Originally Posted by ingwe
Originally Posted by Mule Deer
kaywoodie,

The meat of all the nilgai I've taken has been aged for a while, which makes considerable difference in chewability! One was aged in the cooler a butcher shop in Texas before being shipped to me; the others were aged in the coolers I brought them home in via airlines.

Depending on the animal, we've aged game up to 3 weeks before butchering and freezing. That long can make a BIG difference even in old bucks and bulls!



JB...have you got any hints for aging them in the summer in Montana?


ingwe;
Top of the morning to you sir, I hope the weekend treated you well.

As I've read you might be on the road already, this is most likely too late, but for next time or for anyone else wondering what those of us who hunt when it's warmer do to age meat.

Since I know you've read Eileen's book "A Slice of the Wild", I'll clarify I'm recommending it for anyone who hasn't as it contains the best explanation of meat aging I have found.

We picked up a big upright freezer that had a brand new "slightly too small" compressor installed into it by a repair place. They were selling it as a big beer fridge.

Usually I'll skin the animal, cheese cloth it and leave it until at least the next morning so rigor has relaxed a bunch - covered in Eileen's book again folks. wink

Then it's into pieces and into the fridge.

[Linked Image]

Since this photo was taken I've done two additional modifications.

On the door on the bottom shelf, I've installed twin computer fans to help the air circulate inside. The original fan can be seen at the top in the center and we found that it didn't circulate the air quite enough so some of the meat would turn a wee bit brownish after 7-10 days. I tried a small household cooling fan, but that was too much air flow and while it helped the meat not to turn color, it made a bunch of crust that needed to be cut off.

The other modification I did last fall was to add an indoor/outdoor digital thermometer. This way I can see what the internal temperature is in the fridge at a glance.

When I load a couple deer into it, sometimes it'll tend to freeze the meat at the bottom, so it requires a wee bit of monitoring and temperature adjustment, but certainly nothing too onerous.

We've also seen other folks up here buy a beer fridge and gut it and then install their own angle iron/bed frame rail hanging and racking system and that works for them equally well.

We've not done that as we use it for vegetables and other stuff occasionally too that it's nice to have the original shelving setup still there.

Hopefully that helped someone out there this morning. All the best.

Dwayne

The most important stuff in life isn't "stuff"