Max- Time for hanging
Whitetail Deer
I usually rely on my bother and father's deer to feed my 5 munchkins. They usually process the weekend after gun season, so the longest they would hang is 2 weeks. For what ever reason it didn't get done this past weekend and they plan on cutting everything up this coming Sat. The deer are stored in a pole shed. Temps have been relativly cold. The first week hanging outside temps only got up to 33. The second week was warmer, highs in the 40''s with night time temps just below freezing. This week is also below freezing. Would you still trust the meat? I have always cut up my own deer the day of, or the following morning.
If it's the right temp I've hung for 3 weeks. When it starts getting moldy inside the ribcage is when I've always taken em down. I hang with fur on, usually only a couple degrees above freezing in the garage this time of year. That's perfect. Sniff test is always your friend.
Diddo on what Pat says, make sure it's a well cleaned deer.
I always make sure I cut around and tie off the anus when gutting, if done right everything pulls thru when I gut the animal. I have seen a lot of guys gut a deer and I call most yankers and pullers. I myself get everything and it is very neat and I get everything out , all the bits and pieces. I always try and get the bladder ecsp. as it is normally full and I tie it off and save it to drain later. I have eaten venison that has hung outside with the skin on for as long as 3 weeks. Temps were cold and it never went above freezing. Deer ate well, I have also seen them hung just a day in cold weather and not so good. A lot has to do with how a deer dies, stressful long dragged out death results in tough meat. Quick relaxed death, tender meat. I find myself lately quartering as soon as possible and then placing in the fridge and cut up at my leisure over a few days. Shawn
+1 Pat
It seems like they do this every year have you ever had issues in the past?
I normally will only let a deer hang overnight or a day at the most. I skin and quarter and age in a refrigerator for 7-10 days.
Can't remember the last time I hung a whole animal, we debone everything in the field. But I understand in some states you have to check in the whole animal?
If in a cooler on ice I like a week, maybe 10days. I have a few ways to keep the meat away from water, but it's pretty humid in a sealed cooler, I'd still call that wet aged.
Dry aged is the holy grail of meat aging. Used to have a walk in and you could go a couple weeks easy in the dry cold like that. The meat gets a skin on it. You need to age it in big cuts. The dry aged beef guys say a minimum 3 weeks. Some age for months.
Looking to pick up a dedicated old refrigerator this coming year to get back into some dry aging. Well, maybe some beer in it too..... you really need a thermal sink to stabilize the temps and increase the efficiency of the unit......
Dad hung one in the cooler for 28 days one time after reading an article written by a butcher in a hunting mag. When I saw the deer I told him no way was I eating any of it. It was nasty looking!! Fast forward a few weeks and I rolled in late one afternoon and momma was setting the table with biscuits, gravy, rice, black eyed peas and fried tenderloin. I ate until I was sick at my stomach. Dad had already eaten and was chewing on a mouth full of Red Man. When I finally pushed away he asked me how I liked that rotten deer meat;) It was the most tender I have ever eaten!!
I well known chef told me to hang a deer skin on in a cooler for a month...it will be the best deer I ever had....
all hunting stops at time of kill and all attentions go prossesing the meat , no exceptions, no wait .no reason to risk meat or waste the kill . in fact I useally head for the butter and a frying pan so I can eat some fresh steak while butchering . wait for what ?
If it's frozen it's not aging, it's in the same condition it will be in after you butcher it and put it in the freezer. Meat only "ages" when it's thawed. Aging is the bacterial breakdown of the meat. There are a lot of theories on whether venison is improved by aging or not, and I have eaten a lot of it that was aged, and a lot that was not. Cooked properly it's all good.
I'm pretty sure that meat will be fine, but you can always trust your nose, if it's spoiled there will be no doubt.
as Pat said, sniff it. If you skinned and cleaned the carcass well (took out trachea, anus, cleaned and rinsed abdominal cavity, cut away and drained any bloodshot areas) the temps you describe 2 weeks will be fine.
The temperatures that you are talking about (staying near freezing to slightly frozen) the meat should be fine. if they are skinned already, there will be a thick, dry skin that you will have to carve off, but the meat underneath will be fine. We routinely age 2-3 weeks in our walk-in cooler at about 33-35 degrees, and we leave the hide on if we are able to get them to the cooler right away. That way, the hide protects the meat and keeps it from drying out. If it is hot and we can't get to the cooler in the first few hours, then we will skin it to get the body heat out and avoid sour. At 3 weeks, you will start to see a little mold growth on some of the exposed surfaces, but it is easy to trim off.
Hanging deer only makes a difference for animals under 2 1/2 (maybe 3 1/2).
Anything older and you are just wasting time.
All the butchers/beef guys you are referring to are aging animals 12-18 months old. They are rarely aging animals older than that. So just remember if you shoot a 4 1/2 yo just butcher it for roasts, burgers and braising. No amount of aging is going to make that animal as tender as a 1 1/2 yo deer.
Either way good luck!
I read a book about those Benoits. They hang a deer outside so it freezes solid, and leave it there all season. Then they bring it into the living room so it can thaw out for butchering.
I've tried most popular methods myself, I find it best to just butcher it completely the day after. Can't age venison either, It aint beef.
Dry aging does two things. By removing some of the moisture (water) in the meat it concentrates the flavor.
Secondly the meat starts to break down from the enzymes in it. (It does not "rot" as bacteria is what causes rot and the rotten smell and other bad things, enzymes are not bacteria.) Proper aging changes the texture and flavor. Older animals are not immune to enzymes, they may never get as tender as a spike would all else being equal, but they will get more tender. Nor are they unique to beef. The fats are different between beef and game, game fat will sour so you want to trim it as best you can. But meat is meat. The chemical process is the same. Dry aged a week may or may not mean much, especially if at freezing temps. Dry aged several weeks you will notice a difference in texture and flavor in nearly any meat.
Fresh is far from "bad". but aging meat, right up though pheasant and such, makes it better.... IMO. Others may have different tastes, or may not be worth the time and effort to do so. And if you're just going to grind it I wouldn't bother much with aging either.
The only meat I like best fresh is seafood. But rarely does that need to be more tender.... usually the problems cooking and eating it are the opposite, you're trying to keep it firm and away from what seems an instant decomposition.
I never age the meat, makes it gamey, process and freeze
I know a guy that hung one for 2 months with the skin on. He made it into jerky and always tried to give me some. Always said "no thanks ,not hungry". He seemed to have a lot of diarrhea and stomach aches. Surprised me he lived thru it!
I believe the most important step in good quality game meat is to immediately get the skin off and cool it. If it is warm, I don't hesitate to put the skinned quarters in a flowing creek or in a waterproof bag in a pond. Other than keeping stink off it from entrails or musk, rapid cooling is my highest priority.
The longest I've hung a moose is 35 days. I shot a large bull that was fighting with another old bull. Five days later I went with a buddy and he shot that other rutted up bugger. Mine was hanging, in a proper cooler, and we added that one to. I asked the butcher to hang mine for the full thirty days and he agreed if I paid a small fee for freezer space. He ended up cutting them on the same day, 35 days for mine and 30 for my buddy's. Fantastic!! You do loose a bit of meat to the crust that has formed. But on a decent sized animal it is very much worth it.
Deer, I hang for ten to fifteen days. It depends on temperature and a lot on humidity. If the air is dry and cool, meat can hang a long time. Moisture will cause mold and spoilage, better to cut it sooner. It takes time for the process that tenderizes the meat. If you can only hang it safely for less than a week, then here is likely little or no benefit.
But if you have the space and inclination, put a skinned, hind quarter from a mature animal in your frost free fridge. Every several days cut a steak off the quarter and quick fry it with just a few spices. By the time you get to the end of the third week, you'll see why high end steakhouses buy twentyeight day aged beef. That's hung and not what some call "box aged" which is packed first to prevent moisture loss. That moisture {water} is worth the same per pound as the meat, when it's in it.
But I guess if you only make burger and sausages or cook everything to death in sauces for hours, then it really doesn't matter. And a whitetail is just plain better flavoured than a mule anyway. But i don't think you can find a better deer than a coastal Sitka!!
TD is pretty spot on. Almost all of my customers wild game will hang at least two weeks unless it comes in soaked in ice water. This stuff is terrible, covered in bacteria, dirt, sticks, and stomach matter. Soaking in water is not your friend. It's the enzymes in the meat that make it tender and aging usually doesn't even start until about the 8-10 day mark, at least for beef. Wild game starts aging around the 5-8 day mark. I've hung elk in the mountains during the bow hunt for 6-7 days before with no issues. Keep it clean and cool and it will hang much longer than you think it will.
bone sour is caused by not properly skinning and gutting the animal quickly, especially with elk. The blood in the meat has no way to cool down properly with the hide on and causes bone sour. You can get by with the skin on for deer if gutted and hanging in a cool place, preferably below 35 degrees.
If the deer are in the shade, they are fine. Once chilled, all the way to the center of the bone, it takes a lot warmer weather to warm them up if they stay in the shade. That is the only plus to leaving the hide on. If it gets cold enough to freeze the deer with the hide on, It takes one heck of an effort to thaw them enough to skin them. But, it must be cold and I must have a long trip to not get the hide off ASAP.
On our yearly Thanksgiving week deer camp, sometimes we drag and sometimes we debone at the kill site. It routinely drops to the single digits or teens at night and daytime highs range from 20 to 45 degrees. We camp under a huge hemlock grove that never gets direct sunlight. On the deer killed close to camp, they are drug in, washed out, hung and body cavity is propped open so they cool. We wedge their rear legs apart. Many times some of the group is there for two weeks or more. The deer are excellent. Much better than early season deer that have to be butchered quickly. Also, if it is cold as it should be, they are much more tender than the deer that are deboned at the kill site.
Good meat is a process. I try to get them cooled as quickly as possible. If it is cold outside, I will let them hang for weeks literally. Because it needs to be free from fluid blood to be good. I just cut up a deer Saturday that was killed the day before Thanksgiving. It is going to be the best eating of the year. My two big bowls of grind meat didn't have blood in the bottom after grinding. while the meat was really cold, my grinder doesn't require a flash freeze to grind. So, if it had a lot of blood in it when I ground it, it would have pooled in the bowls.
A good rule I use is when I'm deboning the meat while letting it hang is, if I get blood on my hands, it hasn't hung long enough. My hands and fingers will get red but, never bloody. If they do, I return it to the fridge or let it hang longer if temps allow. Also, you will be able to tell the meat has started to get more tender when the blood content is right for butchering.
You fellas butchering the day of or following a kill are really missing out on how could deer meat is. Try it. God Bless
Well, had I read all the responses before responding, I could have simply said glacier, TD, Ambush, and butcherboy X 2. God Bless
butcherboy is a professional butcher, so I'm going with his data :)
When it's well below freezing you don't really need to worry about cooling the animal down even with fur on. Hang it up and it cools fairly quickly from the inside out.
We've always hung our deer and I can not tell you the amount of times people tell me it's the best deer they've ever tasted, etc etc. So you can't tell me it makes it gamey or bad in any way. Just last week had a lady in church come up to me out of the blue to tell me how amazing the deer was I made for her 12 years ago!! She still remembered it and I don't know what brought the memory on but she's had a lot of deer meat and she says she normally doesn't like it but this was just SOOOOOO amazing etc. So I'm going to continue hanging in near freezing temps until it is moldy on the inside of the ribcage.
I guess most of us are creatures of habit and do most things the way we have always done it. Where I hunt, it generally does not get that terribly cold. Most of the deer and other critters I have taken are generally skinned and in an ice chest as soon as I can possibly get them there. If a larger animal and I am away from home that may change by necessity based on facilities at hand. I have friends that insist on hanging deer to age them because that is what their Dad did. We always put our on ice as soon as we could. Just seems to taste better that way to me.
Smell is the best way to tell if its still good. After leaving it all week in the upper forties as you said, I would take a slice off and throw in the pan for a taste test. Good Luck
We have always deboned them and placed them in a cooler with ice and water for a week or so and then processed. I am looking for an upright drink cooler to start aging them in. Anyone else do this? I have a walk in cooler that we salvaged off of a job, but I don't really need anything that big.
Canada, a lot depends on how conscientious your dad and bro are in the meat prep. The first few hours are probably as important in how well/whether the meat should be aged as anything else. Assuming they do a quick, clean, thorough gut and clean up, as noted above, the aging part depends on you/your family's tolerance for scraping off a little fuzz (if need be). What did the British say about aging upland birds - hang them by the neck until it falls off? One thing for sure, you will get a more tender cut by aging. Have done side by side tests with quarters from the same animal, and it makes a noticeable difference.
Process and freeze right away, clean up all gear, sharpen knives and broadheads and get back in a tree!
Aging meat is not what makes it "gamey". Improper handling does. And that "improper" handling can begin literally within minutes of the kill. After the guts are out, then the next thing that should be done is probably the #1 thing that can make for off tasting v enison if not done right......the dissipation of the animal's body heat. The initial cooling of the carcass is what can make the difference between venison that you have to "hide" in a recipe, and that which you want to be the center piece of the recipe.
I split the chest open all the way and then remove the windpipe. Then I use a stick to prop the chest open after I drain the blood out. On a cold day you can see the steam coming off the body....and that's exactly what you want!
Someone said they did a side-by-side comparison of a quarter that was aged vs. not aged.
While I get that, not many would argue aging helps make it more tender, the right comparison would be comparing that deer to a 1 1/2 yo deer. I bet the 1 1/2 yo deer is better every time.
That's what I compare against. That's why I don't steak anything except backstraps/tloins from an older animal. Just not worth it no matter how long you age. It will never taste like a 1 1/2 yo deer. I'm just too picky and eat way too much good meat to eat a steak that's tougher than that.
