I vacuum seal my fish. I vacuum sealed my venison and waterfowl last season and we are still eating it and its been fine.

Yet, vacuum sealing is much more expensive than butcher paper, so I have some questions.

How long will venison and bear last just in Butcher Paper frozen? What is the proper method for using butcher paper in the first place?


That'll do for now. thanks in advance for your replies.

Scoplamine: I am interested in the answer to this question as well.
Since the last two VarmintChildren just graduated from college last year and are out on the west coast earning "big bucks" its just the VarmintWife and I now eating my wild harvests!
I am contemplating buying a vacuum sealer IF it will increase the "shelf life" of my game and fish.
Up til now my harvests were all consumed wihtin about 12 months of initial freezing and everything seemed fine with the fish and game so I contend that 12 months duration with the "Butchers paper" is very doable.
If I get an Elk this year along with a Deer and an Antelope it may take two years for us to consume it all?
I would gladly pay the extra amount if the product is kept "good"!
I use two types of paper now on each cut of meat - a special Saran like freezer wrap and then over that the traditional "Butchers paper".
Good luck this season.
Hold into the wind
VarmintGuy

I still have 6 packages of ground elk that was harvested in Nov of 2009. It was/is wrapped in butcher paper and is still great. We will eat the remaining in the next month.

BTW the Butcher paper has a very slick side towards the meat and was wrapped very tight.

if vacuum sealed and the seal holds tight, the book that came with mine indicated something like a 3 year freezer life for most meats. You have to figure the manufacturer is likely to lean to the conservative side...

You can make things some cheaper by putting your meat in a twist tie gallon bag first, and just kinda rolling it closed. Then vacuum seal and it will push the air out of the thin bag. Take the meat out of the sealed bag before it thaws and it will remain clean and can be used again. Could wipe it down with vinegar or something if worried, but I figure several months at below zero will kill things. miles

I've eaten meat from my deep freeze from 3 seasons before that was still just as good as the more recently packaged stuff. I wrap it tight and make sure to get all the air out.

I may be vacuum sealer challenged but with the home unit I have the seals or plastic itself will leak air after about a year. I'm sure some of it is having moisture on the seal but that's hard to avoid when doing any amount of wet meat.

The meat wrapped in plastic wrap then double wrapped in the plastic faced butcher paper was good for a long time. I found old forgotten stuff in the back of the freezer that I was sure couldn't be good. I was going to cook it up for dog treats and ended up eating it all myself. It was at least 4 yrs. old.

Now I use the vacuum sealer for fish in water and ground meat and the old fashioned way for the larger cuts.

I have found that briefly freezing my game or fish (20 mins or so) before vaccuum sealing provides a much tighter seal and seams to prevent air pockets or poor seals due to blood/moisture within the bag. That being said, I have had properly sealed game go over two years in the deep freezer and still cook up as tender and tasty as day 1!

I also double seal every thing. I make my own bags from rolls a double seal both ends. miles

There is a difference between butcher paper and freezer paper.The freezer paper has a poly or vinyl side that goes inward.Plain Butcher paper does not.Using a butcher wrap seals it very well. I have meat in the freezer + 4 yrs and it is fine.( Thta is not a frost free freezer though.)
Put the meat in the corner of the paper,roll once, fold two corners in and then roll until the opposite corner is wrapped.Seal with one piece of tape.

Butcher paper alone has never given long term satisfaction. In my mind efficacy is typically measured in months.

For years we have wrapped our game in Saran (or similar product) Wrap and butcher paper using the drugstore wrap.

Drugstore wrap package link

If one just folds over corners with his paper, he is wasting his time. The wrap is a clingy enough material that it leaves essentially no air pockets. The butcher paper adds durability to the product. Handling or knocking about of frozen packages will puncture the fragile wrap and allow dehydration to begin.

With two large freezers, we often dredge out red meat (deer, elk, caribou, moose, beef, pronghorn, pork, and lamb) dating back as far as 7 or 8 years, and it is fine. Fish (steelhead, salmon, tuna, lings, halibut etc) are another deal entirely. We have tried every possible suggestion, and fish, regardless of species, simply looses it's magic after more than a month in the freezer. That includes our Saran Wrap treatment, quick freeze/dipping in water and then wrap, vacum sealed, and actually freezing in water. I'm convinced there are some fat soluable enzymes that remain active at well below -20 degrees F in fish. It's a shame, because there are times that we could return with 50 or 100 lbs. We pretty much catch and release and bring home an amount that we can consume in only a couple of months.

If one can get good vacum seals, I think it's almost as good as the wrap/bitcher paper packages. My problem with vacum packages is the extra material (ends, sides, and corners) make efficient storage a problem. Those ends just use up a lot of space. Not too much of and issue in a chest freezer, but with much stacking at all, they will slide off/out of upright shelves. I also think there's a lot of profit margin in the vacum bag material.

Thanks folks. Now, if I can just shoot something...

I just had some elk backstrap last week that was vacuum sealed in Oct '08 and got shuffeled to the back of the freezer (I hate it when that happens). As good as any I've had. I started vacuum sealing my meats about 7 years ago and wouldn't do it any other way now.
__________
NRA Life,Endowment,Patron or Benefactor since '72.

I vacuum seal everything..

I just had a moose roast from 2002. It was wrapped in butcher paper. It was delicious! Somehow it got moved to the back of the freezer. I usually don't like meat past 5 years old, but you never know. A lot depends on the freezer and how it was wrapped. I can't honestly see any difference in freezer paper (poly coated) vs. vacuum sealed. I have both from 1 year to 8 years. They taste the same. Flinch

As saddlesore pointed out, there's a difference between "butcher" and "freezer" paper. One side of freezer paper is plastic coated, making it a longer-term wrapper.

A lot also depends on whether your freezer is frost-free. A FF unit sucks moisture out of the air AND the stuff in the freezer, promoting freezer burn.

Whether you use a chest or upright freezer also makes a difference, with chest freezers being much better because the cold air doesn't fall out of them every time they're opened.

The freezer units in frost-free refrigerators are the worst, since they don't stay near as cold as real freezers.

We have a very good vacuum-pack machine and use it regularly for odd-shaped stuff like fish and birds. But we butcher and freeze several hundred pounds of big game each year with good freezer paper. We use the standard technique that leaves at least two layers of paper on each hunk of meat, and they last 3 years easily with no freezer burn. It's a LOT cheaper and quicker than vacuum-sealing, especially since we buy our freezer paper in the big rolls from Costco.

I'm eating the last of a moose I killed from 2 years ago, it was wrapped by the processor in freezer paper and I did notice it was starting to turn brown on the edges but it was still good. Everything isn't wrapped by my processor I vacuum seal.

Vacuum sealing is king.
The only thing that will kill your meat in the freezer is freezer burn.
Freezer burn occurs when the meat isn't tightly wrapped and the air gets to it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freezer_burn


I don't have a vacuum sealer, but tightly wrapping my meat in freezer wrap is usually good to about 2 1/2 years which works for me.

As said previously butcher paper; get the air out. Meat has been absolutely fine after 4 years. We don't plan on going over 12-18 months but sometimes a bits works its way into a corner and comes up 4 years old. also don't get cheap and use tiny pieces of paper, drugstore wrap or a modification is my preferred. GRF

I've gone back to freezer paper after the vacuum unit died.
A good tight double wrap should last at least til the following hunting season. We try to rotate meat to sausage and hamburger if we are successful again in the fall.

As to Mule Deers comment on frost free freezers, I wonder if anyone makes one that ISN'T a ff model.

as I now slow down, Freezer paper. GRF

We package ours (there are two of us) in sandwich bags, wrapped in foil with freezer wrap on the outside. Couple of years they are fine. I also have quite a following of friends that will take game if there is a surplus. My biggest issue is giving it away prior to cutting it up.

bigwhoop,

Good question!

We have three 15 cubic-foot freezers, two chest and one upright. All are "defrost as needed," which we do annuall, about this time if year.

But we haven't bought a freezer for at least 6-7 years.

Anybody?

JB we always do ours with a layer of Saran Wrap, to seal out the air, then tightly wrapped in the butcher paper...good for two years....



You never complained and I always feed you the old stuff......












DOH!

Probably shouldnt have said that....

I wrap each cut in cellophane, then bulk pack those in gallon ziplock bags. You can get quite a few small cuts in a gal bag. It's very fast, and very cheap. It's easy to find a particular cut because you just have a few gal bags instead of dozens of smaller packages. I've kept meat 2 years that way with great success. Repeated openings of the gal bag doesn't seem to matter as long as we squeeze out as much air as possible each time. We've never needed to keep it longer than that. It disappears long before it gets to 3 years.

Before I started this method, I used a lot of butcher paper. Properly wrapped, a single layer will last several years without inside wrapping.

We use a saran type freezer wrap, then that goes into the freezer paper. Like others have said, I've used meat that was 4 or 5 years old with no loss in quality.

I bought a vacuum sealer thinking it was going to be the ticket, still use it on a few things like sausages or tamales, but wasn't pleased with the long term results. Seemed to lose too many seals which resulted in freezer burned meat.

Saran wrap and butcher paper here. Of course we go through it fast enough that hardly any of it is over a year old, but the oldest still tastes as good as the freshest.

I've been using Glad Press'n Seal for I guess about ten years now with excellent results. Good for three years anyway, meat doesn't last that long unless it gets lost in the bottom of the pile. In case you don't know, it's a plastic wrap that's coated with a tacky adhesive on one side about the strength of the adhesive on a Post-It.

The plastic is a little stiffer and easier to manage than the standard poly film. With the adhesive the stuff tends to stay sealed when you squeeze the air out. Beats bags because you can size it as you need and you just wrap.

I over wrap with freezer paper, not very carefully, mainly so stuff doesn't slide around in the upright. I buy packages of chicken leg quarters or thighs on sale and wrap individually with Press'n Seal. Then back into the store bag and in the freezer. Works just fine without the over wrap but I'd get the Press'n Seal freezer version for longer storage without the over wrap.

I've had elk and whitetail venison last a couple years even in a regular frost-free kitchen freezer, if well wrapped in freezer paper.

We buy our beef and pork in bulk from local farms. All of the slaughterhouses (three different ones so far) use vacuum packs, and nearly every package ends up leaking when you get it out to thaw. Still, most of them are tight enough that the meat's fine. Even a six-month-old Boston butt with a lot of frost on it turned out well after nine hours in the oven.

I'm still working on 2008 Axis sausage and it was tightly wrapped in butchers paper. Good stuff with my morning eggs.