Level Up Your Kitchen: Butchering Basics for the Home Cook (South African Cuts)
August 8, 2024
South Africans are a nation of carnivores, and there is nothing that we love more than a good braai or a potjiekos. The hallmark of both is the rich flavours of home-produced meat cuts. However, if you are serious about your food, why stop buying the meat prepared by someone else? Why not butcher it yourself? It’ll save you money, allow you control over the cuts, and it’ll deepen your relationship with your food.
In this article, we will examine the basics of home butchering, from tools like a meat mincer to popular cuts (specifically in South Africa). We will also examine four staple items you need in the kitchen and why! So, let’s go…
Why Butcher at Home?
- Cost Savings: Whole cuts and primal cuts will be cheaper than pre-cut portions.
- Butchering: Controlled By You: You can craft your cut in a way that precisely suits your recipes and preferences so that the meat you have on hand is always the exact piece for the task at hand.
- Less Junk: By using the whole animal, you are wasting less and getting more for your money.
- Fresher Flavour: Home butchering means the freshest possible meat since it’s up to you to decide when the cuts are made.
- Skill Building: Learning to break down a carcass is a useful kitchen skill that allows you to appreciate better the meat you prepare.
Essential Tools for Home Butchering
- Boning Knife: A flexible knife with a sharp blade primarily used for separating meat from bone. It is important for separating meat from chicken, lamb and some other cuts.
- Butcher Knife/Cleaver: A larger, heavier knife for chopping through bones and separating larger cuts.
- Slicing Knife: A long, thin knife for carving roasts and slicing cooked meat.
- Hand-or-foot-powered Meat Saw: This is helpful for larger bones, but most people doing home butchering don’t need this tool.
- Cutting Board: A sturdy, non-slip cutting board is essential for safety and hygiene.
- Meat Grinder (Optional): A meat grinder can be used to make your own ground meat blends, sausages and burgers.
- PVC Apron: Protects your clothing from blood and other mess.
Popular South African Cuts
- Boerewors: You’ll never go wrong with your own traditional braai sausage. Make your own blend in a meat grinder.
- Biltong: Dries like jerky or beef jerky, but it’s cured than dried meat. The technique is the same. All you need is a sharp knife and a dehydrator.
- Sosaties: Meat cubes on skewers, marinaded, and braaied. Buy meat to cut your own, and cube it properly.
- Steak: South Africa has some of the world’s best beef. Practice your butchery to make perfect steaks for every occasion.
- Lamb Chops/Ribs: Another braai staple, lamb is delicious when butchered and cooked to perfection.
Butchering Safety Tips
- Keep It Clean: Work in a clean, sanitised area. Wash your hands, knives and cutting boards before and after handling raw meat.
- Sharp Is Safe: A sharp knife is less likely to slip than a dull one. Hone your knives regularly and sharpen them as needed.
- Proper Technique: Learn the proper way to butcher an animal and make your cuts to avoid injury and get the best quality meat. There are many websites and courses that will teach you the skill.
The Importance of These Kitchen Staples in Elevating Home Cooking
- Saw Blade
- Job: A saw blade isn’t your everyday cooking implement, but it holds out the enticing promise of expanded horizons for the home cook with a taste for adventure. It’s the bicep flex for the big cuts of meat, the whole fish, the bones.
- Benefits:
- Cost: Whole animals or large cuts are often cheaper than cuts that have already been portioned out.
- Customisation: When it comes to cheese cutting, you get to decide how thick and wide you want your slices. The possibilities are limitless.
- Adaptability: A saw blade can slice through a lump of frozen meat, a big bone and, if it’s dull enough, pretty much any non-food item you could find in the wild, from firewood to belt buckles to arrowheads.
- Boning Knife:
- Function: Because of the delicacy of the task, and the need for the knife to work around joints and contours, for maximum yield and minimal waste, it needs a thin, flexible blade. Thus the boning knife is a specialist, precision instrument.
- Benefits:
- Improved Carving: Debone chicken thighs for stir-fries, pull out the rib bones from a rack of lamb, and fillet a whole fish with a few strokes of your blade.
- Better Knife Work: The boning knife is about control, precision, and, ultimately, understanding animal anatomy.
- Better Confidence: With the right tool, deboning a whole chicken is a lot less scary.
- Butcher Knife/Cleaver
- Function: The butcher knife, also known as a cleaver, is the workhorse of the kitchen. Its thick, wide blade is good for chopping through bones, cartilage and tough cuts of meat.
- Benefits:
- Efficient Prep: Quickly break down whole chickens, separate ribs or portion large cuts of meat.
- Multifunctionality: A cleaver is good not only for meat but also for chopping vegetables, crushing garlic and cracking nuts.
- Kitchen Swagger: A tad of culinary machismo with the cleaver.
- PVC Apron
- Role: A PVC apron is an insulating suit to protect your clothes from blood and grease, as well as other messes made during the act of role-playing.
- Benefits:
- Hygiene: Keeps your clothes clean, preventing cross-contamination between raw meat and other foods.
- Durability: PVC, particularly pasteurised polyvinyl chloride (PVC), is easy to clean and disinfect, making it a good option for messy applications.
- Professionalism: If you’re wearing an apron when cooking, you’re serious about it.
- Meat Mincer
- Function: A meat mincer is a kitchen appliance that grinds chunks of meat into ground meat.
- Benefits:
- Customisation: Create your unique blends of ground meat for burgers, sausages, meatballs, and more.
- Cost Savings: Grinding your meat can be more economical than buying pre-ground options.
- Healthier Options: Let the fat content and quality of your ground meat be determined by the cuts you choose.
- Creative Cooking: Experiment with different flavour combinations and textures in your ground meat dishes.
Add these tools to your kitchen arsenal, and you will be able to do more, try more recipes and make more memorable meals.
Embrace the Challenge
Home butchering can be daunting, of course. But the more you understand and practise it, the easier it becomes and the more rewarding it is. It’s more economical and puts you in control of the meat you eat – and the burgeoning relationships with food ties you into the South African butchery traditions.
SUMMARY
So remember, start small. Butchering a small animal is a great practice for larger projects. Buy the best tools you can afford, learn proper techniques, and always work safely. Don’t forget the humble meat mincer, which can get you going with recipes at an early stage. Don’t be intimidated; before long, you’ll break down whole cuts into delicious, custom-made meals for your family and friends. And you know, the best meat mincers in South Africa are sold at Kentmaster South Africa.