1/17/2024 0 Comments Modern mutton chops![]() Even groups that prefer lamb are willing to buy older sheep for the right price, says Katherine Harrison, a sheep farmer and butcher from near Columbus, Ohio, who presented the second webinar. Eyeing this trend, extension agents in Maine, Maryland and Ohio just organized a four-part webinar on marketing lamb (and mutton!) to new ethnic consumers. ![]() now imports mutton from Australia and New Zealand - a whopping 19.5 million pounds through August 2013, up 37 percent from the previous year. Why? America’s changing demographics.ĭespite its stigma, the U.S. Given tight supplies and an uptick in lamb demand, owner Pat Bosley says it’s getting harder to buy domestic mutton, which further fell out of favor when the grill made Americans forget how to cook cheaper cuts, low and slow.ĭespite its stigma, the U.S. The fat-capped meat, from two-year-old ewes who’ve lambed once, is hickory-smoked overnight into barbeque and burgoo (mutton stew). They buy more Midwest-sourced mutton than anyone, or about 10,000 pounds a week. One of the few restaurants still nationally known for mutton is Moonlite in the Welsh-settled Owensboro, Kentucky. Even New York City’s Keens Steakhouse, where “ surprisingly mellow mutton” chops were one of the restaurant’s claims to fame since its establishment in 1885, long ago replaced mutton with lamb saddle. The tasty sausage, which cuts like a Brat, is stuffed into lamb-casing for a product the butcher labels “natural lamb.” Settlemire, who grew up on sheep farm in post-War Ohio, admits this is the only way he finds the stronger-flavored mutton palatable. Master shepherd Tom Settlemire, who breeds Maine’s native Katahdin hair sheep known for their mild meat, says his culled ewes at Crystal Spring Farm go into a sausage along with the meat of underweight lambs. Sausage is mutton’s perfect vehicle, since spices, garlic and curing salt disguise any unfamiliar flavors. In fact, we may also have eaten mutton in products like “lamb” sausage. Food processors don’t necessarily distinguish between lamb and mutton - “it’s basically marketing,” says Sauder. ![]() And a lot of adult sheep widely go into “lamb and rice” dog and cat food and even jars of baby food, says USDA’s Rebecca Sauder, who oversees the San Angelo auction. Direct farm-to-customer sales (think a custom-butchered whole or half lamb) are growing - the way about one-third of all lamb bought in the U.S. For each of the past five years, the also large New Holland, Pennsylvania auction has sold at least 30,000 live sheep to New Jersey’s halal abattoirs, to supply ethnic grocers and restaurants. We’ve long exported live ewes through San Angelo, Texas (the country’s largest sheep and lamb auction) to Mexico for barbacoa de borrego. Rams after three or four years of breeding are also slaughtered. To actually profit, the 82,000-plus farmers of the U.S.’s 5.3 million sheep can’t afford to keep unproductive ewes with sub-par genetics - those who don’t conceive, birth, mother or lactate properly - alive. ![]() Yet perhaps mutton is already more ubiquitous than we realize.Īfter all, mutton is a natural by-product of the country’s lamb and fledgling dairy sheep industry. Others are attempting to give mutton a boost through education and marketing. Recent African, Hispanic and Middle Eastern immigrants are generating new demand for fresh lamb and even mutton - staple meats in their cultures ”“ giving the beleaguered but fighting sheep industry some help. In fact, the average American eats less than a pound of lamb annually, though disproportionately more in the East Coast’s ethnic enclaves. Though sheep of all ages are widely consumed around the globe, few Americans even have a taste for lamb, which constitutes the bulk of domestic sheep meat production. “It’s really easy to take a lamb chop and turn it into a hockey puck, but you braise your shanks and slow-cook them for two to three hours, it’s going to be awesome.” “The more you cook it, the more it’s going to just dissolve in your mouth,” Galle says of their mutton, which he braises in coconut milk with curry spices, carrots and potatoes. Farmer Jake Galle sells mutton ground into a rosemary sausage, mutton shanks and, when available, mutton chops. Yet on Apple Creek Farm’s chalkboard list of grass-fed meats for sale at the winter farmers’ market in Brunswick, Maine, there it was: mutton. ![]()
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