Processing your own animals
Elk
What does your processing set-up look like? What have you learned over the years processing your own animals?
I have a couple different sized meat cutting knives, a homemade butcher paper holder, and a commercial size grinder. The price of the grinder will be offset after a couple elk are processed. I have learned that it is not as hard as you think and I know how every piece of meat that we eat was taken care of. No excuses!
I have fond out that I want a cuber. God Bless
Don't skimp on the grinder. If you plan on making sausage, sticks, etc., I would recommend the LEM grinder that attaches to their mixer.
Its really not that difficult, just take your time. Its not something you rush. Get some buddies together and make a good time of it.
An elk takes my wife and I about 10 hrs to cut and wrap (vacuum seal), including grinding the burger. This is from quarters that were game bagged and kept fairly clean in the field.......the time will increase if the meat got dirty. We can do a deer or antelope in about 5 hours.
Some of our tools: 1). a 30" x 60" piece of 1/2" pexiglass for a cutting board that is set over the washer/dryer next to the laundry tub. 2). Wusthof kitchen knife and a Cabelas diamond wheels electric sharpener 3). Cabelas vacuum sealer and heavy bags 4). A Cabelas 3/4 HP grinder for the burger. 5). Quite a few small food grade bags to store burger meat in prior to grinding....ones that can go into the ice chest or freezer without leaking all over. 6). Garbage bags for the tallow scraps that I take out for the birds. 7). Small ziplock sandwich bags for the red meat scraps that aren't quite food grade for us that I grind and freeze for the dog when we are done with our food. 8). Good light over your cutting area so you can see the dirt/hair on the meat
All this sounds worse than it is! We really enjoy cutting our meat. It provides a huge sense of satisfaction to see a moose or elk or even a deer in the freezer that you hunted and cut up.
Good luck with it.
Been doing my own as long as I can remember. Takes around 2-3 hours cradle to grave (rail to freezer) for elk.
A large, quality grinder is worth the money. Vacuum sealer and a sharpie marker are essential, especially if you are fortunate enough to kill several animals in a short amount of time.
Biggest time saver (lessoned learned) freeze your meat prior to grinding. Grinding partially thawed meat is fast and easy. Grinding fully thawed meat is a slow, unnecessarily messy process.
Being your own butcher is time well spent.
Making sausage is a little more time consuming but worth the effort if you have have time.
Lots of guidance on line, even YouTube. Trim it up, keep it cold, take you're time and do it right. The end result is always worth it!
We run a grinder, a stuffer, a Vac. sealer, and a smoker, and to be honest I wouldn't even consider letting someone else touch the meat I strive towards 365 days a year. Would be kind of like running a marathon and then having some random dude you don't know standing there at the finish line to cross it for you... JS
I do moose, deer, and pigs every year. Just did a deer last night with a buddy. A few tables in the garage, large cutting boards, knives, grinder, paper roll, tape dispenser and your good to go. Takes time but the reward is greta and you know your product exactly. Our wild game started tasting way better once we started butchering ourselves.
Another tip is to put your auger and throat in the freezer to get it as cold as possible before using.
Anything to keep your meat cold will definitely benefit the processing
keep your knife`s very sharp,I use a long 8" fillit knife or my small Havelon with the replaceable razor blades !.....ive still not figured out how to deal with all the blood soaked burger in the bottom of the 30lbs tub after sitting in the fridge over night,maybe the wifes cooky rack and some wax paper under it ? lol have fun
I will say with a fillet knife, bone saw and Kitchen-Aide you can break down any animal and into the freezer in relatively short time. While heavy duty grinders are nice it's absolutely not necessary if your wife has a Kitchen-Aide standup mixer (just buy grinding attachment).
Also, know how old your animal is (roughly) and it will save you a lot of time. If you have a 4+ yo animal only steak the choices of cuts and make everything else burger, roasts and sausage. No 4+ yo animal is going to be tender enough for steaks which will save lots of time cutting.
Learn how to cook. A lot of guys don't know what cuts make as far as dinner is concerned. Sure a steak or burger is easy but shanks make great meals like Osso Bucco. Neck roasts are amazing. You can even get crazy with organs and tongue.
Whatever you do enjoy the process and remember you really can't mess things up. Get a good book, slow down and you will be fine. If you accidently make a mistake well it can then be burger! Haha.
Mine is quite simple. I have a gambol for hanging animals. Knives of different sizes-I bone all mine out-a medium price grinder and a vacuum packer. My grinder has a sausage tube included. I have found that is about all I need since I custom cut and closely trim every cut.
What Bowriter said. This is how my son & I do it.. We always grind our burger after it's cooled in the fridge as it grinds up fast & great that way. We only keep one or 2 roasts, the back straps & then all else is burger as that what gets used in so much at our house..
Here is mine at elk camp. After sucking everything down in the seal bags I get it all on ice. take it home and toss into the freezer. It's much easier to grind meat when partially frozen so after freezing the meat I pick a weekend for burger, jerky, summer sausage, Brats, and hunter sticks.
I have a cableas grinder. Stuffer attachments. Usually do it all in kitchen. I package burger with the poly bags and steaks with the Saran Wrap and butcher paper
I have a cableas grinder. Stuffer attachments. Usually do it all in kitchen. I package burger with the poly bags and steaks with the Saran Wrap and butcher paper
Tip#1-Spend money on the grinder. Cheap ones, don't last. Tip#2- There are a couple really good instructional videos out on butchering etc. However, there is no substitute for practice. Volunteer to help friends until you develop your own method. I butcher quite a bit differently from professional butchers because I use no saws and bone out completely. Learn seams and muscle groups and what has to be trimmed. Tip#3- Your most valuable tool will be a quality, vacuum packer. It will add flavor, tenderness and freezer life to every cut.
Get a good vacuum packer. I always used commercial shrink wrap for years, and meat lasts that way for 5-10 years no problem. Never had a piece go bad, BUT it's a pain to wrap and you sometimes get some blood leakage in your freezer, and everything is a ball when you're done.
Added benefits of a vacuum packer:
1. You can freeze your burger flat. Stacks nice in the freezer, and thaws REALLY fast in hot water. 2. The labelling doesn't wear off. Sharpie seems to stick better, but to make sure I now use masking tape and it's never losing the marker. 3. Always on hand I can't tell you how often I use it! 4. Waaaaaay faster. And stuff goes bad over time if it's just in freezer paper.
Going hunting to Saskatchewan in 10 days for an 8 day hunt, and I'm just going to bring it along so that all my meat is going to be frozen and packed before I even come home :) (assuming I kill something)
Another thing I've learned is to have your whole kitchen clean before starting. The more and bigger surfaces you have available the better! Obviously remove ALL sinew/silverskin, fat from whitetails.
Well, I do all mine in a special place I have in the garage, not the kitchen, but clean is paramount and I do have stainless steel surfaces to work on. Re the Vac. packer. No matter where I am going, if I am driving, mine goes along and I do pre-wrap with shrink wrap before vacuum packing. Makes it a lot easier to separate cuts. Also, Ikeep a large bowl of warm water and a clean towel handy. I like to work with exam gloves and wash them from time to time for a better grip. As an aside, for myself and others, I usually do about six - eight deer a year. No elk anymore.
#1 Good grinder (I have cabelas 1 3/4 and it works awesome) #2 Good set of Knives. (I have a 6 and 8 Inch Victorinox boning and breaking Knife) #3 Like a few people have said it is VERY beneficial to make sure the meat is as cold as possible before grinding. Makes a world of difference in time and ease.
The wife and I, a few good boning knives, a kitchen aide with grinder and sausage stuffer attachments, and a vacuum sealer. Also a pressure cooker, cubed, browned, and canned venison is great.
GOOD grinder +1. Good boning knife, I like the straight flexible 5" Victoinox, (used to be Forschner I think?), like them so much I have one in my kill kit in my pack and have 4 or 5 at home. For how good they are they are pretty cheap.
For the guys that have stuffers, (Amazon has some real good SS ones that from all I can see are the same as the Cabelas $200 ones for under a hundred bucks.) get a large tube and stuff the round poly bags made for ground meat. Stuff em from the bottom of the bag out and you will have no air, I use a metal crimp to seal but they have tape systems for them too. So fast and slick you'll never do it any other way again. Cheaper than vacuum bags too I think. Looks very professional, important if you give burger to other folks. The bags pretty much measure it all out for you and last as long or longer than vacuum sealed. Steaks, roasts, etc. we vacuum seal. Have a sharpie handy and make sure you mark what it is and the date on everything.
Only critical thing I didn't see above was a small cooler half filled with ice. Keeps your beer so much colder...... =D
we have been doing this for 20+ years. We have a smoke house and everything else you can imagine. I have a question that I have run into thru the years of making sausage. After several months in the freezer, our sausage develops a very strong taste and its not nearly as good and really not edible. anyone else have this issue?
We process ours in the garage, nothing fancy, hand grinder, plastic wrap/butcher paper once cut up (looking into a vacuum sealer). things we've learned - cold meat is better, not just for grinding. Yes your hands freeze, but warmer meat will stick to your hands, table everything. When it's cold it's more firm making it easier to cut into steaks etc. - I am "sharpening challenged" but you need a way to sharpen knifes as you go, trimming meat and getting the silver and white off, it's essential to have SHARP knifes. We struggle with this.
We can go from deer hanging on a gambrel in the garage, setup (we use a 6 foot kitchen counter top on saw horses), skin, break down, butcher, grind, wrap and clean up in about 3 hours with two of us.
Did one last night, started at 5:30 alone, got it skinned, broken down totally, one backstrap into steaks and a big bowl of burger meat in the freezer chilling. then my son showed up which helps (his deer), but I had to tell him what to do as we went.
We were done, cleaned up and cooler with meat in his car before 9.
One "new twist": deer ticks! Never had this happen, but it was warm (60 during the day), but I pulled 5 ticks off me while butchering and another 5 off my clothes while getting undressed and into the shower. Must have jumped onto me while was skinning the deer.
I am lucky enough to have a walk in cooler at my house. Any deer or elk gets boned out in the field. We then hang the meat in game bags in the cooler for at least 5 days. I had a good buddy give me a 4x8 sheet of cutting board material that I cut to the size of my center island in my kitchen, makes the entire island a cutting board. We use fillet knives for the cutting, 1hp Westin grinder, vacuum sealer and a couple Lem tubs to keep the hamburger and scrapes in. Most of my hamburger gets turned into jerky so I weigh out 2.5lbs or 5lbs and vacuum seal them. Most jerky seasoning packets are made to do 5-10 lbs of meat at a time.
To me, it is essential to have a whet rock and steel handy at all times. I can't and won't tolerate a dull knife. A few licks on the steel now and then usually keeps them in good shape. I would love to have a walk-in cooler but there is a way to age meat quite well without one. I have tried this and it actually does work. Put the meat, still on the bone if you wish in a large ice chest. It takes a big one. Then, cover with frozen water bottles and keep refreshing the water bottles for as long as a week. You'll be surprised how well this works. I put down a layer of boned out meat, (elk)and a layer of bottles and then another layer of meat and another of bottles. They stayed mostly frozen for four days and the meat was perfect for butchering. (I just put a nice roast in the crock pot, mylast one from last season.) Love those vacuum packers. And BTW- Passed up this buck, this morning.
My setup...I have a double tackle gambrel in my garage for skinning. A basement beer fridge that I hang quarters in for 3-10 days until I can get time to cut them up. A 36x24" cutting board on my workbench. Cling wrap and butcher paper for packaging. Good sharp knives, I use a replaceable blade Havalon for skinning and a filet knife for cutting meat. A sturdier knife to pop a couple joints. Don't need a saw for anything but the skull plate. And an antique manual meat grinder but I end up grinding very little compared to many folks, I braise a lot of what typically gets ground. It takes me about 5 hours to do a big whitetail start to finish not counting field dressing/skinning.
I have never done an elk myself but I'm sure I will someday.
Just dive in and do it. It's intimidating at first but you pick it up quickly. If you have a friend or family member to teach you, all the better. There is a lot of conflicting advice out there on the internets and once you do a couple yourself, you'll quickly learn what works and what is BS.
Unless circumstances force my hand, I'll never have a butcher process for me again. The confidence I'm caring for it properly, getting my own meat, and customizing every cut just to my liking cannot be overstated.
As far as what I've learned beyond getting more efficient with practice, pretty much all boils down to keeping the meat CLEAN and DRY. I now use the gutless method on all animals where any guts are hit after having a few nasty cleanup jobs and a doe that ended up having a little special funk. You don't want that stuff touching meat. Gutless method solves that problem. Keep it clean in the field. Get it skinned and cooled as quickly as possible, but I have seen people that take that step a little too obsessively. I remember seeing some bonehead post a picture of deboning an elk in the field and he had literally separated all the hindquarter muscle groups and had them laying on logs. He cooled them all right but surely introduced all kind of gunk and bacteria. Just get the core temps down into the 60-70's within several hours of death and you are in the clear.
Keep the meat dry and allow air circulation to form that crucial crust that holds in moisture and prevents bacteria growth. Anyone that's saying "drain the blood out" by soaking it a cooler or something, run the other way. And I see that said a lot on these threads. Yeah their meat will be edible, albeit gray and sacrificing taste, but that is no way to treat red meat respectfully.
This is outside the realm of butcher but related...just learn to cook the stuff properly! I've cooked venison for several hunters who always gave their meat away or had it all ground into salty snack sticks and sausage. Never had one of them come away from it less than wholly impressed and with a changed perspective. They or their wives treated it like beef and it comes out tough, livery and dry. Lean cuts have to be hot and fast and not taken past medium rare at most. Tougher cuts you gotta learn to braise/pressure cook/can.
Here's a tip for you. For cutting steaks and roasts to a uniform thickness, there is no substitute for an electric knife. I'm talking about the kind with two serrated blades sandwiched together. These are also fantastic for cutting out silver skin and fat. I rarely use a standard knife anymore, while breaking down quarters and back straps into steaks/roasts. The reason the electric knife works so well for this purpose is because you can cut with it by applying very little pressure.
Regarding silver skin on whitetails, can anyone give any tips on removing it or point me to a good book/video? I am sure I need a sharper knife, but I end up taking way too much meat off with it in most cases.
Lay silverskin side down on table [backstrap] and keep knife as close as possible to table when cutting along silverskin and meat.
+ 1HDE. I use a fillet knife and fillet it off like cleaning a walleye. I use a fillet knife for almost all of the deboning and trimming.
Thanks. What about the various cuts off the rear quarters. Assuming all that silver skin should come off as well, right? Some of those are in odd shapes it seems.
Sirloin tip is the worse with "silverskin" running through the middle. Separate at this junction of muscle and trim off the same.
The rounds will have some as well. Pretty self explanitory once you separate the top from the bottom round and pull out the eye of the round.
Like ahunter55, most all meat is ground up with just backstraps and a few roasts treated differently. Between myself, brother and a son, we do about one deer or elk a year- definitely not big time succesful killers. I have been pleased with a $99 grinder from Northern Tools- going on 13 years now.
I used to grind a good deal more, grinding most of the hinds, but I make many more roasts these days. A rub of choice (I still keep coming back to Montreal seasoning) sometimes I'll inject something, Worcestershire mixed with most anything is good. Roast them in the BBQ over mesquite (kiawe) good hot fire to start and sear it quick just let things die back and keep checking. You want the center very rare when you pull it out, it will cook for a few minutes after you pull it out. Don't cut it while hot/warm or you will lose a good bit of the juice that will set up in the meat when it cools. I let it rest for some time and then put it in the fridge. In a day or two I'll pull out the slicer and slice it (against the grain) real thin for lunch meat, makes great sandwiches. You can slice up a good amount and freeze what you won't use right away. I can't tell the frozen from the "fresh" sliced in my sandwiches.
Have a cheap slicer that doesn't work all that well, but works pretty good on cooked meat. Not bad if semi frozen raw, but it's a narrow window between frozen and thawed. My next upgrade is going to be a GOOD slicer. But the good ones aren't cheap.
We grind as little as we can, grind is always the last thing left. If it's big enough it's a roast, we may slice some roasts into steak depending on size of deer. Not big enough for steak, it's stew cubes, not big enough for that, it's burger.
For me, grinding and sausage making winter time projects. All of my grind meat is labeled as such. If I want to make 10 pounds of burger, I pull out 10 pounds of frozen meat a couple of days prior. I also keep an eye out for Boston Butt pork on sale this time of year. I grind that up, package and freeze for winter time sausage making.
If you aren't into roasts, a good tenderizer sure turns the rear quarters into some fine minute steaks. I realize most of you only do one or two animals per year, but we are set up as a commercial operation. Walk-in cooler that will hold 70/80 animals at a time on system of rails. 3 foot by 6 foot cutting table. Commercial tenderizer Commercial grinder that will do 15 pounds a minute Wrap with visquene AND paper. Walk-in freezer that will hold 25 processed animals at a time. We only do 175 to 200 deer per season, all boned out with knife and never use a saw
I worked up a moose last Friday in my kitchen. I used an array of Old Hickory butcher knives and an OH Cleaver, a Cabelas 3/4 hp grinder, two nylon cutting boards, one large and one medium, a Gander Mountain vacuum sealer, 1 pound ground meat bags (from Gander Mtn) a Mirro brand pressure canner, wide mouth pint mason jars, and the large pot from my turkey fryer. I cut the shanks into canned meat chunks, shoulders into roasts and burger meat, hindquarters into steaks, roasts, and trim to grind, rib meat went into the burger, briskets and neck into roasts, and the large bones I baked in a 250 degree F oven for 4 hours, then I cracked the leg bones with a hammer, added 1/2 cup kosher salt, 1/8 cup each of garlic powder and onion powder, a handful of bay leaves, a tablespoon of black peppercorns and 3 and 1/2 gallons of water in the big pot, simmered 4 hours, strained and canned into wide mouth pint mason jars (soup stock) I got 24 pints of canned meat from the shanks, and 24 pints of stock.
