Deer Quartering & Processing

This meat that we get from right in our backyard, you know, we've got to take the measures to make sure we preserve it in the right way so that in the middle of the winter or in the springtime when we need that fresh protein, it's right there ready to go. One thing I try to do whenever I get a deer is get it skinned right away because the sooner you get that hide off of there, the easier it is and the faster the meat can cool down. And the fast— like, the faster the meat starts the curing process. Depending on the time of the year, you can hang a deer anywhere from 1 to 2 days to 3 to 4 weeks, depending on the temperature outside. Uh, right now it's still kind of warm out, still getting into the maybe 60s, low 60s.

So having said that, like, I would— don't want to leave this hide on this deer too long. Because it's, uh, you can risk meat spoilage at those temps. Also, why wait around to skin it if you could just skin it right away? And it's going to be a lot easier. That's kind of the way I think anyways.

Might as well just get it done.

Get it done now and then relax, let it hang for a day or two. When you're cutting through the hide, you always want to cut with the fur. Don't cut across the fur because that just cuts all the hair into little slivers, and that's what— really hard to get off your meat once you, uh, get it skinned. We got a spike buck that I got a couple days ago. It's been hanging for 3 days now, and, uh, Right now I'm just going to cut it up and quarter it, and we'll process it later.

What I'll do is I'll start at the bottom and work my way up. So the front two shoulders, there's no actual, um, like bone that connects them, so you're just cutting meat to get those two front legs off. Such a black-tailed deer that you don't get a whole lot of meat off the front, um, but front legs. But I'll take those, and then we'll work our way up. We'll get the back straps the loins, and then we'll end with getting the hindquarters.

So you slide the knife right behind the scapula there and then just come straight down. Like I said, there's no bones holding that on, it's just all meat holding the front leg on. We can go into the tenderloins now. The tenderloins on these deer are pretty small, but there's some of the most sought-after meat. A lot of times you— when they're fresh, sometimes you really don't even need to cut them out, they just kind of— you can kind of just pull them right out when they're warm.

There's not a ton of, ton of meat you got to cut to get those off.

That's a tenderloin.

Clean it up a little bit, take some of that fat, or gray skin as I call it, off of the loin. And that— those two loins there, that's one mule. Real tender. Now we'll go to the back strap.

That's a backstrap there. We'll remove a lot of this fat outer layer, gray skin, later on, but let's get some good meat there.

Backstrap number 2.

Rib cage. Now we're going to get the hindquarter legs off. That's where majority of your meat's coming from, the hindquarters on your deer.

And then with this, you got your, like, the sternum bone here, so I just cut down and you're just trying to get— take as much meat off of that. That back sternum as you can.

You got to get to the point where you find that ball joint right there, and that's what you're trying to get your knife to and cut around that ball joint. That's what's connecting the leg to the sternum.

And there's one rear ham, we call them.

That's it, all quartered up. Now we're just going to take the meat off of the bones and we're going to jar all this meat. So I'm not going to be too picky on how I cut it off. I'm just going to get it off the bone because we're cutting it up into small chunks afterwards to get put into jars. So I'm just— all— it's not going to be too clean.

I'm just going to take the meat off the bone. This is a, a back ham, we call it. Uh, the hindquarter is, uh, where you get the majority of your meat from these deer, is right off the, the back two legs. And this is one of the two. A lot of your roasts come off of this.

Um, you can get steaks off some of these roasts. The probably the most longest, tedious part is when you're cutting it up for jerky. Because you got— I like to remove as much of the gray, gray skin, which is like all these tendons and joints and stuff like surrounding the muscles. So that's really time-consuming when you're doing that. When you're gonna cut them up to go into jars, you don't have to pay as much attention to that.

You want to try to leave some fat on the meat when you're putting them in the jars. So, but like if you're going to do jerky, you want to try to— you can leave some fat, but you want to get all the gray skin off. I'll get my knife blade to find the bone, and then I'll just work all the way around the bone. Like I said, when you're cutting it up for jars, that's the way I do it, just because it's the fastest. Everybody does it a little different, but if I was going to be cutting this up for like, uh, well, I guess the process of taking it off the bone is all the same.

You just got to find the bone with your knife and then just kind of let the bone guide where your knife goes.

Like if we're up the mountain and we're gonna bone out, because normally when we go on our mountain hikes, we don't pack them off full like the old-timers did. We bone them out, take all the meat off, throw the meat into a meat, meat bag, and then that goes into our backpack. So it's the same process up on the mountain, just taking the meat off the bone.

So those are the two hindquarters, and then we got the front shoulders which have a little bloodshot, and we're not going to be using a lot of it. This was a pretty small buck, so he— usually their front legs don't carry a whole lot of meat. Like I said, majority of your meat comes off those back two legs. I've noticed as I've grown older, the last 10 years or so, I've enjoyed this process a lot more— the cutting up, the taking your time. There's not a whole lot of things in life, as you go forward with life, you slow down at.

You know, you usually become more efficient and you get faster doing these things, but I've noticed with me, I've slowed down a lot with this when it got to this process, just because I enjoy it more. And I'll, uh, I'll block out— instead of trying to get it all done in 2 or 3 hours in the morning, I'll block out a whole day and take a whole day to break down a deer just because I enjoy it that much. And this is a backstrap here, so with this backstrap, I'm just going to take this gray skin off and then So you'll see what it looks like there compared to the finished product. If there's one thing I judge people about when it comes to deer, I'm a tough judge on, is how far they take their backstrap from off of the hanging deer. A lot of people just take like the little small chunk, but when I cut it, I'll cut from literally the back of the hind all the way as long as it on the neck meat.

And sometimes you can get like twice the amount of meat off of it that way. You're not leaving a lot for a neck roast, but you're getting a lot more with that type of cut. So that's like the best cut. If you go around to the elders, that's what you want to give them is that right there. So that's basically it there.

These— the backstrap and the tenderloins, I don't think will jar. We'll just eat those.

So this is a little ham that I would take— make jerky out of, and what I'm going to do is just going to let my knife find like the natural breaks in the muscle. And what I'll be doing is just cutting out a— just a muscle group out of the whole ham.

And once I got that one muscle group cut out, I'll continue to clean it up, and that will go in the freezer overnight, and then I'll take it out. And when it's taken out, it's firm enough to where you can take a real sharp knife and cut it real thin. So that would be a jerky. This right here would be a jerky, jerky roast. And once that sits in the freezer and firms up, then you take your knife and you cut real thin strips, and then into the marinade it goes overnight.

But the rest of this, I'll start chopping it up 1 inch by 1 inch cubes. Basically, when they boil down, they'll lose a bunch of water weight, so this will shrink to about half the size when you after you pressure cook it. So you don't have to go too small on the chunks. This is shelf stable. You know, it's pretty versatile.

You can take out a jar and you can make deer spread out of it, or you can make stew meat out of it, or you can sauté it. Just instant protein, and it's easy to give it away that way. And just like our fish or anything else, we, we take the necessary steps to make sure it's preserved right. And at high quality so that, you know, we're eating it, our kids are eating it, our grandchildren are eating it, our elders are eating it. We gotta take good care of it.

You know, we're respecting the animal by using it to the fullest, and that's just the way I was taught. That's the way I teach my kids. That's the message I'm trying to promote. Our Hodgill word for deer is kaat. So we have cut up our deer meat into cube-sized chunks.

Now it's time to put them in jars for the pressure cooker. When we put our deer meat in jars, we start with about half a teaspoon of salt, and then in goes the deer meat. I go about 3/4 of the way up, just like you would do with fish. You can go higher because it will cook down, but main thing is you just want to make sure the seal is good on the top, just like your jarring fish. Everything that I've learned about it came from my grandpa Claude Morrison, and the whole lot of the butchering process was just me watching him and learning.

So my grandpa was a great teacher when it came to that, and that's, that's where I learned to, to use a lot of the animal, to cut it up, to take your time, to preserve it. And it's a good thing he taught me because I You know, I cut up 5 or 6 of them a year just for personal use, and it's the same thing every time, and the end product always comes out pretty much the same. So we got the deer in jars. The lids are on. The salt is in.

Now they're going to go in the pressure cooker for 2 hours at 15 pounds of pressure, and then they'll be done, completely 100% cooked at that point. And then it's just about letting them cool, cleaning up the jars, and then storing them in a dry place for the winter. This deer will probably just be given away. We'll find a couple elders in town that'll eat it and use it. Everything that I've been taught, somebody taught me, so I have a responsibility to share whatever I know too, you know.

That's a big part of it also. Our culture is like that. We share everything we got, you know, whether it's the deer meat or it's the lesson behind cutting up the deer meat. We've got to share that, and we've got to continue to share that as we go forward, or else You know, we're not really benefiting a lot of people, we're just benefiting ourselves.