I have a question, initiated because of a thread in the deer hunting forum about butchering deer. Several of the people who posted there indicated that they won't use just plain butcher paper to wrap their meat. If they do use butcher paper, they wrap the meat first in Saran wrap or something simlar; others use ziplock bags or vacuum seal their meat.
My wife and I normally fill up at least one 15-cubic foot freezer with game meat each year. In fact, we have three 15-cubic footers: one for Eileen's special stuff to use in her cooking writing, one for this season's meat, and one for the meat we'll eat through the year. This last freezer usually contains meat at least one year old, and sometimes 2-3 years old.
We do use a vaccum sealer on gamebirds and fish, freezing them before sealing, which prevents the problems inherent to too much moisture. We've found a vacuum sealer to work great for this purpose.
But we wrap big game meat in butcher paper only, wrapping tightly and using enough paper so there's a double layer over every part of the package. Even with 3-year-old packages we never have a problem with freezing burn--yet a lot of the people on the bucthering thread talked about freezer-burn when using butcher paper.
Are we just lucky? I can't imagine the expense, let alone the time, necessary to vaccuum seal or Saran wrap or ziplock several big game animals every year. That's one reason we use butcher paper. The other reason is that it's always worked fine.
So what are your experiences?
