Deer Hoof Processing

¡Hola! Today we're gonna cook deer hooves. We have the feet, and these were given to us from friends on Prince of Wales. Big, beautiful deer feet. When you cook the deer feet— well, I have a designated crock pot because it gets kind of gnarly, but there's only 2 ingredients.

It's the deer feet and water, and we're gonna let it simmer for 24 hours.

They feel like fingernails, so When you cook them, they'll get nice and squishy and you can kind of squeeze out— there's a bone in there. And then we'll use a paring knife to scrape out whatever goo we don't want.

We have been cooking the deer hooves for 24 hours and I unplugged it a little bit ago to let it start cooling down. And we're gonna scoop them out and start cleaning them. I'll start pulling everything apart and you can see how soft it is. I always love seeing the bones, but there's just a lot of really soft squishy stuff that we don't want. So I use a knife and get in the hoof and start scraping.

And there's this really cool little bone in there that I always think looks like a shark tooth. I like to save those. There's a lot of, I guess, tissue in here that you should scrape out so it doesn't get moldy or anything. I have really learned to love this smell. This is a smell that only happens like once a year for me usually.

Um, when I started learning how to do this, it was a lot of trial and error, and I was maybe like 12, and my brother Joe was a really good deer hunter, and he always saved me his deer feet. It kind of reminds me of him and just a lot of, um, learning by doing. A lot of good memories of just being out there in the woods with my family. It's very nostalgic. I'm going to let them dry for about 2 days, and, uh, I have some other ones that I cooked last year that are nice and hard, and we're gonna drill holes and make a rattle with those.

So I like to drill with a pretty tiny drill bit, um, and I'll go from the inside. There we go. So I'll just go up from the inside. It's kind of more sketchy to do it tip to tip like that. Just, it can slip.

This one I went through the tip. I do claws the same way where I'll drill from the inside. I have a Chilkat bag, so I was gonna do a couple maybe just in the corners. It's a just a cool little accessory. They make a really beautiful subtle sound.

This is super simple. I hope people try it.