Meat ID and Fabrication

I have been taking meat ID and fabrication the last few days, I must say that I would prefer to be in the fish room more. The meat room is freezing cold, worse than I thought it would be and the smell of all the dead carcasses is sometimes almost unbearable. Don't get me wrong it is all really cool stuff but for some reason I think I enjoyed fish class more. So far we have learned about beef, veal, pork, and lamb. Tomorrow we will learn about chicken. Each day we have broken down different parts of animals; for example we did the tenderloin of the beef, we took the hotel rack of the lamb and Frenched it, we also fabricated a lamb leg, we have done a few others but those are just some examples. Today in class we had a whole carcass of a lamb, it was cool but crazy to see the whole animal but with no curly fur and a head. Our chef broke down the whole animal into primal and sub-primal cuts. It was a cool process to witness I must say. Tomorrow we will be taking on the chicken, I don't think it will be to difficult because who has never worked with a chicken I mean honestly. I only have 2 more days of meat and after we work on chicken we have our butchers yield test, which is the first part of 3 for our final. This test is where you figure out how much of the product you started with and figure what the usable amount will be, the trim loss of the product after cutting it down and how much all this will cost you. I think I have a good handle on the yield test! Class will begin at 6 tomorrow I actually get to sleep in and hour instead of getting up at 4 like I was last week I now sleep til 5am, it is quite the luxury!