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The Flavor of Sheep Meat
(from a discussion on �The Sheep Group�)
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In
[email protected], "Laurie's Lambs"
<laurie@l...> wrote:
"I was further
wondering for those of you out there that do eat your
sheep and this is particular to the purebred
breeder...for those of you with multiple
breeds...do you taste a difference from breed to
breed? I understand there is a HUGE difference,
but thought I'd ask here and for those of you with
crosses or just one breed...do you eat your sheep too?"
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What
a loaded question! [Our family of eight more or less lives
on culls
-- we do eat our sheep, and a lot of it :-) -- and of a
fairly wide variety of breeds and ages over the years. ]
The
conventional wisdom is that the coarser-fibered sheep and
hair sheep
are milder in flavor, including the Northern short-tailed sheep
(Finns, Romanovs, Icelandics). Another conventional wisdom
is that
the younger the animal, the milder in flavor. (Many still blame
Australia in part for the low lamb consumption in the US,
since they
supplied Merino mutton to the US Navy during WWII,
souring the sailors forever on sheep meat . . .)
Actually a fair amount of university
research has been done
on this
topic. Interestingly, the factor which is repeatedly found
to *most*
influence flavor is not age, not breed, but *diet.* To be
specific,
legumes during finishing are a bad idea; straight grasses
and grain (esp.
corn) are good. My own informal experience here finishing
locker lambs (and the culls for us <grin>) tends to support
this. I will
also throw in at this point that in my younger days I lived mostly on venison,
and my comparative eating experiences
with SD
corn-fed deer and northern MN browse-fed deer strongly
support the importance of diet!
Another interesting twist on the flavor
research was that
fat melting point
had something to do with mouthfeel (no surprise there), and that
sheep slaughtered in cool weather tended to score higher on
consumer panels than warm weather-processed sheep. The melting point of the
marbling changes a small, but
perceptible, amount with prevailing temperatures (aren't sheep amazing?).
Age
was a bit of a factor, but not in keeping with the
conventional
wisdom. Hoggets (the Irish definition -- 9-12 mos.) and
yearling
mutton were rated best by the consumer panels. (This is a
tough sell with
some of my locker lamb customers -- I have to give them a free
package of yearling meat before they're convinced.)
The
conventional wisdom on breed type was supported, but at a relatively low level
of significance.
My personal
opinion is that the biggest problem people have with lamb is
habituation; most Americans eat lamb so seldom that it always tastes
"funny" to them. This is why corn-fed lamb --
and deer --
"taste better" to them, for it tastes more like corn-fed
beef.
(I
know that a number of you are going to want to read this
research, but
please, don't ask me to look it up; I'm too busy with
lambing, and
besides, most of the foregoing has appeared in one or
another of the
major sheep magazines during the last couple of years.)
Signing off with an appropriate greeting
out of an old
sci-fi novel (the
title of which I cannot recall at the moment),
"Good
eating!"
Jim Baglien
Baglien Suffolks
Corvallis, Oregon
(BTW, the
�old sci-fi novel� is Heinlein�s Orphans of the Sky �
ed.)
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