Three Current Sessions Available:

Friday/Saturday, September 27th-28th (Sold out),

Friday/Saturday, October 25th-26th (Sold out)

&

Friday/Saturday, November 22nd-23rd (Just released)

Tickets: $1,640; limit 8 tickets per session.

Each day, we start at 9:00 am. We’ll break bread together and commemorate our work with a mid-afternoon meal. On the first day, we will slaughter the steer, which includes the kill, bleeding, blood harvest, skinning, evisceration and offal harvest. Then we will break it down into quarters before moving into the butcher shop, where we will prepare a meal of offal and blood pudding harvested less than an hour before.

Learning how to cook every part is integral to butchery. On day two, we will carve and portion a dry-aged carcass as an assertion of the well-off frugality of the domestic kitchen. We will cover continental, British, and American styles of butchery, but focus invariably on the pot, the pan, and the oven of the family kitchen.  The carcass we cut on day two will be from a longhorn slaughtered 30 days prior.

We will cover beef preservation using the simple and pure methods of our pre-industrial forbearers. We will lard and bard roasts, serve up bone marrow, prepare tartare and make blood pudding, all to remove any doubt about the preeminence of home-harvested beef. All of this will happen on the domestic scale, so you can replicate the process at your homestead without industrial-grade apparatus. By the end of the day, we will have braised, panfried and roasted 30 day aged grass finished longhorn.

This grass finished longhorn beef is mature and unmatched in flavor.  In due regard for this quality, we will be aging the carcasses for 30 days.  Healthy beef can age indefinitely given a good walk-in with low humidity.

Classes usually continue well into the afternoon or early evening and will finish when the larder is full. In any case, we work at your pace. Capping the class at just eight students keeps the hands-on learning undiluted. You’re welcome to make extensive notes and film the whole process.

The class will be at our farm just outside Tulsa, Oklahoma. We’ll use ingredients from the cow we slaughter, our garden, and small local farms. We’ll have locally roasted coffee and Jersey cream each day.

Now included with these 2-day classes:

• You’ll head home with 10lbs of 30 day dry aged beef.  These longhorns are artfully grazed on cross timber prairie and permitted to mature to at least 3 years of age.  The maturity makes flavor; the aging makes tender.
• 2 months free access to the Meatsmith Membership, which includes
  • All Butcher’s Salt e-chapters for you to download
  • Our slaughter film, To Kill A Pig Nicely
  • 4+ years’ worth of harvest films, live chat archives, articles and forum dialogue
  • Podcast topic & questioning priority
• Lifetime access to our private Facebook page, Meatsmith Table, for class graduates and members only.

These serve as ready refreshers of what you learn with us.  They are unparalleled in American butchery educational materials because they return to the radical orthodoxy of the peasant kitchen.

The knife sharpening method that Brandon learned from is now on YouTube on the Carter Cutlery channel.

My family and I learned so much from the in-person, hands-on beef class. My teen boys were able to get right in there with the rest of us to slaughter, skin and eviscerate the carcass. Brandon takes the art and craft of butchery at home, which can seem very intimidating, and makes it doable. From handy tips and tricks for backyard slaughter techniques, to fabrication of meat cuts and preparing a feast in the kitchen, we were brought along for the entire process. He kept reminding us that if we keep our end goal in mind (how we’ll prepare it in the kitchen), the cutting of the carcass will make much more sense. With that in mind, we were reminded that WE get to make the decisions about how to cut and prepare the carcass and that it doesn’t have to match with ordinary retail meat cuts. Both Brandon and Lauren were so hospitable and we greatly enjoyed the fellowship around the table. It’s definitely worth the trip to take an in-person class.

―Christie, Illinois

“The utility of this information will have immediate and long-term use. As a home chef, I expect to use it regularly for my domestic culinary investigations and pleasure. The long term impact of the class will continue to reveal itself with age. So much of the material (and the experience) is detailed, inter-disciplinary, bloody, emotional and tasty! It is one of the those experiences that will always be a culinary, social, emotional reference point to tie to other experiences. This is one of the principal values of the class in my mind.”

―John, Alaska

“I’ve flown halfway across the country to attend a class of yours and watched your videos numerous times. The desire was already there for me to take on the life of sustainability, self-reliance, and kitchen economy. You all just provided the direction and spark… I’m all in because of you folks!”

―Jay, Arizona

“I’ve participated in two hog processing classes. The classes and videos gave me the courage to raise my own hogs. We partnered with the Meatsmiths to host a class and harvest two of the 5 hogs. With the help of friends we processed three hogs on our own, cured three prosciutto, smoked and cured our own bacon, and made head cheese. In all that, the best part of all the learning is the growth of my family and friends. I can’t tell you how many wonderful people we call friends because of the porcine adventure.”

―Jon; Shelton, WA

“You guys have a played a major role in our farm/homestead development of which pigs are the driving factor. Definitely have empowered me and my family. we have done some butchery since watching your videos. I hope to reference you for future marketing development for our farm. And one day get you to do a workshop (fingers crossed) I’m in west Tennessee in case you needed a gage of how far your outreach is. Thanks a million.”

―Justin, Tennessee