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Before one can consider the washing, salting and rinsing portion of Kashering a properly slaughtered animal, your Kosher meat processor has to deal with the following three issues:

1. Removing Fat
2. Sciatic Nerve
3. Major arteries

Chailev (translated as ‘animal fat’) is the subject of a number of important laws pertaining to specific masses of fats found in cattle.  The Torah forbids the eating of Chailev - specific fats found in cattle, sheep or goats. The Talmud specifies the location of these forbidden fats.
1) The ‘fat of the stomachs’,
2) The fat covering the kidneys and the body cavity, covering over the hind legs or the loins, and
3) The diaphragm upon which the liver rests. 

As you can guess, only an experienced and knowledgeable butcher would be familiar with the specifics of this law.

Another task that is very complicated is taking out the sciatic nerve. The Torah forbade us to eat the Gid Hanoshe - the sciatic nerve.  Hence, excising this nerve, which stretches from the animal’s hind legs to the spinal cord of the animals, would be a must before we would be permitted to eat the meat encompassing this nerve. (If you think removing the forbidden fats requires expertise, imagine what surgical skills are called for in removing the sciatic nerve.)

Finally, the most complicated task of all: excising the arteries. Everyone knows that drinking an animal’s blood is a gross violation of the Torah.  But there seems to be blood everywhere in meat, even, it appears after a cut of meat has been washed, salted, and rinsed.  Which blood is forbidden and which is allowed?

The sages have taught us that the Torah prohibits the Dam Henefesh, the ‘blood of the soul’.  This has been taken to mean, among other areas, the blood that emerges after an animal’s throat has been slaughtered, and the blood pooled in the animal’s major arteries. 

How is the problem of the blood in the arteries dealt with?  One method of doing this would be by severing all arteries and exposing them. This would facilitate removal of the blood by soaking and salting. However, it has become traditional to remove all blood vessels completely from the neck through the shoulder and foreleg, the ribs, the brisket, the navel area, and the tongue.

Which arteries these are, and how to remove them, and how to remove the sciatic nerve, how to locate and discard the prohibited fats calls for an expertise in animal physiology, as well as for a ‘surgeon’s hand’ to deal with all these excisions. The removal of the forbidden veins and fats is a painstaking task; and the entire Koshering process requires a high degree of religious responsibility, as well as knowledge in anatomy.

Additionally, there are several organs in the intestinal area that are commonly used (i.e. liver, miltz, intestines, etc.) each requires careful removal from the carcass and is followed by a good scraping to remove all the fats, membranes and cords.

It has become traditional in most of the Western world to limit the use of Kosher meat to those parts of the animal that are in the respiratory areas of the animal (front quarter), which extends to the twelfth rib, at which point the carcass is split off, with the ‘hind quarter’ of the animal going for sale to non-Jews.

The reason for this is simple. The area requiring most of the complicated work is in the hind quarter, and because it is so labor intensive, along with the shortage of experts in this field, the kosher meat processing company decides not to bother with the hind quarter at all, eliminating the need and the expense for the extremely tedious process of excising the forbidden Chailev in the hindquarter, the major arteries, and the gid hanoshe (sciatic nerve). This is only exacerbated by gentile meat markets that would take the entire hindquarter off his hands at a bargain price.

In Israel, probably because they don’t have whom to sell the hindquarters to, skilled Orthodox butchers do remove the forbidden parts and only reject certain cuts of the animal (known in the non-Kosher world as fillet mignon) where removal of the veins is too difficult. But the remaining meat cuts are de-veined meticulously, and are thus permitted to be eaten.

To conclude: Technically, the only forbidden parts of a cow would be specific fats, membranes, cords, veins, blood and the Gid Hanoshe. 

Given that broad a range, one would technically be permitted to eat any cut of meat when its forbidden parts have been excised.  In practice however, in the USA, no meat from the animal’s hindquarters is sold as Kosher.

If you could find Kosher leg of lamb where the proper preparations included the excising of he forbidden parts, then such a cut would be Kosher.  But you will not find them in the Kosher butcher store in the US, and you will be paying a very high price in Israel were you to try to purchase meat from below the twelfth rib. 

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