Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Food, Cooking, and Game Preparation Deer Butchering

How many of you see guys puffing their chest out about how fast they butcher a deer, only to see them leave on the silver skin, grizzle, and tendons, then listen to them and everyone complain about their venison tasting gamey? Gotta take your time, De-bone it and get that stuff out. Once you do, it's heaven!

I agree. Takes me a full day to do a deer start to clean up. I take my time and know my family will enjoy it months to come.

Call me crazy, but I don’t think silver skin ads much gamey taste. I leave it on my loin steaks. Last night I took a bite of nothing but silver skin and it had virtually no flavor. Lymph nodes or scent glands, on the other hand, now that’s another story.

In this area, it's the deer's rank fat that
carries the bad taste
That, and many get hair and glandular
secretions and urine and such on the
meat because they've never learned to
properly dress a deer.
Just as many don't do anything on their
own around here, and take them to a
processor and they have about a 50/50
chance of getting clean meat that was
properly kept clean and at a suitable
temperature. May even get some meat
from another person that rode around all
day with the guts inside.
Getting the skin off without getting contaminants
on the meat takes me more time than
anything else. After that, it's just minutes
to the freezer bags and the cooler

I take pride in how SLOW I am at butchering a deer. Venison is something special and needs to be treated as such. Taught that from a very early age.

I worked up the doe I killed last week and it took me about 4 1/2 hours. All cleaned up to red meat only. Tastes very good.

I do all my own wild protein & agree with everything posted !

To our family, game care, butchering, vacuum packing & eating are all part of the hunt.

YMMV, but it shouldn't !

I have been Hunting deer for 60 plus years, butcher my own and have never experienced what other people call gamey taste!

I killed a deer last week. 30 min after getting home it was quartered and in the spare frig. Got up this morning and finished the job. Cut all the quarters into 1” chunks with nothing but lean meat left, no silver at all, no fat, no bloody spots. Loins got silver skin stripped off cut in half . Everything vacuum sealed. I started at 7:15 and was completely done in 1:45 and that included washing up my meat pans. Practice makes perfect.

This is about the timeline I’m at. I’ve done around a hundred deer/elk/antelope and this is about as fast as I see me ever getting it done. I don’t know where I’d cut time other than cutting corners. I have a lot of people ask what I do to my deer to make them not taste gamey, though.

the worst are the "butchers" who freeze the whole hind quarter and then crosscut it on a bandsaw. a guy i know shoots several deer a year and his butcher does that. i hate it when he brings that schit to a cookout. gives deer meat a bad name.

All? Lots of good steaks on the hind quarters. Simply separate the muscles and save the good steaks. Lots of Jerky meat too. miles

I remember when most everybody did this. I soon learned that deer bone marrow was not good for your meat. Bone it out and it will be better. miles

As far as gaminess goes, I'm convinced that it has more to do with how fast the deer died. A deer that dies in 10 seconds is going to taste a lot better than a gut shot deer that took 3 hours to die. Unfortunately, I know this from experience. Just my 2 cents.

I've got a pretty good routine and technique that I've developed over the years to cut one up. I'm right at about 2 hours from start to finish. I don't generally mess with the rib meat or neck meat. If a shoulder is shot, it usually goes in the trash unless I can salvage some of it. Everything gets boned, separated and cleaned up with all of the silver schit off of the back straps and everything that I'm keeping gets vacuum packed. Most of the other stuff that I'm giving away or grinding goes in ziploc freezer bags. All of the lymph nodes and other crap is removed. I cut up about 10 deer per year if I don't donate them.

In beef, they call that a red cutter, all that Adrenalin..

Yes, agreed. About 10 years ago on the last day of bow season, I gut shot this deer at last light. Thought it was a doe, but it turned out to be a small buck that had lost his horns. I tracked the deer in the dark and found him down in a gully laying in the creek still alive. They do that when they're gut shot. I couldn't get a shot on him, so I backed out and came back about 3 hours later. He had moved to a more manageable location and was still alive so I put an arrow in him. That meat was literally uneatable. I ended up throwing it all away. It was the worst venison I've ever eaten.

Long as the hair is gone I don't have any issue with taste. We keep the fat and grind it just the same.

One nice thing about canning it, easy cutting.
Remove the heavy tendon, the heavy fat.
Chunk and can.
The fat renders and solidifies on top, to be easy skimmed off.
The silver skin and any intramuscler gristle cooks tender and disappears.

Grinding or cuts, we try to eliminate ever spec of silver or white.
A butcher friend tells mne we are too meticulous. That a little bit of fat
Or silver skin won't matter.
And I know he is right.
I'm not sure where the limit is, so we err on the cautious side.
Noticeable deer fat is down right nasty.

i'd love to process my own deer, except for the one problem about not having one...LOL

I prefer not to cut my steaks into chunks but leave them whole maybe cut into one or two chunks. Cuts down on freezer burn, wrapping time, and easier not to over cook especially back loins. Due to the loss of a few fingers I am not sure what I will do if I shoot one