Well the time had finally come to butcher one of our bulls and a couple of pigs.

Now we have a friend who normally helps us cut them up and he has all the butchery equipment, but unfortunately (only for us) he had to go away with the family, so we had to do it ourselves.

Now we butcher a steer/bull calf at least twice a year, you would think that we would remember how it’s done – yeh right!!!  It always almost takes us the whole process before we get the hang of it as we don’t do it often enough.

My husband and No 1 son killed and hung up the beast last Saturday evening, when it was cooler.  He was a big bull, about 18 months old. Once he was dead they hung him on the jib crane on the tractor so they could skin him.

My son is an expert at skinning and between him and my husband they did a great job.  After they’ve skun the bull they lay out the skin and drop the inards onto it so that it’s easier to cart away. They then cut the bull into 4 pieces – 2 front and 2 back halves.  It then gets hung in the cool room that we hired.

This is the same way that they do the pigs.

We did another pig as well the same way.  We skin our pigs because we mince most of the meat and make sausages or just keep it plain mince.  We will be putting a pig on the spit for Christmas dinner and we leave the skin on then, for lovely crackling.

We hired a mincer from the local equipment hire place in town as we only have a really small mincer and it would have taken ages to get it all done.  We first minced all the pork and then I added seasoning etc to the mince and we let it sit overnight.  We did curry and sultana sausages, apple and orange liquor sausages, italian herbs and port sausages, and plain ones as well.

Here is the labelled buckets full of mince in the cool room.  We then got it out the next day and mixed it all together and put it through the mincer again and then made it into sausages.

I must admit I am really happy with the sausages, and was really enjoying making them especially when I got the hang of tying them..

Here is 2 halves of beef and the back end of a pig hanging in the cool room.

Here is my wonderful husband getting ready to bone out the back quarter of beef.

We found a You tube clip that showed us how to bone out the back quarter and we followed that as we did it.  My husband did a great job of this and we now have a freezer full of beef steak, mince and roasts.

I also have 3 big bags of fat in the freezer ready to render to make soap again in the new year.

It is so wonderful to have this meat again as our freezer was getting quite empty.  This should see us through the summer months – hopefully, I suppose it will depend on how many visitors we have.

We are so thankful that we are able to grow and butcher our own meat, and we thank God for this, He has really blessed us.

How do you butcher your meat, do you do it yourselves???