Sorry, but meat doesn't have to be kept in the carcass or quarters to age.
This is was discussed on another thread (I think in "General Hunting") not too long ago. I brought up a test mizwhitetail and I did with a big, old bull elk I killed last November. The shoulders, hindquarters, backstraps, filets, neck meat were all cut off the carcass after three days of the bull hanging in the shop of the ranch where it was killed. The weather was still perfect for aging when I brought it home, so we kept the pieces in our garage/shop.
After a four days (a week since he'd been killed) we decided to see how the meat was doing, so cut off maybe 15 inches of one of the backstraps, then brought it inside and cooked a couple of 1" steaks from it. They were still kind of chewy, so we left the rest of the chunk in the refrigerator, inside a plastic bag. Every day we'd cut another chunk off and eat it, and it definitely became more tender for another week. At that point the elk had been aging for over two weeks total, and it was definitely time to butcher, so we did it. He isn't the most tender elk in the world, but he's pretty darn chewable--and the meat in the shop aged at just the same apparent rate as the mat in our refrigerator.
We have also performed essentially the same experiment with steaks taken out of the freezer. They do get more tender as they sit in the refrigerator, though we haven't drained all the liquid off them.
And no, aging doesn't have to be totally controlled, as in a walk-in cooler kept at 34 degrees. The temperature can be up to 50 degrees or even a little more. Warmer temperatures just accelerate the aging process--though obviously the meat can't be kept as long as when the temperature never gets above 40.
Obviously some of the people posting here don't know where the original question came from, and why. My wife Eileen (mizwhitetail) just published the latest of her 8 game cookbooks, SLICE OF THE WILD, which deals with everything from the moment of the shot to recipes. It includesncluding field care, aging the meat, butchering for your specific purposes, and recipes. Included is all the latest meat science from various sources.
The reviews so far (the book has only been out a month) are saying that it may be the best book yet on the topic of big game meat, partly because it includes the science, instead of speculation. I would suggest that those who are speculating about all this stuff could read all about aging and other aspects of meat in the book.
I started this thread on freezer-burn because we have never had a problem with it. We live off game, with three 15-cubic-foot freezers (two chest and one upright) that by the end of each fall are all filled with big game, birds and fish. We do vacuum-pack some stuff (especially birds and fish) but we only use common freezer paper on big game, the kind that's plastic-coated on one side, and simply double-wrap tightly. We have never had any problem with freezer-burn in over 25 years of doing it this way, even ith meat that's a couple of years old, so I was curious about why and when freezer-burn might be happening with other folks' meat. This started several months ago, so I was kind of surprised to see this thread revived in the past week. Thanks again for your responses.
