Opinions on Lamb / Sheep Meat

[goodsamaritan]

I stumbled onto a live SHEEP in a goat pen this morning.
I was going to buy goat meat but I decided on the whole sheep.
They aren't going to sell me just a part of the sheep, they were selling it whole, arabs were their customers.
Anyway, my son and I were excited to dig into sheep meat.
We saw the slaughtering done right before us.
The man stabbed the sheep 3x on the heart and bled the sheep till it died.

Then the man had a tub of boiling water and dipped the whole carcass to remove the hair / wool. 
Hmmm.... that doesn't sit well with me, seems the skin is getting "cooked" or warmed.
Then the carcass was burned with an lpg torch to remove the hair clean.
Then it was cut up.

We are utilizing everything in this sheep.
So the intestines will be made into soup.
The skin will be cut up and dipped in vinegar.
The bones and the head will be made into broth.
Efficient use of the animal, Sally Fallon style.
The rest of the family, the extended family can have some roasted lamb chops and the soup.

I and the kids had some raw meat for lunch.  wonderful meat.  has its own taste.  I like it better than goat because it is fatter than the usual goat we get.  Lots of fat.  Really, like beef.

I tried the sheep's liver, it didn't sit right with my taste buds and gut instinct.  For the past 2 days I've been gorging on wonderful raw beef liver so I've got immediate comparison.

So, details I'd like to know from experienced sheep eaters out there.

Suggest a better way to slaughter and clean the animal without heating it?
Which parts of the sheep you recommend?
Any other info on sheep you can share.

[TylerDurden]

I have no Advice to give. Just wanted to say how lucky you are to be able to buy and cut up a whole  carcass with eyeballs/intestines and all. Even if I could find a deer carcass etc., it just wouldn't be possible to easily cut it up as I'm not living in the countryside(I'd just get blood all over the place).

[invisible]

i eat alot of lamb because ground lamb is the cheapest source of grass fed organic red meat I can find, and because the fat content of ground lamb is around 70% or more which works well since I can't get any suet at the moment. I do prefer the taste of beef though.

[goodsamaritan]

Just wanted to say how lucky you are to be able to buy and cut up a whole  carcass with eyeballs/intestines and all.

All the meat I get are fresh kills, never frozen.
Maybe we're lucky to still be primitive / poor.

[wodgina]

I live in a Nanny State. There's no way I could go to a market on the street and buy what you buy. Everything is disinfected..refrigerated..regulated.

I think people should be able to prescribe there own drugs, do what the want to their bodies, drink raw milk, kill themselves, Not immunize or school their kids.

[wodgina]

I was almost sounding like Durian Rider for a second there!

[Matt51]

My wife used to randomly pick up books at the Library for me, it was like a free present. If I liked one out of six, it was a lot of fun. One time, she brought me a book about life in England in the year 1000 AD. The old English liked beef and venison, but thought mutton was food fit only for slaves. Slaves at that time were any neighboring Europeans they could get their hands on. I thought about it, and came to agree with them. I really don't like sheep, but love beef, bison, venison.

[Roselene]

I've never had mutton, but have had the other three.  I guess there not a strong slave line in the taste department here.  I can't really say though.  What does it taste like?

[TylerDurden]

I've never had mutton, but have had the other three.  I guess there not a strong slave line in the taste department here.  I can't really say though.  What does it taste like?

It's delicious and has a certain gamey tang, though not as good as wild meats. It's a lot fattier than venison, and perhaps even (grassfed) beef.

[Matt51]

http://www.amazon.com/Year-1000-What-First-Millennium/dp/0316511579

"If you were to meet an Englishman in the year 1000," they continue, "the first thing that would strike you would be how tall he was--very much the size of anyone alive today." The Anglo-Saxons were not only tall, but also generally well fed and healthy, more so than many Britons only a few generations ago."

Eating meat was good for people.

"Bristol was a slave-trading port, and the use of "bondservants" was a basic underpinning of the rural economy (the Norman invasion of 1066 would replace servitude with feudalism)."

Page 58 describes mutton as food fit for slaves, but the English seemed to like pork as well as beef and venison.

Not knocking mutton for those who like it, it is just subjective, like what is the best wine, or what is the best way to make coffee. All a matter of personal preference.

[goodsamaritan]

Sheep must be common in your countries.
But sheep are very rarely found in my country, I've seen them in the zoo. 
The goat pen owner said his supplier was growing some sheep for small scale growing along with goats to feed a specific long term customer. (probably arabs or indians in my country)

This is the first time I tasted fresh kill raw mutton.
The first time I tasted raw mutton was a blast frozen one from Australia a few months ago in an upscale supermarket that caters to foreigners.
Tastes between blast frozen and fresh kill mutton are very different.
I'm still at the novelty stage.

My in laws cooked the mutton this lunch and didn't know how to cook it properly, they couldn't eat it... too tough they said.  Funny.  This evening I joined them for dinner with my raw mutton and showed them how tender raw mutton was.