How to prepare a Scotch Beef rump into three primal joints

The Staff Canteen

Here we have a D cut rump of Scotch Beef, traditionally we would just slices through into required stakes, what I want to do is to actually break this down into it’s three main mini primal muscles, so working from the underside I want to remove the small tail muscle or the rump tail, I'm going to follow the seam through and remove the rump cap and then being left with the centre cut of the rump heart, I will then divide that into two separate muscles following that silver gristle in the centre. So let's start by just removing the rump tail, it's a small muscle fairly coarse in texture of a slighter chewier texture when cooked to the rest to the rump, so I'm just following through that natural seam and that will be removed and then trimmed further for further processing mainly goes into good quality dice. So now I'm going to follow natural seam here but first you can see this large triangular wedge of fat, I’m just going to put the knife under that piece of fat and because we're following the natural seams between the muscles you can actually do a lot of pulling and feeling your way down that seam with

So now I'm going to follow natural seam here but first you can see this large triangular wedge of fat, I’m just going to put the knife under that piece of fat and because we're following the natural seams between the muscles you can actually do a lot of pulling and feeling your way down that seam with your finger and thumb and that enables us to get down the seam without damaging any the quality muscle, so we follow that down to the edge or the contour of the muscle and we can take that off like so in one piece and that is our first major primal from that D cut rump ready for further trimming that is the rump cap.

So the main block now the central of the rump, looks a solid piece but actually is still two or three separate muscles, I have a small course public muscle line on the underside of the rump, this fibre here will be in the bone sheath that attaches the muscle to the bones so we just need to lift that off taking again care not to cut into the underlying muscle, it’s important to remove this as it goes hard and fibrous in cooking and now it also gives me a clear view of the underside pad that I need to remove and again it's just following a natural seam and what you will find when you go into these seams, that the seam normally consists of a load of silver gristle now bearing that in mind when I said at the beginning traditionally would be slicing this through that slice of gristle it would be in every cut that we produced.

So with seen Seam Butchery you can actually get into the product then remove the plate waste before serving it to the customer, so off comes that small part of course muscle and again like the rump tail that will be further trimmed to go in for the processing of dice or mints.

What I want to do now is follow this silver gristle in the centre if I point that out with a knife it's probably just under about 5 ml thick and that will travel right the way through the rump body and that white line of fat there also indicates the line at the seam that we're going to follow, so it's putting my knife carefully into the centre of the rump to find the line of the silver gristle and the best way doing this is just too gently scrape along that silver gristle which helps us follow it but without damaging any of the quality rump, if I just stop there at the moment I've got almost three-quarters of the way into the rump and you can still see that silver gristle so it’s continuing through right the way to the other end so that silver gristle has run the full length at the cut, so we’re just following that down now and that will take is to the external side of where I pointed that white line a fat and as we follow that down straight through there into the fat, all the remaining fat and that separates what we turn our Bistro fillet which is followed along that silver, so that actually now gives us our three main seamed primal from the rump: the ramp heart or centre cut, the rump bistro fillet and the rump cap.

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The Staff Canteen

The Staff Canteen

Editor 11th May 2017

How to prepare a Scotch Beef rump into three primal joints