Recently I've been visiting the slaughterhouse in my city to source some high-quality meat. In my country there is no quality involved in price of meat. All meat is sold at the same price and the animals that get here are named with the same label. Slaughterhouse vendors are conscious of the importance of pastured vs grain-fed animals and some are doesn't even sure of what type of animals are they selling.
The thing is. I'm walking in the slaughterhouse surrounded of a hundred of lamb, mutton and beef carcasses. I'm looking for fatty mutton. If there is no one watching me, I can steal a piece of fat that is on the belly or on the kidney area to determine if that animal was pasture-raised or not. The thing is that I'm not well-experienced to determine what the flavor exactly represents.
Last week I found one of the most fatty mutton I've ever seen on my short life. I asked if it was fattened or was It was "natural" which is the word they use for pasture-raised. They told me "yes, It was fattened naturally". I thought that she tried to combine the two possible answers and tried to cheat on me. I asked "What you mean?". She said "I mean that he was fattened naturally on grass". Well, I wanted to drop my raw butter as a source of fat because I think is giving me problems and I could not resist the temptation to buy the most fatty piece of meat I've seen on my life, which maybe is not for you, but for me finding pasture-raised fatty meat is almost a dream. I bought half a sheep. It looked and smell well. When I came to my house I tasted the fat. It tasted mild, like water or something like that. Not grassy or gamy. I don't know, It was strange. I thought that lamb tend to taste very lamb-my, especially if It is a mutton fed grass. Even tho, It's summer today and I felt the fat melting on my hands and on my table which I believe It's a good sign because I've seen that grain-fed animals tend to have very hard and waxy fat. I will share some pictures of the meat 3 days aging on my fridge and I would like to hear your comments.
Pictures:
https://imgur.com/a/137dpxoI would like to know your experiences related to tasting raw fats. I'm not talking only about flavor, but texture, melting point and whatever you had identify about good quality fat.
Thanks for reading this post which may sound stupid for some, but I find it very critical on my journey on finding real food.
