I bought 1/2 of 700 lb.Braunvieh Calf w/processing today at a friends fundraiser.

What are your recommendations for processing?

One of my buddies says hang for 28 days and dry age. Evidently, the meat market doing the processing offers "dry age"

It's been so long since I purchased like this, I'm clueless.

Any advise would be appreciated.

28 days dry aging is great if the processor will hang it that long. At a minimum, hang it 21 days.

Have steaks cut 1" to 1.5" thick.

Decide if you want roasts or most of it ground or cut into stew meat. Get the shanks.

Get all the bones they offer as you can make delicious stock with the bones.

You can request package size for some things. For example, 2 steaks per package (or 1 or 4), ground beef in 1 lb packages or 2 lb. Now that our kids are bigger, we freeze ours in 2 lb chubs.

Any other questions?

My opinion - you don't need to dry age a month, especially if you aren't willing to chance it into the time frame where it actually makes a difference - which is farther out than 28 days in my experience.

Having slaughtered 50-60 over the past several years, you will probably be happy just getting their standard steak processing (unless you want something specific like all boneless steak cuts) and then telling them how much roast you want.

Half of a 700 lb calf means you walk away with about ~175 lbs product - less if you opt for boneless, more if you want all the soup bones. Of that 175, you could roughly expect around 60 lbs each of steak, roast cuts including brisket, and ground.

Thank you both. I'll be talking to the meat market this week.

Who is doing the processing?

Just curious, are you sure you purchased half of a 700lb calf or a half of alive weight steer weighing 1400lbs? The latter makes more sense.

1/2 of 700lb calf. Brenham Quality Meats

You're going to want to get a lot of ground beef from a young calf... steaks won't be that great (but the ground beef and roasts/tenderized round steaks will be).

If it was a fed calf, I would hang it, it does make a difference. I doubt it will for a 700 lb calf that you're going to grind up.

My opinion, others may disagree. I've had both weaned calves and fed, aged and not aged.