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My hunting partner and I have been busy this year. The new LEM 1.5HP grinder/cuber/slicer has made life easier.

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Wow nice!

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Been processing all my own game for more than 30 years. Helped my Dad before I was allowed to carry a gun unsupervised. I know many who pay someone else to process their game, but I never understood it. I wouldn't trust most to do it for me.


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Originally Posted by Mule Deer
A few comments:

Wild animals are not all the same, whether in species, age, or condition. Connective tissue and silverskin can affect taste, but only in a few species during the rut, or sometimes when they start to lose weight during winter.

When it does occur, the off-taste tends to increase the longer the meat's frozen. Have had it happen with rutty mule deer that tasted fine initially, but after 6 months in the freezer the cuts with more connective tissue definitely changed flavor. But most of the time it doesn't make any difference.

Whether or not to use plastic for wrapping depends a lot on the freezer. Frost-free freezers tend to freezer-burn meat, because freezer burn is a result of "freeze-drying," essentially oxidation of the meat.

Frost-free freezers are constantly cycling moisture outside the freezer, and if you open up a freezer a lot the same thing happens. The worst are the freezer compartments in most new refrigerators. They're frost-free and not as cold as dedicated freezers, and get opened a lot, so oxidation's likely. Fat also oxidizes easily. Lean meat doesn't.

The reason vacuum-sealing works is it gets the air out, the reason we use it primarily for fish and birds, which are often irregularly shaped. With steaks, roasts or burger that can be tightly wrapped, it's not likely, especially in a non-frost-free chest freezer.

My wife and I trim all fat off big game, and don't add any fat to burger. Unless the cut is really irregular, we don't vacuum-pack or even use plastic. Instead we double-wrap in good freezer paper, and put the packages in frost-free chest freezers. They've never freezer-burned even when stored 3 years, and we regularly keep big game meat that long from special animals.

If somebody wants to make sure then plastic helps, especially in frost-free freezers. But if you have a non-frost-free chest freezer, good freezer paper is quicker, a lot cheaper and just as effective.


A couple points of correction... oxidation and freeze-drying are very different. Sublimation is the process by which water in solid form turns to a gas without an intermediate liquid form. That is freeze-drying.

Oxidation is the process by which something gives up electrons while combining with oxygen. Burning is an example.

Freezerburning is essentially a melding of the two processes.

Years ago we went to mixing our burger meat with olive oil as we grind. It works so well we have kept it up.

We went to vac packing in chamber machines years ago and it really is far better... and faster...

A couple years ago I went to retort bags... essentially MRE bags that are sealed in a vac sealer and then pressured cooked like jars. Shelf stable, easily stored, and no jars required...

I was there for every step of four big bull moose and two caribou bulls this year. Last year I broke down all of the quarters on eight bull moose... it is just a great way to pass time in the fall...


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Oh, I did virtually all of the skinning and butchering on the moose and caribou... they were lifted neatly off the ground for processing and it was the best moose wrangling I have ever gotten to do!

In the end they gave me a hard time because they found a total of about six hairs...


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I get my venison ground straight, no beef or pork fat added.

If I need the venison to stick together for burgers, I add freshly shredded cheese to the mix. Works great.

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Originally Posted by TATELAW
My hunting partner and I have been busy this year. The new LEM 1.5HP grinder/cuber/slicer has made life easier.

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Nice !!
I know that feeling too.

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Just a PSA but the Ky Afield Show has a pretty good video on how to process your deer available. Just google their web site. I wish it had been available before I killed my first deer. I remember when I killed my first one the first for either of us, my buddy asked how are you going to clean this thing ? I said just like a great big rabbit now let's roll him on his back and you hold him by the legs. I actually did a pretty competent job on the butchering part.. Now I prefer to just take hem to the Amish for processing.

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Art,

Sounds interesting, but have a couple questions, and then some comments on how long we keep meat:

What brand of bags are you using in the chamber vac? We buy 1100-foot rolls of 18" wide freezer paper, and process an average of 7 animals a year, ranging in size from "eater" pigs and pronghorn to nilgai, elk and moose. The average cost for paper is around $3 per animal, so am wondering how the bags you use compare in cost.

We have the roll set up in a dispenser/cutter (that as I recall cost around $20, though that was a number of years ago) and have a pretty fast system worked out. With two of us working, we can butcher and wrap a mature northern buck deer in about two hours, cut into steaks, roasts, stew, backstraps, filets and burger. A nilgai, elk or moose takes 4-8 hours, depending on the size of the animal. Am wondering how your system compares timewise.

Freezer burn has never been a problem. For everyday meat we have two non-frost-free 15-cubic-foot chest freezers, one next to the kitchen and the other in the basement, and Eileen has a 15cf upright (again non-frost-free) for her cookbook projects, so she can access them more easily.

We empty and defrost all three each year just before hunting season, then inventory the meat and divide it between the kitchen and upright freezers, a process that takes a couple of hours.

The empty chest freezer in the basement gets filled during hunting season as a "savings account." With very few exceptions, we don't eat any of that meat until the following year.

The kitchen chest freezer gets filled with the oldest packages, with meat from last year's hunting season on the bottom and older packages on top. Most of meat we're eating right is from 2012 and 2013, including several packages we cooked last week while my brother was visiting, and none have been freezer-burned. That's been our experience for many years now.







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I process my own, although a coworker gave me some jalapeno cheese venison summer sausage and I almost changed my mind. But once the deer were home, I went back to my old ways.

Backstrap, tenderloins and large muscles become steak, the rest is ground. I pick up pork fat from the butcher and beef trimmings from the local grocery store. Add the fat by weight for the percentage I want and grind it.

Burger gets beef fat, pork pan sausage gets pork fat. This year I used Leggs off the shelf breakfast sausage spice mix and it turned out great, second and third batches had garlic and garlic-habanero powder added to the mix.

I bag the pan sausage in quart ziplock bags, about 12 ounces, flat so it thaws quick and goes right in the pan, no need to make patties.

I have not made smoked sausage in casings yet, but I plan to upgrade my grinder with a LEM Big Bite and practice using pork butt in preparation for deer season. I want to use the chub packages with the LEM grinder rather than vacuum bags for burger, appears to be a lot easier.


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Originally Posted by Mule Deer
Art,

Sounds interesting, but have a couple questions, and then some comments on how long we keep meat:

What brand of bags are you using in the chamber vac? We buy 1100-foot rolls of 18" wide freezer paper, and process an average of 7 animals a year, ranging in size from "eater" pigs and pronghorn to nilgai, elk and moose. The average cost for paper is around $3 per animal, so am wondering how the bags you use compare in cost.

We have the roll set up in a dispenser/cutter (that as I recall cost around $20, though that was a number of years ago) and have a pretty fast system worked out. With two of us working, we can butcher and wrap a mature northern buck deer in about two hours, cut into steaks, roasts, stew, backstraps, filets and burger. A nilgai, elk or moose takes 4-8 hours, depending on the size of the animal. Am wondering how your system compares timewise.

Freezer burn has never been a problem. For everyday meat we have two non-frost-free 15-cubic-foot chest freezers, one next to the kitchen and the other in the basement, and Eileen has a 15cf upright (again non-frost-free) for her cookbook projects, so she can access them more easily.

We empty and defrost all three each year just before hunting season, then inventory the meat and divide it between the kitchen and upright freezers, a process that takes a couple of hours.

The empty chest freezer in the basement gets filled during hunting season as a "savings account." With very few exceptions, we don't eat any of that meat until the following year.

The kitchen chest freezer gets filled with the oldest packages, with meat from last year's hunting season on the bottom and older packages on top. Most of meat we're eating right is from 2012 and 2013, including several packages we cooked last week while my brother was visiting, and none have been freezer-burned. That's been our experience for many years now.


John
We ran with butcher paper and heavy freezer wrap for years. First the clear plastic and then the butcher wrap which is folded around the package, not just wrapped like butchers do it. I still do it that way when saving whole deer hams and such.

The bags are much more expensive, but because we run with one, two, or three vac packers depending on the size of the job, it gets done faster than you can wrap carefully.

Now I have access to a packer that will easily vac seal an entire king salmon!

We regularly have meat that is not eaten in a year or two, but generally use last years meat for sausage or burger.

Like anything else the abuse packages get in the freezer is critical to how well meat lasts. With the burger packages we flatten and stack them in proper size boxes to be extremely efficient in space utilization. To speed freezing I will stack short piles to freeze and then stack together with a new package between to mate the packages perfectly.

Bulk packed sausage gets the same treatment.

Extremely rapid thawing is another benefit...






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Thanks for the details. It would certainly be handy to vac-seal an entire king!


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