Learning to Butcher at Home

[Shelby]

You could also make burger out of those tough leg parts. We do about 20% beef with 80% venison when we grind. We buy a really cheap beef brisket that has like 30-40% fat on it to grind with.

[Rico]

10 or 20 tiny "hams" prepared in various ways is sometimes more desirable and more appealing than one big one.

Prawncrackers, this might answer your question, but I'm not exactly how he's cutting it. Arbitrarily? Or are there specific muscles/sizes/shapes to follow?

Shelby - that's a great idea! But even 80 percent with this venison might be too much. I'm thinking 20 will be ample.

And Martin, it's going to be three months before I can even pronounce rådjursköttbullar. Doesn't mean I can't make them, though. Got a recipe, by any chance?

[Martin Fisher]

They're something we've made for as long as I can remember (we grew up on venison) so we never really followed a formal recipe.

Any decent Swedish meatball recipe should do.

Just substitute ground venison and venison stock for the beef.

[jayt90]

Brawn people, brawn, there's a perfectly good English word for it. There's absolutely no need to transliterate the French. That's like saying four-twenties instead of eighty!

I've been talking down half and whole pigs for few years now but I'm always stuck for ideas when it comes to the back leg. Sometimes I take a couple of tranches off it for Chinese stir fries. But more often than not I've been grinding them up for salami. What does everyone else do with them apart from curing them for hams?

You can saw off a good sized shank and braise it like a lamb shank.

The rest can be separated

into small roasts, along natural muscle separations, as DDF suggests.

[Martin Fisher]

FWIW, here's a video of Dominique Chapolard breaking a large ham down into 10 small 'hams.'

[Prawncrackers]

Oh that's wonderful, will definitely try that with the next pig. Is that just salt in the cure or do you think there's some #2 in there too? Also a proper cold smoke then how long drying?

[Martin Fisher]

It's just salt.

They're dried until they lose about 30% of their weight.