or dry out.
3. From the hindquarter: remove the flank, separate the loin from the sirloin, then take the round off, and finally break the round into its major muscles if your market wants them separate.
4. From the forequarter: remove the brisket and shank, take off the plate, separate the rib from the chuck, then break the chuck.
5. Trim as you go, into a labelled trim container, and weigh it. Trim you do not weigh is trim you will not price.

Now the commercial half, which matters more than the sequence. Work the same carcass two ways.

Take a 215 kg cold carcass that cost 860 US dollars all in, and remember that every money figure in this course is indicative and must be replaced by your own.

1. Cut boneless at 57 percent, in the middle of the published 55 to 60 percent range. Saleable meat is 215 multiplied by 0.57, which is 123 kg. Cost per kilogram is 860 divided by 123, which is 6.99 dollars.
2. Cut bone-in at 67 percent, in the middle of the published 65 to 70 percent range. Saleable meat is 215 multiplied by 0.67, which is 144 kg. Cost per kilogram is 860 divided by 144, which is 5.97 dollars.

The bone-in route produces 21 more kilograms of saleable product from an identical carcass and drops your cost base by more than a dollar a kilogram. Whether it is better depends on one question and nothing else: does your market pay enough more per kilogram for boneless to cover the 21 kilograms that boning throws away? That is a calculation you make with your own prices, not a preference and not a matter of professional pride.

In many African markets the answer is that boning destroys value, because bone-in stewing portions sell readily at good prices and there is limited demand for a European-style boneless steak range. The cutting manuals written for European supermarket supply assume the opposite, because that is the market they were written for. Do not import their assumption.

Published worked examples give you a sense check. On a 1,200 lb, that is 544 kg, beef carcass: boneless steaks and roasts at one-eighth inch trim give about 425 lb, which is 193 kg. Bone-in cuts at one-quarter inch trim give about 500 lb, which is 227 kg. Mixed cuts at one-eighth inch trim give about 490 lb, which is 222 kg. Notice that the mixed pattern comes close to the bone-in figure while still producing premium cuts, which is often the practical answer.

A few rules that protect the value of what you cut:

• Cut across the grain for retail steaks and with the grain never. The grain is visible; look before you cut.
• Follow the seams between muscles where you can. Seam cutting gives you clean single-muscle pieces that cook evenly and look better on the counter than a saw cut through three muscles.
• Keep the primals you are not working on in the chiller, not on the bench. A primal left out for an hour has been warming for an hour.
• Do not saw where a knife will do. Every saw cut produces bone dust and bone fragments that must then be wiped from the meat.
• Weigh each primal as it comes off. Six carcasses of primal weights will tell you more about what your carcasses actually contain than any published table.

A worked case. A butcher in Mwanza, Tanzania is persuaded to bone out his hindquarters and present boneless steaks. His steaks sell slowly at a premium his customers will not pay, and the bones pile up with no buyer. He reverts to bone-in portions and a small premium range from the loin only, sells the carcass in two days instead of five, and cuts both his chilling cost and his wastage. His margin per animal rises with no change to his purchase price at all.

A retail cut is a promise about how the meat will behave in a pot. Sell a customer a shank as a frying steak and you have not made a sale, you have made an enemy. Matching cut to cooking method is the part of butchery that keeps customers, and it costs nothing to learn.

Go back to the principle from Lesson 1: tenderness follows work. Now turn it into selling advice.

The tender, lightly worked muscles along the back, the rib and the loin, have little connective tissue. They are cooked fast with dry heat, grilled, fried or roasted, and served short of well done. Cooking them long and wet wastes them, because there is no connective tissue there to be broken down and all you achieve is drying them out. These are the premium-priced cuts and they are also the least forgiving, so they belong with the customer who knows how to cook them.

The hard-working muscles, chuck, shank, brisket, plate and flank, are full of connective tissue. Connective tissue is collagen, and collagen only softens with time, moisture and moderate heat. Cooked fast, these cuts are tough. Cooked long and wet, in a stew, a braise or a pot, they become the best eating on the animal and they carry the most flavour. This is exactly the cooking that dominates most African home kitchens, which is why bone-in stewing portions sell so well and why they deserve to be at the centre of your range rather than at the edge.

The round is between the two. It is lean and large, worked but not heavily marbled. It gives you lean roasting joints, braising cuts, and excellent mince.

Mince and trim are a product line, not a leftover. Trim from every part of the carcass goes into mince, and mince sells fast, but understand that mincing changes the safety picture completely. That is the next thing to teach every customer.

Here are the safe minimum internal cooking temperatures, measured with a thermometer in the thickest part:

• Beef, pork, veal and lamb steaks, chops and roasts: 63 degrees Celsius, that is 145 degrees Fahrenheit, with a 3 minute rest.
• Ground or minced meat, beef, pork, veal and lamb: 71 degrees Celsius, 160 Fahrenheit, no rest stated.
• All poultry, whether ground, in parts, whole, or as stuffing: 74 degrees Celsius, 165 Fahrenheit.
• Leftovers and casseroles: 74 degrees Celsius.
• Fin fish: 63 degrees Celsius, or until the flesh is opaque and separates easily.

Now the reasoning, which is what makes the numbers stick. A whole muscle cut is contaminated on the surface only, because the inside of a healthy muscle is essentially sterile and the contamination came from the hide and gut at dressing. Searing the surface destroys it, so 63 degrees plus a rest is enough. Mincing takes that surface contamination and distributes it right through the mass, so the centre of a mince patty now carries what was once on the outside. That is why mince needs 71 degrees. Poultry carries Salmonella and Campylobacter throughout, so poultry needs 74 degrees. A customer who understands why will not get it wrong; a customer who has only memorised a number will.

One more thing to tell customers, because it protects you: never judge doneness by colour. Frozen and thawed minced beef can brown prematurely and look cooked when it is not. Frozen patties can stay pink at 71 degrees when they are perfectly done. Colour is not a measurement. A thermometer is.

A note on goat, and this is a genuine gap. No goat-specific consumer cooking temperature was verified for this course. Goat is a red meat and is handled like lamb, but that has not been confirmed against a regulator. If you need to give goat cooking guidance, obtain it from your national food-safety authority's cooking guidance, and say plainly where the figure came from.

A worked case. A butcher in Kumasi, Ghana finds his chuck and shank moving slowly while his loin sits unsold at a price nobody local will pay. He writes two small cards for the counter: one saying which cuts are for the pot and roughly how long, one saying which are for the pan. He starts recommending rather than weighing in silence. His slow cuts move, his complaints drop, and he learns that his customers were not avoiding those cuts, they simply could not tell which was which under the glass.

Sheep and goat carcasses are small, and small carcasses punish mistakes. There is far less meat to absorb a bad cut, and the yield arithmetic is much harsher than it is on cattle. Goat in particular is where most butchers quietly lose money without knowing it.

The conventional primals for sheep and goat are shoulder, rack, which is the rib, loin, leg, breast or flank, neck, and shank. The same principle from Lesson 1 applies: the loin and rack are the tender, high-value, fast-cooking cuts; the shoulder, neck, breast and shank did the work and reward long wet cooking; the leg sits in between and roasts or portions well.

Goat carcasses are leaner and smaller than sheep, and in many African markets goat is sold in bone-in stewing portions rather than fabricated into primals at all. That is not a lesser way of doing business. It is usually the correct commercial answer, because it matches how the meat will be cooked and it keeps the maximum weight saleable.

Now the yield arithmetic, which is the real subject of this lesson.

Dressing percentages, live weight to hot carcass weight, are these. Sheep, shorn, 50 to 53 percent, with a second source reporting lamb at 54 to 59 percent. Goat, 45 to 50 percent. Compare those with beef at 56 to 63 percent depending on feeding. Note that the two published sources disagree on sheep. Teach and use the range, not a point value, and record your own animals.

Then shrink. Carcasses lose 3 to 5 percent of hot carcass weight in the first 24 hours of chilling. Goat carcasses shrink significantly more, up to 10 percent. That is a second penalty stacked on top of an already low dressing percentage, and it is the reason goat pricing carried over from cattle intuition is always wrong.

Work a goat through, with indicative money you must replace locally.

1. Live weight 30 kg, bought at an indicative 3.00 dollars per kg live, so 90 dollars.
2. Slaughter and transport, indicative 8 dollars. Total cost 98 dollars.
3. Dressing at 47 percent, inside the 45 to 50 percent range. Hot carcass = 30 multiplied by 0.47 = 14.1 kg.
4. Chilling shrink at 10 percent for goat. Cold carcass = 14.1 multiplied by 0.90 = 12.7 kg.
5. Cost per kg of cold carcass = 98 divided by 12.7 = 7.72 dollars.

Less than half the live weight reached the cold room, and that is before a single cut. A goat bought at 3.00 dollars a kilogram live already costs 7.72 dollars a kilogram hanging.

Now notice where this example stops. Carcass-to-retail cutting yields for goat, bone-in and boneless, were not verified from any authoritative source. This course therefore does not give one. Do not assume the lamb figures transfer: goat is leaner, smaller and dresses lower, and using a lamb number would silently understate your cost. To complete the calculation, obtain a goat-meat extension publication from a national agricultural research institute or a university small-ruminant programme, and weigh your own cuts from several carcasses. Two further goat gaps: frozen storage times for goat meat were not verified, so do not assume the beef or lamb figures apply, and no goat-specific consumer cooking temperature was verified either. Both must come from your national food-safety authority.

For sheep, a published worked example gives you a benchmark: a 120 lb, that is 54 kg, shorn lamb carcass cut into bone-in chops and roasts yields about 46 lb, which is 21 kg. Set your own cut-out against that.

Two chilling points specific to small stock. Lamb pre-chill air should be no lower than 8 degrees Celsius, to avoid cold shortening, and lamb deep muscle should not fall below 20 degrees within two and a half hours of sticking, while lamb loin should not fall below 10 degrees until the body is in full rigor. Chilled too hard too early, small carcasses toughen, because they are small enough to cool fast. The good news is that cold-shortening toughness in lamb is resolved by 3 days of ageing, so if it has happened, hold the carcass rather than selling it tough.

A worked case. A trader in Arusha, Tanzania buys goats by eye at a live-weight price he thinks is fair. After weighing thirty animals through to cold carcass he finds one supplier's goats consistently dress near 45 percent and another's reach 49, a difference of about 1.2 kg of carcass on a 30 kg animal. He does not stop buying from the first supplier. He pays him less per kilogram live, by an amount his own records justify, and shows him the figures.

Your hands and your blades are your two most important pieces of equipment and the two most likely to make somebody ill. This lesson is about accuracy, safety and hygiene together, because in a cutting room they are the same subject.

Start with the knife itself. A sharp knife is safer than a blunt one. A blunt blade needs force, force slips, and a slipping blade under force cuts the operator. A sharp blade also cuts cleanly through muscle and seam rather than tearing, which means better looking cuts and less trim loss. Steel your knife regularly through the day, not only when it stops working.

Now the hygiene rules that govern how blades move around the room.

1. Work clean to dirty and never back. A knife that has touched hide, gut, floor or waste does not touch exposed meat until it has been cleaned and sanitised.
2. Rotate two knives through a steriliser rather than wiping one on your apron. The apron is a contaminated surface.
3. Never put a knife down on a bone, on the floor, or in a pocket. It goes in a scabbard or in the steriliser.
4. Separate raw meat from anything ready to eat absolutely, with different boards and different knives. Separation of raw from ready-to-eat, and of poultry from red meat, is the primary control for Campylobacter and a major control for Salmonella and E. coli O157:H7.
5. Colour coding helps you enforce that. The commonly used industry convention is red for raw meat, blue for raw fish, yellow for raw poultry, green for salad and fruit, brown for cooked and root vegetables, and white for bakery and dairy. Understand that this is a convention, not an international standard, and no authoritative regulator-published colour-coding scheme was verified for this course. Pick one scheme, write it on the wall, and never deviate. What matters is that raw and ready-to-eat never share a board, a knife or a surface. The specific colours are arbitrary.

The knife register is next, and it is the control most small butcheries have never heard of. A published food-safety guide for small meat plants requires a knife register as an essential record. Every knife on the premises is numbered and accounted for at the start and end of each day. The reason is a physical hazard: a blade tip that breaks off and ends up in a customer's food. If you count your knives twice a day, a missing blade is found while the meat is still in your building. If you do not, it is found by a customer's dentist or by a lawyer. It costs a numbered list and two minutes.

Saws and bandsaws add hazards of their own.

• Bone dust and bone fragments. Every saw cut produces them and they must be wiped from the cut surface, not left for the customer. Prefer a knife wherever a knife will do the job.
• Blade breakage. A bandsaw blade that snaps can put steel into product. Inspect blades, replace them on a schedule rather than on failure, and account for fragments if a break happens: stop, isolate the product cut since the last inspection, and do not gamble.

- Cleaning. A bandsaw is the hardest thing in the room to clean, because it has guards, guides, a table, wheels and a blade path that all collect meat and fat. It must be stripped and cleaned properly, in the fixed order: remove gross soil, wash with detergent and hot water, rinse, sanitise, air dry. Sanitiser applied to a dirty surface does nothing, because organic matter neutralises it.

- Personal safety. Push sticks and guards exist for a reason, cut resistant gloves and mesh aprons pay for themselves the first time, and nobody operates a bandsaw tired, rushed or alone.

Surfaces matter as much as blades. Food-contact surfaces must be smooth, impervious and hard-wearing, and easy to clean and disinfect. That rules out wooden surfaces, cracked plastic boards, rusted steel and porous cement. A board with knife scores deep enough to hold water is a Listeria reservoir and must be replaced, not scrubbed harder. Buy new boards; they cost less than a recall.

Sanitiser concentrations for food-contact surfaces, from a published extension source: chlorine or hypochlorite at 25 to 200 ppm, most active at pH 6 to 7.5, in cold water at a maximum of 46 degrees Celsius; quaternary ammonium at 200 ppm; iodophor at 25 ppm and effective at pH 4 or lower, maximum 49 degrees; peracetic acid at 0.20 to 0.35 percent. Required contact times were not verified and are not given here. Obtain the contact time from the label of the sanitiser you actually buy, because the label is the legally binding instruction and it differs between products. Applying sanitiser and wiping it off immediately achieves nothing.

Finally, temperature. Cutting-room ambient not exceeding 12 degrees Celsius is the European example; your national rule governs. Mince must be held at not more than 2 degrees under the same example, and craft practice for grinding is meat at 0 to 2 degrees for a clean cut. Warm meat in a mincer smears and multiplies bacteria at the same time.

A worked case. A butcher in Harare, Zimbabwe uses one board for everything, wiping it between jobs. His shelf life is short and he cannot explain it. He buys three coded boards, replaces the deeply scored one, and starts a two-knife steriliser rotation. Nothing about his chiller changes and his product lasts noticeably longer.

Yield is not a technical detail. It is the difference between a butchery that makes money and one that does not, and it is almost entirely under your control after the carcass arrives.

Start with the chain of losses, because each one has a published range and each one is a place you can act.

1. Dressing loss, live weight to hot carcass. Beef 56 to 63 percent depending on feeding, sheep 50 to 53 shorn, goat 45 to 50, pork 70 to 75.
2. Chilling shrink, hot to cold carcass. 3 to 5 percent of hot carcass weight in the first 24 hours, and goat up to 10 percent.
3. Cutting yield, cold carcass to saleable meat. Beef 65 to 70 percent bone-in and 55 to 60 percent boneless. Pork 75 to 80 bone-in and 65 to 70 boneless. Lamb 70 to 75 bone-in. Goat, not verified, obtain locally.
4. Ageing shrink, if you age. Dry ageing costs 5 percent at 14 days, 10 percent at 21 days, 15 percent at 30 days, and 35 percent at 120 days, with an overall cooler shrink range of 6 to 15 percent, plus a further 3 to 24 percent trim loss for crust removal.
5. Wastage, unsold and thrown away.

Take the ageing numbers seriously before you take up dry ageing. A 30 day dry age at 15 percent shrink plus, say, 15 percent trim leaves 0.85 multiplied by 0.85, which is 72 percent of the starting weight as saleable product. The selling price has to carry that 28 percent loss before it carries anything else. Dry ageing is described in the research as very costly for exactly this reason.

Now the lever most butchers do not know they have: chiller loading. A published technical reference gives the example of 1 percent weight loss from a chiller holding 50 bodies of 150 kg, against approximately 2 percent from the same chiller holding 25. A half-empty chiller roughly doubles your shrink. Shrink is money evaporating. If you run a half-loaded chiller because your throughput is low, either fill it, or size the room to your actual throughput, or accept that you are paying a shrink penalty and price for it.

Trim standard is the second lever. The published worked examples on a 544 kg beef carcass show what it does: boneless cuts at one-eighth inch trim give about 193 kg, bone-in at one-quarter inch trim about 227 kg, mixed cuts at one-eighth inch trim about 222 kg. Trim harder and your counter looks better but your saleable weight falls. Trim less and you sell fat your customer may not want. The right answer is the one your market pays for, and you find it by testing, not by copying.

The third lever is what happens to the trim itself. Trim is not waste unless you treat it as waste. It becomes mince, and mince sells. Fat becomes rendering or dripping where there is a market. Bone becomes stock and soup bone, and in many African markets it sells readily rather than being discarded. Every stream that leaves your bench is either a product with a price or a cost you are paying to remove. Decide which, deliberately, for each one.

Now the arithmetic that ties it together. Wastage compounds against you. Every kilogram thrown away must be recovered from the kilograms sold. Waste 10 percent and the remaining 90 percent carries the whole cost, which raises your effective cost per kilogram by roughly 11 percent. On a carcass costing 6.99 dollars a kilogram of saleable meat, 10 percent wastage takes you to about 7.77 dollars before a single overhead has been added.

So the full formula for what a carcass actually costs you:

Cost per kg of saleable meat equals total cost of the animal or carcass, divided by the weight of saleable meat obtained, where saleable weight equals live weight multiplied by dressing percentage, multiplied by one minus chilling shrink, multiplied by cutting yield. Total cost means everything: purchase price, transport, slaughter fee, inspection fee, levies and the cost of chilling.

And the measurement that makes it real is the cut-out test. Weigh the cold carcass. Weigh every stream as it comes off: each primal, bone-in cuts, boneless cuts, mince trim, fat, bone, offal, discard. Add them up and compare against the starting weight. The gap is unrecorded loss, and finding the gap is the whole point. Most butchers doing this for the first time find between 2 and 5 percent they cannot account for, and it is usually going out in the bin or off the bench.

A worked case. A butcher in Ndola, Zambia runs a cold room at less than half capacity because he buys one carcass at a time. He also throws out roughly a bucket of trim per animal that he has never weighed. When he weighs it he finds it is 4 percent of his carcass. He starts buying two carcasses at once to fill the chiller, which cuts his shrink, and he starts putting the trim through his mincer instead of the bin. Neither change cost him anything. Both went straight to his margin.