How do YOU find a good butcher?

[swat1018]

Yes, at that point it really does become a job. It is certainly understandable why many folks don't like venison. Starting from shot placement to poor field dressing and dragging techniques contamination and decomposition begins. I can recall when I lived in PA as a kid taking a deer to the butcher shop. They had a compressed season with a million hunters. "Just throw it in the pile and make sure the tag is attached" is what you heard from the butcher. The pile sat outside for days of freezing and thawing before they even skinned the deer. It was usually cool by Thanksgiving time but occasionally we would get a warm day. Chances of getting meat from your own deer were small. If we treated cows like that folks would hate steak.

That is why I like to process my own. I live in the northern VA suburbs and I've converted a lot of anti-hunters who hated venison. My wife would cook a dinner for them and they would rave about how good the "steak" was. "Where did you get it?...Oh, it was a deer my husband shot..." Before long they were on a list of folks who wanted venison. Over time they went from "How could anyone hunt?" to "When are you going hunting again". Over the years I've refined my butchering.

When I hunted public land, I kept a deer cart in my truck and would use that rather than field dressing and dragging. No dirt or creek water got near the meat. I would field dress it back at the truck and skin and quarter it at the game check station I used. I would put the quarters in a Rubbermaid bin and take them home. I originally had an old side-by-side refrigerator that I removed the shelves from and installed a bar to hand the quarters. After letting it hang for several days (depending on the size) I would butcher the quarters in the kitchen. I started by just using a knife. We started with ziplok freezer bags but soon got a vacuseal.

Now that we have private land, things are much easier and I've acquired better equipment over time. We have enough ATV trails and firebreaks on the farm, a deer is never too far from ATV access to drag without field dressing. I have a Great Day lift on the front of my ATV. It is much easier on my aging back. When I get it back to the barn, I've got an electric hoist making field dressing much easier with gravity's help. I skin and quarter it immediately. I have a sawsall with a demolition blade I use only for deer. This makes quartering much easier than a hand saw. I have a reach-in cooler at the barn as well where I hang the quarters. So, typically within 2 hours of pulling a trigger, I have a deer with a constant temperature around 35 degrees.

The deer stays there until I'm ready to head home. Again I use a Rubbermaid tub to transport the quarters and depending on temps, I add ice to the tub if needed for the trip home. I've got another reach-in cooler for hanging deer at home. The meat is cooled down quickly and never exposed to bacteria unless I make a bad shot and when that happens, any exposure is washed with clean water and any tainted meat removed.

Letting a deer hang at that 35 degrees allows the enzymes to breakdown and tenderize the meat without significant bacterial growth. Larger and older deer are hunger longer. I usually butcher within a week. I have bandsaw type meat saw now. I use it only to make ham stakes from the rear quarter. I still fillet the loins. We either cube or grind the rest. I got a very heavy duty Cabelaas grinder that really works great. We started looking at the cost of the channel bags needed for the vacuseal and decided to invest in a chamber vacuum sealer that uses low cost bags and can seal bags with liquid in them. An Excalibur dehydrator for jerky and a heavy duty Cabelas jerky shooter round out the equipment.

Around here butchers will charge $70 and up to butcher a deer, but I don't butcher my own to save the money. I do it because I know and control exactly what happens to the meat from trigger pull to table.

We finished up this morning. We decided not to make jerky from this batch. We ended up with about 75 lbs of meat (not counting soup bones and such). I know guys up north will get that much from a single deer. That is about 10 lbs per hour of butchering time (from cooler to freezer).

Thanks,

jack

If you skin and quarter immediately, I wouldn't even gut. Use the gutless method, it improves quality even more by not opening up the intestinal cavity at all.

 

[yoderjac]

If you skin and quarter immediately, I wouldn't even gut. Use the gutless method, it improves quality even more by not opening up the intestinal cavity at all.

I've seen guys who do it that way. I have not tried it myself.

 

[swat1018]

I've seen guys who do it that way. I have not tried it myself.

If I'm going to skin and cut immediately, I think it's the only way. You should try it, I don't think you'll go back to wasting time gutting.

 

[yoderjac]

If I'm going to skin and cut immediately, I think it's the only way. You should try it, I don't think you'll go back to wasting time gutting.

I think part of it depends on how much you want to do at once and how much of the deer you plan to use. After spending the day in the woods followed by tracking and retrieving, I really don't want to fillet out all the meat. Also, I don't know how one gets at the tenderloins without gutting. With the deer on the hoist using a gut hook, it takes me about 3 minutes to gut it. I use the hear and liver as well. On top of all that, our DMAP program records dressed weight and live weight is optional.
Like most things, it depends on the situation.

Thanks,

Jack

 

[Wintomatic]

I thought I was pretty good at butchering deer until I learned from a retired butcher who did deer processing. Proper wrapping is pretty important. Although vacuum sealing is far superior, we wrap ours with butcher paper.
Totally agree with Yoderjac on the field dressing. Drag your deer out to a place you can get access to transportation before you field dress it to prevent contamination. Bacterial contamination occurs fairly quickly and getting dirt and mucky water and grass into the body cavity will contaminate the meat.
Skinning and refrigerating the meat quickly makes a huge difference on the taste of the meat.
Skinning a deer right away is so easy compared to waiting until the fat has solidified and adhered to the mucle. The subcutaneous fat between the skin and muscle peels away with the skin. A lot of the “gamey” flavor that people don’t like comes from the fat, especially in more mature bucks with a lot of testosterone in there system. The first thing a lot of people do with a buck is “remove the testicles so it doesn’t make the meat taste bad”. This is actually a good thing to do. Testosterone and other sex related hormones are fat soluble and will be absorbed and concentrated in the fat. The sooner you get it away from the meat will reduce those hormones and the “gamey” flavor from absorbing into the meat.

 

[Northbound]

I rarely drag a deer, I cut up and de bone where they fall. Pack out in backpack. So much easier when fresh. No need to gut. It will change the way you hunt if you give it a try. I venture into some remote public areas I never would consider dragging a deer out of. Only problem is when you kill another one while your pack is full from the first one...

 

[MRBB]

just a heads up, make sure its LEGAL to quarter where you hunt if you plan to do this, here in PA< its NOT allowed, on state owned lands, as they consider that waste left behind
same as with dumping remaining boanes and hide in the woods, which is also Illegal here
they expoect you to PROPERLY get rid of it, be it in your trash and or??
I have done both methods, and it always for em depends on where I am at to decide what way to process them, but will be honest and say I have gutted and dragged out more than quartered, as I don't carry a pack for packing out often
and last many I killed, come out on a an ATV so that speeds things up
I Hut where they fall, and haul out with atv and cut when I get back, never had a deer with bad or other wise meat damage from gutting in the woods, and killed a few hundred deer land gutted where they dropped?
Guess it can happen, but I never seen it?

 

[yoderjac]

just a heads up, make sure its LEGAL to quarter where you hunt if you plan to do this, here in PA< its NOT allowed, on state owned lands, as they consider that waste left behind
same as with dumping remaining boanes and hide in the woods, which is also Illegal here
they expoect you to PROPERLY get rid of it, be it in your trash and or??
I have done both methods, and it always for em depends on where I am at to decide what way to process them, but will be honest and say I have gutted and dragged out more than quartered, as I don't carry a pack for packing out often
and last many I killed, come out on a an ATV so that speeds things up
I Hut where they fall, and haul out with atv and cut when I get back, never had a deer with bad or other wise meat damage from gutting in the woods, and killed a few hundred deer land gutted where they dropped?
Guess it can happen, but I never seen it?

It is really often a lack of information about meat spoilage that plagues most hunters. I've seen guys gut deer in the field and wash them out in a creek. What they don't realize is that they are often putting much more bacteria into the deer by doing this. I've seen guys puncture the stomach or bladder. Deer shot in the paunch will have bacteria introduced into the meat. Often guys will simply hang a deer overnight when temperatures are much too warm and sometimes unskinned.

Different styles of hunting lend themselves to different styles of processing. The underlying principles are pretty simple:
- Make a good shot to start with.
- Reduce heat from the body cavity as soon as practical
- Don't introduce bacteria into the meat from the digestive track or from the environment.
- Keep the deer at around 34-36 degrees until you are ready to butcher.

The only substantial differences I find between well cared for venison and beef is the fat. Venison has much less fat marbled through the meat. It is very lean. Beef fat is liquid at the temperature of our mouths but deer fat will congeal a that temperature. Serving venison on a hot plate and with a warm beverage solves any issues with a tallow coating on the tongue and mouth.

Different folks will find different techniques fit their individual situations better, but the underlying principles hold true regardless of technique.

Thanks,

Jack

 

[ksgobbler]

The processor here charges extra if you have field dressed is and got anything in it. They would just prefer you drop it off whole.