Cooking Special: Butchering a Whole Deer | S6E06 | MeatEater

cooking wild game properly takes know-how but ask any skilled cook and they'll tell you the importance of understanding your raw ingredients as much as possible with game there's no better way to do this than to butcher it yourself on previous cooking episodes we've shown you how to take butchered meat from raw to table in this episode we'll show you how to go from whole animal to freezer next time you grab that frozen white package you're gonna know exactly what's inside i'm stephen ranella to me hunting isn't only about the pursuit of an animal it's about who we are and what we're made of i live to hunt and hunt to live i am a meat eater butchering your own deer at home is rewarding and it's not that difficult if you learn a few tricks and procedures i'm going to show you what i think is the best way because it opens it up to have the greatest variability in ingredients meaning when i process a deer i have more than just a pile of steaks and a pile of burger i have a wide array of cuts that can be used for many different applications i'm going to demonstrate this method on a whitetail dough this dough was shot yesterday i gutted it out washed out with snow you can see everything is clean inside other than that there's been no cuts made on this deer i'm going to start out by demonstrating what i do for skinning cuts then i'm going to show how to cut the legs that we're going to skin it i'm going to start by making five simple cuts one of each of the legs and the last up the brisket and around the neck behind the ears when you're doing opening cuts on any kind of animal never cut down from the outside in because what you do is you're cutting all kinds of little hairs and that's going to get all over the meat always go like this out in because that way the knife blade finds its way up through the hairs without cutting any of the hairs always cut leather out toward hair never hair in toward leather once those five incisions are made i need to take off the four legs at the knees this can be done with a hacksaw but it's easier if you just learn how to do it with a knife you want to find the second joint on the leg there's kind of like two joints in here right in there it's lower than you think just kind of not work you'd expect that i always think it's a little lower than where you think you're going to find it back leg got this little knob for the sake of efficiency these joints are the one place where i break my own rule and cut through the hair to make my cut so at this point the deer is ready to start stripping the hide down starting at the cut i made around the neck i want to start peeling back the hide carefully separating it from the meat as cleanly as possible as i go along i'm also taking the time to clean off any and all hair from the meat trust me do this now not later [Music] when you're pulling the hide it's helpful to have some clothes on you don't really care about getting dirty because a good trick once you get some cuts made take your elbow like that here elbow so my tailbone now we got the hide taken off now that the hides off this deer i'm going to do one last thing i'm going to go through and make sure there are no hairs anywhere it's easier now to get them all it's cleaner to get them all now so just take the necessary time to get all the hairs off right now at this point some hunters find that the skinning process is arduous if so there are some tricks that can make it go faster you'll see some guys call this the golf ball method i'm using a rock instead place the golf ball or rock at the nape of the neck and make sure you tie it off with a good strong [Music] knot [Music] once you get the hide off you want to consider bullet damage personally i cut pretty wide around any shot up meat i'd rather lose a little bit of meat than run into bone or bullet fragments when i'm cutting grinding or eating from a meat cutting standpoint the best bullet placement you can do would be either in the head which is not a type of shooting that i recommend or about two three ribs back from the front shoulder right there where you are double lung just losing a little meat around the ribs but as anyone who's hunted much knows it just doesn't always work out that way it's just a fact of life you're gonna lose some meat you can hope to minimize it but it's just going to happen so now i got the deer skinned out i got the bullet damage taken care of on this deer is particularly bad but i think it's in some way helpful just for demonstration purposes so at this point i'm going to bring it in and pick the job back up inside [Music] now that i'm on the butchering table the first step i'm gonna do is i'm gonna part the deer out or we sometimes say quartered out now quartering would imply that you're gonna have four quarters and traditionally a quarter would be literally that you cut the animal in half right here and then you cut it up the spine and you have four quarters of deer we just say the term now basically it means you're going to be cutting the four legs off and then we'll take the rest of the body and cut some more meat off that the front legs there's no joint inside here it's just ligaments to hold this you see how that just kind of opens up it's very easy just keep pulling you'll cut just looking at it just kind of shows you where you want to cut there's an arm take this leg same thing give it a pull cut over the pelvis and come in here you see right where this is called the punch through the punch joins the leg and here's the ball joint now remember that front leg there's no joint there's no ball socket up there it's just ligaments to hold on back here you have a ball side so just keep putting downward pressure like this right here i'm putting downward pressure on this thing and it makes that joint want to pop see i got a bone right here that's like the pelvis so i'm cutting around and i'm going to take as much of this meat along here as i can and leave it on the back ham as i pull it might look a little bit confusing but when you're doing it yourself you just see you just really can't mess it up i'm not gonna work on getting the back strap off we call it deer fat tallow a lot of people ask me if deer fat is good like if you can use it like pork fat if you can cut it into your grind it's a lot different than beef fat it's a lot different than pork fat it doesn't taste good it puts a very waxy substance inside your mouth when you eat it if you want to mess around with it when it's fresh go ahead but never freeze venison with tallow on it it will turn not rancid but it will turn even worse in the freezer and a lot of people complain about off flavors when they're eating venison are reacting to tallow the piece we're gonna pull off is the loin some people call it the back strap back here you'll feel a point on the hip that's the back end of the back strap so you can just mark it i cut like that that's the back of the back strap i usually go up kind of right around to the end of the rib cage so i got my last rib right there i'll go up and i'll make my i'm calling everything forward neck everything back from here back strap so let's just cut it there so we know what we're dealing with if you look here there's like a natural seam where your back strap or your line curls around and you go into the ribs cut or run your thumb up there like so so to start removing the strap right along the edge of the spine and then you could come in and meet that cut by coming down here [Music] with the back strap off i'm now going to remove the tenderloin in order to give a better look i'm gonna cut the punch away just so we can get a better view these are the tenderloins one on each side they're easy to remove you can almost remove them without using a knife at all see i'm just taking my fingers and just peel it away [Music] general one there's the r10 line now the tenderloins are out i'm gonna cut the punch see the ribs you can't see them because they're under this layer but the ribs end there's my last rib right there ribs end right there trace up that rib [Music] a punch now i'm gonna flip the deer and repeat everything on the opposite side front leg back leg back strap remember this is where i had that thing you know i screwed up with my shot placement and i lost a lot of backstrap so i lost you got there up to there you can see a little bit of damage we're going to lose right here and i'm going to pick up the rest of this back strap that i haven't discarded [Music] rather than boning the neck out i'm gonna take the neck off for whole neck rolls or for pulled venison recipes here's the sternum like the end of the rib cage comes forward you got the ribs i can feel them right here rib rib last rib beginning and neck cut in right there cut there so now we have our deer parted out or quartered but chances are you're not going to put an entire deer leg in your freezer next i'll show you how to break these cuts down into more manageable pieces all right let's check in on where we're at now so we got the deer pretty well taken apart you have front leg front leg loin or back strap rib cage both sides on it we're gonna talk about this next here you have what in uh cooking turns we know as a saddle we just have a pelvis and the lower spine all boned out but we're pretty much done with this piece as far as the meat perspective goes back leg back leg whole bone in neck tenderloin or inside loin two of those and our two punch pieces venison ribs are tricky a lot of guys just don't like to mess with them they are fatty there's not that much meat there but there are some things you can do with them there is meat on this between the ribs so i'm just getting all this fat off the outside once you get most of that stuff off you start boning the ribs here you'll see why a lot of guys aren't crazy about ribs [Music] so that's one way that's how to bone ribs these pieces right here are gonna go right into my burger pile the grind pile now i'm to show another way to handle ribs this is why i actually prefer to do it as much bad stuff that i've said about tallow it's not terrible if you keep it separate from everything else what i like to do with ribs is leave them bone in with as much meat on them as possible so all that stuff i was just cleaning away to get rid of the fat i'm going to try to not get rid of all that and i'm just going to get rid of some of these big pieces of fat on the outside again some deer aren't like this cut into some deer they have no fat on the ribs for those are ready to go but for this one i'm gonna get rid of some of the biggest pieces of tablet [Music] once i got the heaviest pieces of fat off the rib cage i'm gonna free it up from the other part so here's one rib slab i'm gonna cut this one just like this all the way through and i'm gonna part it out so i have pieces with three or four rib bones in each then what you do is you can either simmer or pressure cook the ribs what happens especially in a pressure cooker is a lot of that fat that's on there becomes liquefied and rises up to the top so it separates a lot of the fat from the meat then once i pressure cook them or i slow cook them in the oven at 300 degrees until they're so tender you could grab this bone and just pull it out of there you could break it apart with your fingers at that point i take them put them on a grill with a dry rub put a mop on them they are unbelievable it's as good as any kind of ribs you're going to get in a restaurant [Music] for the front shoulder there are basically two options you can take as much off the bones as you can and then add it to your grind pile because this side is being done for the grind pile it doesn't matter how many pieces it comes off in you're going to cube all that anyways or you can leave it on the bone and has some unique cuts to work with one of my favorite dishes to make is what we call a blade roast and i give the exact recipe and the complete guide to hunting and butchering and cooking wild game it's a great dish you have zero waste when you're done cooking that blade rolls it looks like the bone looks like something you'd find in a museum i mean it's just picked clean so i'm gonna cut this piece for three blade rolls the rest of this thing we're gonna leave bone in shank for doing asabuko let's cut in so you're cutting through the meat leaving the bone and then go about a third of the way down there's the knee right there [Music] now take my saw so here we have that front shoulder broken into four huge great meals blade rolls and you can do these according to a recipe i put in the complete guide or you can do pot roast season it with salt and pepper sear it on all sides and then braise it down in stock or water until it's tender finally we have the shank here which i like to use for a dish called asabuko it's a very moist meat when it's been slow cooked on the back legs once i get all the fat off i like to take it apart by the muscle group so i'm taking off whole muscles in this case you really just have to follow the seams of connective tissue the muscles are already separated you have the bottom round just cut between them fillet off the bone and that's basically it that's the top round here you have the sirloin some people call it a ball roast you can do this piece it's awesome boogle as well it's huge or you can come in fat off this is a big heavy tent in here so there's a piece for grind pile to blowing this part off come in here see i can put my finger in there [Music] the main thing about the leg meat is all this stuff should be cooked very simply and as rare as is tolerable for the people you cook for this is the really high quality meat this isn't stuff for stews this isn't stuff for braising and pot roast it'll get dry if you overcook it this is for rare cooking everything here can be taken salt and pepper put on it you sear it in a pan till it's browned on all sides you put into a 400 degree oven when it hits 125 degrees pull it out let it rest 10 minutes slice it thin it's the best stuff on the planet so at this point i've shown you how to break down an entire animal into smaller recipe-ready pieces that will fit into your freezer the final step is to prepare them for freezing properly so that they come out looking as good as they went in if i know that i'm going to be the one who thaws this thing out and cooks it i will leave the silver skin on the back strap it's going to just add more protection to the meat it's like when you wrap meat and plastic wrap you're trying to keep oxygen off it this is going to work as good as that i still use plastic wrap but i would leave that stuff on there if i'm going to give it to someone and i don't want them to have to worry about how to handle it i'll remove that heavy layer of silver skin off the back native americans used to take this material right here and use it for both strings that's just how strong that tenon is you got to get that thing off just start very slowly cutting it away slow process because that thing is stuck on there so tight there's no peeling it off with your fingers that piece of loin is ready for the freezer i'm going to take the front section of the loin there's a piece on there you can kind of peel away and trim that up put that in your grind pile the silver skin gets thinner remember on that other piece the whole back of that thing was all covered with that silver skin that silver skin piece narrows down and narrows down as it gets up in this area you still want to get rid of it it's much easier to deal with here this is a great piece to give away to people because it's hard to mess it up when they go to cook it as long as they don't overcook it you can't mess that piece up so here's two pieces of loin that are ready for the freezer when it comes to freezing venison or any red meat i don't use a vacuum sealer i like vacuum sealers for fish but for red meat i much prefer using a double wrap one of plastic wrap and one of wax freezer paper so the key is to take this stuff and wrap it and squeeze out as much of the air as you can done this way you can leave meat in the freezer for longer than i would even care to mention i think nothing of putting meat wrapped this way when it's been trimmed to fat into my freezer for a year two years is fine if you have a good freezer and you've wrapped it this way get the air squeezed out then next step wax freezer paper [Music] squeezing the air out fold in [Music] just like that so there you have it no matter what big hooved game you're dealing with the process is pretty much the same hopefully i've made butchering a bit less intimidating with practice it'll become second nature and you'll get that huge sense of accomplishment knowing that you did the whole thing yourself and you did it right you

Channel: MeatEater

Views: 867,274

Keywords: steven rinella, meateater, meat eater, Steve rinella, butchering, hunting, cooking, wild game, deer hunting, butchering deer, field dressing deer, field butchering

Id: _y4eFWfOvDI

Length: 21min 20sec (1280 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 16 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/warsuler]

Love the show, good episode. Would you use such a short knife though? I would prefer something a little longer and slimmer.