Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Deer Processing

For burger grind we started using 30% pork butts. Around here they go on special time2time for 0.99 to 1.29/lb. 30% puts the right amount of fat for sticktogether plus it’s tasty. For tacos, pasta sauce, etc 100% ground venison. For pasta sauce a good dose of I-Talian sausage seasoning when cooking the grind works well.

Shanks are set aside for all day crock pot or slow cook pot roast. Shank chili with the shredded crock pot version is wonderful. If you never long cooked shanks it’ll be amazing to see how all the connective tissues just go away. Adds good collagen to the mix. Rarely do roasts anymore since starting to use shanks.

Loin steak and round steak are sliced appropriately and bagged separately. Tenders usually don’t make it past processing. All the steak and shanks are vacuum sealed. The burger and grind are tube bagged off the grinder 1lb or a little more each. Since we started stockpiling the cheap pork butts we just use that for sausage without venison. But usta do 50/50. If you don’t mix your own sausage seasoning check out Rebel Butcher Supply in MS. Their Breakfast mix is great, Italian is acceptable and they also do Cajun. FYI they use monosodium glutamate. You can order tube bags there at the same time.

Last but not least we bag scrap for the old dog belonging to one of the family land owners. Freeze it in doggy serving size and she just dumps it into a boiling pan. Old Molly loves it.

edit: A few reasons for doing it ourselves vs commercial processor. 1)I know whose deer it is 2)I know what’s in it 3)Got tired of getting a shoebox of meat back for close to a hundred bucks.