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

I always hear folks say that they don't like eating mule deer, and I even had the same opinion after eating some that friends gave me or that I had killed in CA. Until tonight....

I filled my mule deer tag last year, first time as a Montana resident, and grilled one of the backstraps. I was not looking forward to it, but I wanted to know for sure whether the meat was as bad as its reputed to be.

It was delicious. I was careful with caring for the animal from the time it went down to the time it went into the freezer and did all the processing myself. I also soaked it, then marinated in a teriyaki type of sauce anit d cooked it to medium rare.

It was as good as beef and way more tender.

Granted, this was a younger buck and the area I took it is cattle country, so it had a lot of good things to feed on, but it was so much better than the other mulie meat I've had that I'm starting to wonder if I just got lucky or whether most people screw up handling and cooking mule deer.

I love that wild game flavor sage eating mule deer of the high desert have.

Good fat mule deer is our favorite.. Over everything but moose..

Yes!

Every animal is different.

Every person's care of meat is different.

Every person's taste is different.

Basically all that means is you have to decide for yourself. I've eaten old rangey, stinking rutted up Mule deer and enjoyed all of it.

See above.

In Colorado,you can have different tasting muleys. In eastern CO in crop land they are corn fed, sorghum forage ,winter wheat. .Great eating.
Then you have the oak brush muleys in lower altitude, not so much,but can be decent eating. Move up to high sage brush country muleys and they can be nasty .Find some int the transition zone of brush and aspen and then up higher at the aspen, pine altitude and they can be very good.I have had some I could not get past my nose and some I preferred over beef.

It depends on their age and what they eat. We used to get ours off the grain fields in central MT. They are very good. I did get an old buck one time that my wife wouldn't eat and I had to admit wasn't the best. The deer we have shot in the breaks with no grain fields nearby were also very good. A friend shot one on the Rocky Mountain Front that stunk even in chili.

I guess not even whitetail are always good, although I haven't experienced that. My in-laws in MN farm country claim the deer from Northern MN are pretty bad. Pine forests like what we have in western MT. My uncles over the Divide will not shoot a mule deer there.

I have taken mature buck mule deer in various places since taking my first (a big doe) 55 years ago here in Montana. Off the top of my head, aside from Montana they've been taken in Alberta, Colorado, Wyoming, and both New Mexico and Old Mexico. The country has ranged from the Sonoran desert to timberline, and the biggest variable I've seen is whether the bucks had started rutting.

After they've been chasing does for a week or more, they can start to have a funky taste, though a lot of that ends up in the connective tissue. The most "gamey" tasting buck was a 5x6 taken during the peak of the rut by my wife during the peak of the Montana rut, as I recall on November 17th, in ponderosa pine breaks in central Montana, The big cuts tasted fine, but after a few months in the freezer the stew and burger developed a different, not-so-good flavor, and were turned into relatively spicy sausage, which was fine.

Before the rut even the biggest bucks have been relatively mild flavored, often mistaken for elk by dinner guests. But Eileen also once killed a mature 3x3 in late November her in Montana that had almost no fat on its body, due to rutting so hard. We were prepared to turn it into sausage, but it turned out to be one of the tenderest, mildest-flavored bucks we've taken.

Couldn't agree more.

Delicious.

Balderdash!

The Muley I shot last year has a bit of a rutty smell to it while raw, but is really quite delicious. It was taken from The Great Basin on 10/2, from a bachelor group, before the rut. Even my wife keeps commenting how it tastes so much like beef. We had a Mississippi pot roast last night that was killer. Can't wait for a leftover hero (hoagie/sub/whatever) for lunch.

Good timing for this thread. Just received the mount home yesterday. Gotta love those sinister eyebrows!

What a beautiful face.

You killed Gene Levy!!! lol

J/K....beautiful muley!

As others have said, a lot of it has to do with the care of the meat. The sooner you can get it on ice the better, in my experience. Same goes for antelope which is still my favorite game meat so far.