the butcher, the baker

    It's that time of year again! All year long here in Jersey there's a ton of deer trying to run in front of my car, but now it's hunting season and it's time time to turn the tables. Not that I'm actually going out in the cold to shoot them myself, but if you know the right people at least you can eat them once someone else does all the work.

arrow wound on the foreleg. we won't be eating that bit.

    So if you're asking, what do I do with a whole deer? More pictures of the butchery and details on what I normally do with an entire deer to follow.

    First things first, I got most of the bones into a stockpot to roll lightly while I slept before waking up and cleaning up all the meat. I get the impression that most people would throw all of the bones into the garbage and find it shocking. That would be a terrible waste, as easy as it is to throw some bones into a pot with water. Just think: I'll surely be needing some braising fluid for a bunch of the meat, and what better for the job than deer stock?  In the pot below are portions of the ribcage and maybe a bone or two from a leg, and that's as far as I got before I ran out of room.


    So some general tips for deer butchery?

• Get rid of the tissue ruined by the hunting implement.
• This one went about 50 yards with the arrow lodged under one shoulder, so the tip tore up a lot of meat. It's not so much the damage done to the meat that's the problem, it's that the arrow head went through some very unsanitary deer hair and skin to get to where it eventually stopped and the meat has been impregnated with all that nastiness. Best practice is to get rid of these bits.
• Hair gets everywhere. Maybe you're a lot better at skinning than I am, but there's always a bunch of little hairs hiding all over a lot of the meat. I keep a deep bucket of warm water on hand as a place to get the hair off of my hand after it comes off of the meat.
• Don't worry about following some diagram of what cuts of meat you should have. For use at home, it can pretty much be separated into meat that is sinewy and meat that is not. Go from there.
• It's not really the easiest thing to use the hind shanks from a deer. To put it bluntly, they pee all over themselves and the hind legs are just rank. So even if I had managed to carefully get the skin peeled down from the leg without tainting the meat, the hunter apparently likes to keep that tendon on him when he hunts to cover his scent. And cover it they will, because they stink like nobody's business.

stock!

gore

• A couple gallons of stock, which I'll reduce down to a quart or so at least and keep in pints and ice cubes in the freezer.
• Lots of braised/stewed deer dishes in the cold months to come. From deersobucco(as we call it) with the shanks to various chilis and stews.
•     Jerky! It's a good thing I brought home a lot of deer because there's very little yield once the meat is dessicated. I've got two dehydrators in the house so I'll probably spend a few days doing different batches: something juniper, something plain and meaty, something smoked and also whatever else comes to mind once I'm curing the meat.
• Ground venison will become a wealth of simple dinners, but what comes to mind firstly is deerloaf and Sloppy Does. Sloppy does, of course, being Sloppy Joes but with deer. I know this happens to be a male deer, but the name is too good not to use.
      I can probably bang out a couple of sausages from some of the ground meat plus some beef fat.
      As a burger snob I'm not generally a fan of venison burgers, even with beef fat ground in, due to the texture. It's just too soft. I'm planning to try making a firmer deer burger using transglutaminase one of these days though, and I'll surely be sharing the results with the internet once that time comes.
• Steak! Roasts! Steak! The loin, tenderloin, chain and some other lean chunkers will most likely all be eaten seared with salt and pepper, and served with some sauce from the aforementioned stock. It's easy and delicious.
      Normally I would steak it up with the heart too, and smaller hearts have gone okay for me that way but this one is large and looking pretty developed so I'm thinking it will need a braise, unfortunately.
      The larger lean pieces from the rear leg will be tied up as roasts for some night where we have a couple of guests.
• The ham will be brined for a week or more, depending on how much it winds up weighing, and then I'll smoke it and cook it gently in our steam oven somewhere around 140F overnight. Then I'll hold on to it for Thanksgiving.
• Deer "bacon" will come from the flaps of meat from the belly and ribcage area that weren't obliterated by the arrowhead. It doesn't have the fat to be treated like bacon in strip form but it can certainly be diced and crisped up to provide smoky saltiness to some dish later on.
• Cheesesteak meat will come from some of the steaky meat. I'll freeze it semisolid and slice it super-thin on a deli slicer. Really handy stuff to have on hand for a quick meal.