Home Forums Hunting & Shooting General Big Game hanging your meat?

How long do you all hang your meat for? How long is to long assuming the meat is kept cold? Hanging it longer make the meat more tender?

Can't pass this one up. Mine's been hanging for about 15 years now. Doesn't seem to make much difference if it is cold or warm, at least in any measurable way. I certainly hope it hangs for a good while longer, and how tender it is or will get later on is purely subjective....

As for hanging game meat, I don't. Mostly because of ambient temperature being too high, or lack of time. My venison goes pretty much all to 'burger and jerky with the exception of the loins, which are usually consumed pretty quickly.

Of the few elk that I have shot and ALL the ones myself and my buddies have taken, none have ever hung, due to logistics. All have been de-boned, bagged, and refrigerated or iced shortly after harvest because they had to be transported back east by vehicle or commercial airline. I can honestly say that I've never tasted a bad bite of elk from any that we've taken, and if it gets better by hanging (aging), then so be it. I have read that hanging is the preferred method IF it can be done; I just never have been able to do so.

Moose is definately better if it's hung..Time lets the meat begin to breakdown naturally. I've had no problems hanging meat for 8-10 days

I hung my meat on a barbed wire fence onetime trying to get away from Wanda Fay Sczymyczh's daddy.

As to game meat all I know about are white tail deer and hogs neither of which is improved by hanging more than about twenty minutes.

BCR





Ps That's pronounced Shimmy shack

Yeah, I bet it was... <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/blush.gif" alt="" /> <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif" alt="" />

Most often it depends on the outside temperature. If its over 40 and I have no other options, I butcher immediately.

Aging allows the enzymes present in meat to break down complex proteins, possibly improving tenderness and flavor. Because wild animals forage for food, their muscles may develope more connective tissue than domestic, which can provide less tender meat.

If you cannot wait about 72 hours before butchering, do it immediately. If you butcher during rigor mortis you will not be happy when it hits your plate.

I have kept records of deer processing and found the following produced the best meat:

Hanging under 40 degrees for about 7 days.
Butcher and freeze immediately after death.

It looked so nice out this morning that I decided to leave it out all day. (Sorry - the voices made me do it.) <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" /> <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />

honestly I'm not sure if it helps or not. It just seems to be something tht we do. If that makes anysense. Ussually were hunting in november so we can hang the meat in the shed. We hang it untill the outside of the meat gets kinda a hard like crust on it.

My experience mirrors "whitetail's". Down here in eastern NC, you don't have the option most times to hang it. It's shoot and cut!!! When I go to WV durning firearm season in late Nov. most generally they can hand at least a few days. Keeping it clean and dry and in 40 degree or cooler makes for good chow.

Here's some professional opinion on the subject......

www.uwyo.edu/CES/PUBS/B-513R.htm

Meat cuts much nicer when it's cool. I won't hang it any longer than necessary to get it cooled, assuming I have the option.

Aging or hanging wild game for days or weeks on end makes no difference in the tenderness or flavor of the meat. If it is tendor after hanging or has great flavor, it did in the first place. I have tried hanging it in controlled temperatures from 1 to 13 days and everything inbetween. I butcher everything now as soon as I can. It all tastes the same and is just as tendor or tough as any other animal. This has more to do with genetics, age and forage than anything else. Many of the toughest, nastiest elk and deer I have eaten have been aged and taken care of perfectly. They were just old, tough and nasty. Nothing can change that. On the other hand, I have aged yearly elk and deer and they were tough and nasty as well. It just depends on the animal, more than anything. 95% of the people that hang their meat don't understand that it MUST be under 36 degrees constantly to keep the meat from spoiling (meat starts to rot at 40 degrees). I see deer and elk hanging all around my neighborhood for days on end...most with the hide still on them throughout the hunting season. The temps range from 30-80 degrees throughout the day and night. This behavior disgusts me, because I know the meat is wasted, no matter what the owners say. Meat going up and down in temperature like that rots, let alone the flies and maggots. This kind of behavior does not tenderize meat for human consumption. The local dump is FULL of elk and deer for many weeks after the seasons are over, due to people realizing their "hanging" meat has spoiled. The common excuse is, "I shot a bad deer/elk this year. It must have been sick. We had to throw the whole thing away, because it smelled so bad."

Beef on the other hand, are a whole different animal. They are butchered young and aged in temperature controlled coolers for a given amount of days (usually 18). They are fattened with grains and other products that produce lots of fat and tissue that is easily broken down by againg. They don't have to walk around feeding for a living while eating wild plants. Cattle just eat period. Their muscle fibers are COMPLETELY different from wild game and thus, break down and get better with aging. Flinch

My father hung his deer, so I hung mine. It tended to be dry and a bit gamy on occasion. Then I spent time in TX where it was just too hot to hang it, so I butchered it as soon as I could (usually the day after I took it). All of a sudden, the meat wasn't so dry and was tasty. After talking with some folk over at the Vet Sciences department at A&M, I found out why. Charlie Birdseye. Ol' Charlie learned that flash freezing caused things to freeze so fast that the ice crystals stayed small and didn't break the cell walls, making frozen veggies nigh as good as fresh. In my home freezer, though, the deer meat froze slowly and the ice crystals broke the cell walls, doing the same thing that natural aging did to tenderize the meat -and I'd gotten it into the freezer before dehydration of the muscles set in. And as for a lack of gamy taste, that's because I was taking it off the bone and trimming fat and connective tissue off the meat before I froze it. Most of the gamy taste comes not from the meat itself, but from the bones, connective tissue, and suchlike.

Nope, any more I don't hang mine any longer than I have to.

On my hunts we are usually dealing with either multiple animals or large animals that in either case have to be cut for transport so aging options are limited. When I can, I like to hang the gutted animal whole or quartered with hide on at least until the meat is cold and preferably until it comes out of rigor. Don't know if it matters much to the flavor, but (as has been said) it cuts better and is more tender then. Just don't let the hide freeze to the meat before you try and cut it for transport!

Hmmm. Back in the olden days (Way before us) The old boys and Indians in the DRY area of the west like Wyoming and such, would hang skinned buffalo and other large critters long enuff for it to wind dry.You Alaskns know that sun and wind dried salmon are pretty common so maybe we are missing something. Here in New Yorkistan the autumn weather is too unpredictable to hang too long.

Usually the temperature while I'm hunting hovers, if one can call that hovering, around freezing. I will usually hang a deer over night on the buck pole before butchering, but occasionally one or two days more. Not for the sake of hanging, but to continue hunting.

I didn't have any meat that'd hang, the first time I had to use a urinal in my bed in the hospital. My request for half a Viagra really puzzled the sweet young thing who stood watching to be sure that I did it right, and my answer to her "Why?" didn't amuse her one little bit:

"I need all the help I can get to find the damn spout."

.

Yes. Anyway you wanna read it....

Flinch's - whom I respect - and my circumstances are somewhat different, but I think he is largely full of it on this subject. "Rotting" IS "aging". Or vise-versa. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" /> <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />. Best caribou I have ever eaten "aged" in temps of 35 to 45 degrees in range, for two weeks, as we ate on it in a remote area fish-counting site without refrigeration- and we'd gotten darned tired of flown-in porkchops 7 days a week..You could cut the meat with a fork, literaly. Delicious. You could also cut the gaseous after-affects with a fork, tho a knife might have been more sutable. Not so delicious. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" /> <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

Having experimented with moose and caribou, aging it is better, IMHO. Dehydration is counter-productive. With my moose, upper temps are generally in the 50's or so, so 4 days is about maximum from time of kill.. It does hel tenderize hem.

I did a lot of research on this a number of years ago, some of which came from the meat sciences dept. at the U. of Wyoming.

All meat, wild and domestic, has natural enzymes that do tend to break down collagen (the connective tissue between cells) at any time after rigor mortis starts to leave the meat, a matter of a few hours. This makes meat tenderer, which has been proven in labs by pressure-gauged knife tests.

How much collagen is in the meat is the big question. Older animals tend to have more collagen, the reason their meat tends to be tougher. Some species also naturally have less collagen. Even mature pronghorn bucks, for example, wre shown to have less collagen in their meat than 6-month-old lamb.

Animals that are losing instead of gaining weight also tend to have more collagen--or perhaps we should say it gets diluted when animals are "on the gain," and concentrated when they start losing weight. This is the reason an earely Septmber bull elk is a lot tenderer than a late October bull.

The process of "aging" starts as soon as rigor mortis leaves the meat. If you just hang a deer overnight to let the meat cool, it has aged some. It does NOT only take place at under 36 degrees, in fact is accelerated at higher temperatures--but as temperatures rise you run into the problem of bacterial action, which is inhibited at lower temperatures.

Aging and rotting are two different things. Aging is allowing natural enzymes to break down collagen. Rotting is allowing bacteria to eat away at the meat. The stink you smell from bacterial rot is bacteria [bleep]. You won't smell this on properly aged meat.

Aging also does not take place only when the carcass is hanging. If you bone and ice down a carcass, then take a couple of days of travel to get it in the freezer, the meat has still aged. It also continues to age if you thaw it and put it in the refrigerator for a few days.

As a result of learning all this stuff, my wife and I tend to butcher pronghorns and young specimens of deer, elk, etc. as soon as as the meat cools down enough to slice nicely.
Older animals we try to age as much as possible, whether in a cooler or fridge, or if the weather is just right for hanging in the garage, as it often is in Montana Novembers. But a lot of it depends on all the other factors listed above. But the first 3 days of aging probably do as much as the final week.

Whether you leave the hide on or not depends on the temperature. If it's cool enough for the meat to thoroughly cool below 50 degrees, we leave the hide on to prevent drying the meat. If it's not, then bacterial action can start deep in the thickest parts of the carcass, the reason for the so-called "bone sour." Then we skin and often bone or quarter the meat. If we want to age it a while we leave it in plastic bags in ice chests.

MD

MD, while I don't have as much research as you do, my experiences are close to yours. Maimly the deer I eat are made into a few roasts(pot), backstraps/loins and ground meat. The only thing that I age is the whole backbone, with the ribs removed. Wraped in a plastic bag I age this in the fridge' and then bone. I have tried both ways and anecdotally it is more tender this way. capt david <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" /> <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" /> <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />