Meat cutters ease butchers’ workload

In most cases butchers who sell meat in different outlets in the country use panga, knives and manual sows to cut the meat into preferred size ready for sell.

In order to ease workload in butcheries, Makerere University School of Food Technology, Nutrition and Bioengineering (SFTNB) has introduced hi-tech machinery which they are sharing with livestock farmers and students.

According to the university, this technology will curb livestock losses during slaughter and packaging. There is various meat processing machine ranging from cutting the beef and separating it from the bones, cutting the meat into pieces to make meat mince and meat balls and meat sausages fillers.

Seeds of Gold had an interaction with the technician in charge of food technology business incubation centre and he takes us through the process.

Bow saw meat cutter
Allan Nkinzelwki, explaining the steps of processing meat for various end users, notes that the incubation centre serves both students and business entrepreneurs who are taught how to use the right machinery for the required beef package.

This begins with the use of the bow saw meat cutter which is used to prepare primal cuts into a variety of smaller cuts intended for sell in a radial environment.

This can be done by isolating the bones from the beef and cutting pure beef into smaller pieces or cutting the bones together with the beef into small pieces depending on customer demand.

The work of a meat cutter machine largely overlap those of the butcher but butchers tend to specialize in pre-sale processing thereby reducing carcasses to primal cuts, whereas meat cutters further cut and process the primal cuts per individual customer request. The meat cutter is responsible to prepare standard cuts of meat to be either sold in supermarkets or self-serve counters as well as for onward processing into meat mince.

Ball cutter
According to Nkinzelwki, the next machine to be used is the ball cutter which enables pure beef to be minced and ball rolls can be made out of it.

However, some student and business entrepreneurs will use this machine to cut well shaped beef into small pieces depending on the demand and market outlet

Meat grinder
This machine is used to grind the beef into a fine texture. This is mainly used if you want to process meat balls and sausages.
There are two types of grinders - the electric and manual.

Process
What is done is to press a button for the grinder to work while for the manual type one has to rotate the arm of the device to grind the meat. Meat is best to cut in medium to small size pieces and then refrigerate the meat and the blade of the grinder for half an hour. It is easier to grind meat that is semi-frozen as it does not clog the grinder.
The next step is to add the meat to the feeding tube and it must be added in small portions and grinding is done in small batches so that there is no risk of clogging or overloading the meat grinder.

Spinning of the blade enables the meat grinder to push the meat forward through the attached plates so that it can come out in the desired form. Whether you want finely minced meat that is juicy or you want a large grind, you can get it all.