Been cutting a beef up over the last week or so, I save all the trimmings off the outside or anything that looks questionable for us to eat, and run it thru the grinder on a 40mm plate to make larger "crumbles". Then fry all that up, put in jars and pressure can. Made 4 runs of the two canners, the big one holds 20 quarts, the small one 7 quarts. Total of 108 quarts of mighty fine eating for dogs !
Beautiful canning setup. Win the food porn prize of the week and I must keep my wife from seeing this. Can not have her getting ideas like "We need to do that". LOL With fall here, canning is a good topic for all of us. Freezing is so easy that it spoils you, but then Mr Gotchya is there with you have to have electricity and it is difficult to cache. Canned goods and a semi hidden fruit cellar can be a great comfort. I am sure that the "dog food" would be more than welcome if SHTF by most people with a little gravy or tomato sauce over rice or pasta. Thank you for sharing. I love to see good examples of how others are doing.
I've been definetly taking the easy road utilizing the freezer which could bite me in the long run. Need to step up my game to the next level. Thank you for sharing.
It's actually pretty good stuff for the most part. I suspect a lot of it would end up in the human food chain in most commercial operations. I trim off the outside fat from whatever section I'm working on and usually a thin layer of meat comes with it.....otherwise, I toss the fat in the garbage can. Or if the meat has been exposed in the cooler and turned dark, that too goes in the dog food. Or there is a bunch of bone dust on it where I sawed thru a major bone....trimmed and in the dog food lug. Or the meat has a lot of tendon in it, like that from the lower part of the leg approaching the hoof area. I know from past experience my grinder tends to clog up a lot when I get down to the 7mm plate I use for hamburger, and there is SO much other good hamburger (at least 150lbs comes off a steer like this), so that goes in the dog lug too. I run everything I'm grinding thru that 40mm hole size plate, which makes a large grind, and stop there for the dog food. Then run our hamburger thru a 7mm plate for the final grind. But by the time it's fried and a lot of the fat rendered off, it's looking pretty dang tasty, to be honest ! WHOLE lot better looking that Alpo, for sure.
I understand. We're running 6 smaller chest freezers (7-9cf) now and I really hate to add more, and this would have taken up almost a whole 7cf one alone, so I can it. Plus we've found if we put fresh/frozen (then warmed) crumbles in their dishes with dry food, they simply pick around the dry and eat meat. With the canned, you get a fair amount of good 'gravy' (after ladling off the fat risen to the top), and when mixed with dry, they eat it all. Dogs are like kids.....you have to fool 'em some.
TnAndy, that "dog food" grind looks just about perfect for chili to put over rice or beans, I like a little texture to it for that.
Yeah....we've always used hamburger grind (7mm plate), but I told my wife we ought to try this for chili for us.
