Animal Age and Flavor

I had a conversation recently with a customer about the ewes that we intend to slaughter in May. She pointed out to me that technically meat from sheep ceases to be called "lamb" when the animal reaches a year old and wanted to know what to expect regarding the flavor and tenderness of the meat. I had to confess that I didn't know the answer to her question. This will be the first time we've slaughtered a sheep older than 6 months. Since this is something of an experiment, I decided to discount the per pound price of the animal that this particular customer was ordering.

Well, this has piqued my interest and I decided to look into the relationship between age, flavor and sex of livestock. Here are some things I've found out regarding sheep, cattle and hogs.

Castration
Regarding castration, it is something we have never done at Liberty Farm and our 6 month old ram lambs have had no hint of "buck" flavor. Walter at Sugar Mountain Farm has blogged about his experiences eating meat from uncastrated boars. He's up to 6 months old without any effect on flavor and a friend of his has eaten them considerably older than that.

Sheep
Ewes between the age of 1 and 2 years are called hoggets. So there are three categories of sheep meat: lamb, hogget and mutton. Hugh Fearnley–Whittingstall of River Cottage in the U.K. writes, "the best sheep meat I have ever eaten has come from animals over a year old." And also:

Today, mutton and hogget barely exist in the mainstream meat market – and have the reputation of needing very slow cooking. This is a grievous misunderstanding. Sheep slaughtered in their second or third year are still young animals in the prime of life. Their meat is quite superb, and can be roasted and served pink, like the best cuts of prime beef.

In fact, it is in comparison to beef that mutton may be best understood - mutton is to lamb what beef is to veal. The key, of course, is that to reach its full potential, mutton does need to be properly hung – like the best beef, for at least two weeks, ideally three...which is why you don’t find it in the supermarket!

Cattle
The Stockman Grass Farmer often has articles about finishing beef on forage alone. In a typical situation with cool-season perennial pastures, this takes 2 years. So true grass-finished beef is typically 8-10 months older than grain-finished feedlot beef. In a past issue there was an article about the French preferring older beef. In the most recent issue, the editor responded to a letter with the following:

Many French breeds are large and late maturing. This is why grassfed steers typically are four years of age and weigh nearly a ton at harvest.

Most Americans would find grilled steaks from these chewy and bland because the French do not prize marbling as we do.

Grilling is not the major way beef is cooked in France. Cooking it at low temperatures for a long time is much more common.

The majority of French beef comes from five-year-old dairy cows. There is a strong correlation between butterfat content and beef tenderness and their cheese breeds are prized for their tender beef.

The best flavored steak I have ever had came from a nine-year-old French Alps-raised dairy cow.

After reading all of this I'm really looking forward to trying the meat from a hogget this summer. If we don't sell them all I may even wait until later in the summer and let one of them get even older. Perhaps next year we'll be charging a premium for this meat from older sheep.