who butchers your deer?

[migrant hunter]

Do you cut and wrap your own game, or do you take it to a butcher?
I have room at my parent"s house to hang deer, and I cut them on a peice of kitchen counter top. I put the meat on polystyrene trays and wrap them in clingfilm.(I "m getting better at it, and made some excellent burgers this weekend!)
I know not everyone has room,time or privacy to do this.
Do you even bother, or just take it to a shop to have it done? what about the big guys, like elk and moose?

 

[Scott_N]

I don't have the space to butcher my own, so I take it to a butcher shop.

 

[riden]

I usaully do my own deer, I love deer sausage it's a big hit in my house.

But I don't have the time to do a moose so it goes to the butcher.

 

[sjemac]

Cut and wrap all my own. Takes about 3hrs for me to skin butcher, cut and wrap one deer. But I'm anal a remove all silver skin, fat, and blood vessels.

Bought a commercial grade vac packer this year to speed the process up.

Funny, I seem to get twice the edible meat out of a deer compared to what I got sending it to the packers.

I just spread a moose over a couple of evenings.

I also only grind my burger and fresh sausage as I need it. I keep that meat frozen in chunks and then grind it as I need it. Gives me the flexibility to use that meat as stew meat if I want.

 

[John Y Cannuck]

We started doing our own cut wrap and freeze at deer camp last year.
We grind our own burger too. Handy to have hydro and a freezer at camp.

We use butcher paper to wrap. Harder to do, but less freezer burn, and easier to unwrap when frozen.

 

[SwedishMan]

After the deer is gutted and skinned, I take it to a local
butcher in Forrester's Falls (near Cobden).
The same butcher my Dad uses for his beef cattle.

The cuts of venison come back wrapped in pink/red freezer paper.
(Not the styrafoam pack and cling wrapped -- like I think you are doing.
Not that there's anything wrong with what your doing. Some butchers
use the styrafoam and cling-wrapped packaging here too, but not mine.)

 

[Skippy]

We do all our own deer and moose. Usually there are at least 2 or 4 helpers (depends who hunts that year and who has the time) but I too find that we get more meat doing it ourselves thn seinding it away to a butcher.

We also seem to get nicer steak cuts, especially on deer, because we use knives to cut around most of the bone, where as the butcher just runs the quarters thru the meat saw and gets tons of little grissley chunks of bone where we'd have cut around it.

If you've got someone to show you how to do the first couple of times it gets pretty easy.

 

[John Y Cannuck]

I thought we got more meat out of our deer too. Lets face it, if you are running a shop, you have to balance your time against cost. There is bound to be more waste.

 

['Boo]

We do ALL our own butchering. The quality of the finished product is much better and I am 100% sure the meat in the freezer is ours, not someone else's gut-shot animal.

We just finished off another batch of elk & pork maple sausage and Kovbasa this weekend.


Sink full of elk trimmings

Weighing binder & seasonings

Elk & pork maple sausages

Kovbasa waiting their turn in the water

Kovbasa being cooked in hot water bath

Kovbasa fresh out of the smoker

 

[zthou]

I debone and wrap my own. I am also anal about silverskin and fat on any wild game. If you have access to a cooler it will add greatly to the finished product. I have also found that if you are freezing meat for future sausage/burger, try lining a 5 gallon pail with two garbage bags. Stuff your pieces of meat in tight, you get aprox. 40 lbs. from a pail. You may have only about 1 or 2 inches of freezer burn right on top which you can discard when you thaw it 2 or 10 years later. I'm serious, the larger the frozen chunk the longer it will keep in a frozen state. remember those mammoths and cavemen that they have found preserved in ice?, if you freeze in small meal size packs, you are lucky to get a year without freezer burn/dogfood.

 

[migrant hunter]

Interesting stuff, I have been doing my own deer for about 5 yrs. I have taken a couple to the butcher and had the same complaints, ie bone dust in the cuts, less return, and a lot of it was just big joints with "roast" written on it!
Here in the Northern Ireland, a butcher is"nt allowed to take in any animal that was"nt killed in an abattoir/slaughterhouse, so it"s pretty much a garage job anyway! In mainland UK, registered game dealers will usually buy deer if they are legally shot. It was a lot easier when I was shooting in Scotland and just had to take off the head/feet/insides and take the carcase to the dealer for cash

 

[fester]

I usually do when I shoot it and then again when I get it home.

That Kovbasa looks great.

 

[Silverback]

I helped cut up three deer this year and only one was mine, I started doing my own butchering over 10 years ago. Like others have said you know it is your meat and it is trimmed to your standards when you are done.

 

[hakx]

I do everything but the sausage. Even then, the meat I provide with the butcher is clean, deboned, trimmed and good to go straight into the industrial grinder.

 

[04rubicon]

my wife's uncle is a butcher and has his own shop, then i make my own sausage.

 

[John Marshall]

We picked up a stainless meat saw with a sausage grinder on the side. Home butchering was worth the money before but now its ridiculous. In the last 12 months we(our hunt camp) have done 2 moose 4 deer and 9 lambs and its a breeze. We still send out some for smoking.

 

[dumbdawg]

we do both send to butcher and have done it ourselves

 

[snowshoe]

I used to make my living cutting meat, so it is no problem at all to do it myself. I used to cut up a bunch for others, but one year 2 "friends" #####ed about $40 for the job. They were very happy with the job, but thought a friend should do it for nothing. Now they pay over $100 to have it all done at the local butcher, or make a mess of it at home. I just refuse to do any but my own now.

 

[carew]

I do it myself with a couple of buddies to do the wrapping. Nothing special just chops, roasts and stewing meat.

 

[sjemac]

Hint that goes with zthou's big bucket. Instead of cutting everything into steaks right away, wrap and freeze as whole muscle groups or larger chunks of muscle groups and then steak them once they've defrosted or roast them whole if you want. Cuts down on the chances of freezer burn and keeps your options open. Sometimes I like the backstraps steaked and grilled that way (if I have to feed freaks who like it medium -- I NEVER cook game to well done unless its in a stew of some sort -- you want well done? Eat elsewhere), other times I like to grill the whole backstrap and slice afterwards (the ends are medium and the middle decidedly rare).