Butchering tips

[mustanger98]

I wonder how many people didn't realize Boston butt is a shoulder. There's this one bbq place in my area... their advertising states "you can smell our butts for miles", which doesn't sound so great without proper context.

Y'all realize backstrap and tenderloin are two very similar, but different cuts?

I know lots of folks like to add fat to their deer burger... I don't. I think whether we're talking chili, sausage gravy, probably several other things, I don't see how fat adds anything. YMMV.

On skinning, my understanding is that if you want to make buckskin, you don't want cuts to the inside of the hide.

 

[Fine Figure of a Man]

There's this one bbq place in my area... their advertising states "you can smell our butts for miles",

My favorite local Locker sells shirts and hats that say “You can’t beat Tony’s meat”
I’m sure there are many similar

 

[Random 8]

^^^Yep

. Grind your meat semi-frozen and do not add pork fat at the time of grinding unless you are going to eat the burger right away. Freezing venison with pork fat, due to the enzymes in the venison, can make the pork fat go rancid over time, even when frozen. Add the fat right before using the burger.

I have never heard or observed this in 35 years of butchering and eating venison. I've eaten frozen venison/pork burger up to 2 years old and never noticed an off taste. Perhaps adding a fatty cut of pork is different than adding lard or rendered fat prior to freezing, which is definitely a bad idea. The main reason for adding fat pork is to allow for frying and grilling. Straight ground venison gets too dry in burger or sausage on the grill, and needs fat added to brown/fry. If you are only browning it to make chili, tacos or spaghetti, you can skip the fat pork and just add some lard when you fry it.

 

[rabid wombat]

Get a milsurp and a dremel...

Sorry, wrong thread

 

[readyeddy]

The neck, blade roast and hocks are great braised. The crock pot method is very easy.

The ribs and flap are excellent but needs to be cooked low and slow to be tender, or you could boil them first then grill.

Back straps, hams and heart make great steaks for the grill. Don't forget the tenderloin.

Liver and testes can be sauteed.

The tongue is an interesting cut as it is both firm yet chewable, giving you the choice of cooking medium rare or braising.

 

[troy fairweather]

This thread made me hungry, I am up at my dads . So after digging in the freezer I found 2, 1/4 pound venison hamburgers with 20% beef fat . And one pack of morning sausage, it's dated Nov 17 so I fried it up and it tasted like the day we made them.

I have had good luck with raping in plastic wrap, so long you get the air out.

 

[Bwana John]

It is easiest to not only skin and quarter but also butcher while hanging.
Use gravity to pull muscle groups away and expose joints.
As you seperate the muscle groups and slice between them the muscle falls away and shows you where to slice next, very easy to cut from all sides by just turning the carcass, no holding anything, just slice meat away.
I try not to do any work on the bench until the point of removing silverskin.

 

[Rembrandt]

We mix burger and sausage with either beef or pork fat. That's what adds the flavor, just as marbling adds flavor to a good piece of beef. Most is all rendered out in the cooking process. Can't say I've ever heard of mixing the two making meat rancid.

We grind twice.....once for the meat, add ground tallow to the first grind, then grind a second time with tallow and meat mixed together. (80% meat 20% tallow) Using scales insures consistent percentages.

 

[FL-NC]

There is some meat there if you work for it, on larger deer especially. I can get a stack of tags so it isn't worth the time.
The scraps are not wasted, it all gets put out for the bald eagles. This year may be different after an eagle killed my little dog.
View attachment 863200

Sorry for your loss.

 

[burrhead]

Just do it like this guy.

 

[JeeperCreeper]

If no one has said it yet, DeerMeatForDinner YouTube channel has some great tips.

My best advice is to avoid cutting/sawing bones and trim the fat off.

But then again, I've only helped, never led, a butcher party.

 

[buck460XVR]

. Can't say I've ever heard of mixing the two making meat rancid.

Growing up in a small, rural Midwestern town, we, like everyone else back then, has a local butcher. He was a neighbor that I delivered papers to and later on in life, would help out in his butcher shop after school and weekends......especially during deer season. This is what he told me. While he would do whatever the customer wanted, he did not add pork tallow to his venison, and always recommended I do not do it to mine. He claimed the same process happened with sausage. While folks would rant and rave over his sausage when they first got it, if any was left in the freezer by the following summer, they generally complained it tasted "strong" and would feed it to their dogs. This is why he would suggest folks with large amounts of venison they wanted to make into sausage, would keep the meat in large chunks and make sausage several times a year instead of just once. What I was taught and what I still do. YEMV. He also would use inside belly fat from whole beef carcasses for mixing in his venison, claiming it gave more flavor. It seemed to. Lots of things I saw done in a commercial butcher shop, even back then, that makes me continue to process my own.

 

[.308 Norma]

We grind twice.....once for the meat, add ground tallow to the first grind, then grind a second time with tallow and meat mixed together.

We do the same thing - mix ground pork and the flavorings we like (mostly Italian seasoning and sage) with our ground venison and run everything through the grinder a second time. But then we shape our newly made venison sausage into patties and fry them up. Next we place the already fried patties on cookie sheets sprayed with cooking oil and put the sheets in the freezer for a while (usually overnight). The next day, we scrape the frozen, pre-cooked patties off the cookie sheets and put them in zip-lock bags – they won’t stick together because they are already frozen.

For breakfast, we take a few pre-cooked and frozen venison sausage patties out of the freezer and pop them in the microwave. It takes 30 seconds apiece (in our microwave) for the patties to become piping hot - and delicious! Or, ask me about my venison sausage biscuit with pepper jack and an ice cold lager for lunch.

I wouldn’t know about mixed ground pork and ground venison (we mix it 50/50) going bad after a year in the freezer. Our pre-cooked and frozen pork and venison sausage patties never last anywhere near that long – especially when our three teenaged grandsons are around.

 

[Fine Figure of a Man]

I have found that the best and least expensive way package venison, or any meat, is with plastic wrap and freezer paper. I get it in rolls from the locker. The plastic is thick, not like plastic cling wrap from a grocery store.

 

[mustanger98]

The folks who process my deer... they do three good flavors of sausage... hot, mild, and maple. This year, they're also making summer sausage and I'm sure it'll be good too.

For breakfast, we take a few pre-cooked and frozen venison sausage patties out of the freezer and pop them in the microwave. It takes 30 seconds apiece (in our microwave) for the patties to become piping hot - and delicious! Or, ask me about my venison sausage biscuit with pepper jack and an ice cold lager for lunch.

Well, make mine sweet tea or coffee depending on the weather, but otherwise, yeah. That reminds me I got some maple patties left over from lunch today and some sourdough... might hafta make me a sandwich here shortly.

 

[buck460XVR]

One thing I forgot to mention was to remember to remove the "rind" when cutting up your deer. Because of the lack of fat covering the body on most bucks, if one does like I do and skin the animal warm(because it is easiest and cools the animal faster), leaving it to hang a few days before cutting it up makes for what I call a "rind" on the carcass, especially mature bucks that have little or no fat on them. This "rind" is the outside layer of meat that is exposed to the air and then dries out. This dried out "rind" can be tough and add an unpleasant flavor to the meat. It also adds more dryness to an already dry meat. Basically I just remove the outer 1/8" of meat from those carcass parts that are exposed to the air. This also assures that any stray hairs or dirt/bug poop, etc. that is on the carcass does not end up in the meat. Most commercial processors do not so this and those that cut the meat up with a bandsaw not only contaminate the meat with the "rind" as the bandsaw blade passes thru the meat, it also takes with it the hair and other nasties on the outside of the carcass. Same goes for any of the nasty tasting fat and bone marrow the blade passes thru as it is slicing your steaks and chops. Coupla reasons so many butchers use bandsaws and do not like to debone venison. One of course is the extra amount of time it takes. Second is the amount of discard there is when venison is deboned. Why take extra time to remove bone, fat and blood meat when you have to pay someone to take it away. Much easier to package it with the meat and let the customer put it in his garbage. Third is the big reduction in the perceived amount of meat one takes home. Bones left in steaks, chops and roasts take up a lot of room in the packages. Makes the packages look bigger and makes for more packages altogether. Debone it all and remove anything less than ideal to eat and the customer is paying a hundred dollar processing fee to take home one grocery bag of meat. At least with the bones left in, two bags looks like more when they come to pick it up.

 

[Highland Lofts]

I never paid to have a deer cut up. After doing a few you will figure it out and it gets easier as you cut up more of them. One word of advice, BUY A GRINDER.

I like to grind the tougher pieces of meat and save the better pieces as cube meat to make stew out of.

I cut the back straps into 1/4 inch pieces to fry up. Make sure you cut the silver skin off of them before dicing them up.

When cutting the meat meat up for steaks they don't have to be exactly 1/2" - 3/4" or 1" thick. After you cook them up you will be cutting them up to eat. If they are 1/2" on one side and 1" on the other end it doesn't matter. The meat will taste the same, it will all be cut up to eat it anyway.

Another thing, skin the deer off as soon as you can. The sooner you skin it the easier the hide comes off. We skin them as soon as we get back to the house.

 

[Elkins45]

No bones go into the freezer, and I don’t like using a saw. Bone dust adds a bad flavor, and leaving bones intact minimizes the chance of spreading some diseases.

All you really need to put a deer in the freezer is something to hang it from, a cutting surface and a good knife or two. A flexible blade boning knife can be bought for somewhere around $10 and is really helpful for separating the meat from the bones. If you want to invest a little more, I suggest getting a vacuum sealer, a dehydrator, and a grinder. If you are really living well you might get access to a second refrigerator so you can work at your leisure.

Back when I was working during deer season I would shoot one on the weekend, then skin it ASAP and quarter it up and get it into the fridge. Typically I would wait until Friday night after work and then debone and package the whole thing.

Watch some YouTube videos. There’s a lot of good info. My favorite is the guy who completely deboned a carcass in 10 minutes.

 

[brewer12345]

Buy a grinder.

What I do is hang it, skin it, and quarter it. The sections go in a large fridge until I get around to cutting them up. The shanks I save for osso buco (please don't grind them, braised shank dishes are amazing). The front quarter you can either cut into stew chunks, grind, or leave whole as a roast. Neck, rib meat and any other odds and ends either become stew meat (if big enough pieces) or go into the grind pile. The backstrap and tenderloins come off and get frozen in reasonable serving sizes. The rear hams I separate out into the different muscle groups. Sirloin and eye of round are perfect for steaks. Top round can be ok for steaks, but I usually either cube for stew or make pastrami with it. Bottom round is pretty tough, so it either gets cubed, corned, or turned into pastrami. Any other small pieces generally end up in the grind pile.

Do yourself a favor and get as much silverskin off before you freeze it. I found freezer wrap (plastic, heavy duty) and butcher paper to do a great job for a year and longer. Keep the heart, kidneys, liver and tongue. Whatever large bones you pull out freeze for making stock.

 

[mustanger98]

I might have mentioned that when I have one processed I tell them cut everything possible for steaks and grind the rest, usually for sausage. That being said, I've been wondering if the brisket can be cut as such, maybe to be cooked low and slow for a Texas style bbq.

 

[entropy]

I'd tell you how to do it, but the last person I taught took up butchering for a living. (My son.)

 

[Axis II]

Okay guys I think after shooting a 97lbs hanging weight doe and only getting enough back to pack this cooler full I will be cutting at least one up myself. I asked/text the guy for Smokies if he had time and the response I got was K. I got back maybe 12 packs of 1lbs ground. I don't know if he is still making smokies or what and kept some of the ground? He's super hard to get a hold of because he works swing shifts, so I guess I will wait and see what happens. I will be ordering one of the boning knives mentioned above and find a decent but cheap grinder. I like using a lot of ground so if I mess up something ill be fine with ground. https://www.walmart.com/ip/Igloo-28-Qt-Island-Breeze-Cooler/23735485

I do have another question for you guys. I rent so cant do it at my residence, but a friend said I am more than welcome to use their garage to do it, but I cannot hang anything from rafters. I am thinking about buying one of these tripods to hang it while I skin and quarter it. I am also thinking I should invest in one of these tables to do my cutting on or even a plastic picnic table.

https://www.cabelas.com/product/Bas...VTJyzCh31sAmtEAQYASABEgKz1PD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds

https://www.sportsmansguide.com/pro...MIzMu2hKKw5gIVCaCzCh0OXAkMEAQYAiABEgKJmvD_BwE

 

[Arkansas Paul]

I am thinking about buying one of these tripods to hang it while I skin and quarter it. I am also thinking I should invest in one of these tables to do my cutting on or even a plastic picnic table.

That portable hanger is nice.
If we didn't have a skinning rack at our camp, I would buy one of those.
In the future, you could just keep it in your truck and do it in the woods.

I wouldn't worry about the table, but your situation may be different.
I just quarter them at deer camp and put it in a cooler. Finish it in the kitchen.

I also second watching YT videos. There are some very good ones.

I find processing my own deer very rewarding. If you have a good year and kill 3 or 4 deer, that's enough savings to buy a new gun.

 

[Axis II]

That portable hanger is nice.
If we didn't have a skinning rack at our camp, I would buy one of those.
In the future, you could just keep it in your truck and do it in the woods.

I wouldn't worry about the table, but your situation may be different.
I just quarter them at deer camp and put it in a cooler. Finish it in the kitchen.

I also second watching YT videos. There are some very good ones.

I find processing my own deer very rewarding. If you have a good year and kill 3 or 4 deer, that's enough savings to buy a new gun.

I hunt very small woodlots very close to home, so its literally just a pull off on the edge of the field. I thought about using the tail gate with a large cutting board, but the friends house is in the city and everyone on the street drives a porshe or benz and hand feeds the deer from their porch, so I doubt it would go over well having a deer being cut up in the driveway. I would rather be in the garage with the door closed.

 

[Arkansas Paul]

I hunt very small woodlots very close to home, so its literally just a pull off on the edge of the field.

Sometimes I forget that not everyone hunts on 3400 acres in the middle of nowhere.

Doing it in the garage will do just fine though.
You'll need to get you a gut bucket to keep under the hung deer.
We cut the bottom out of an old plastic 55 gallon drum and that's what we use. Anything will work though as long as it's big enough.