How To De-Bone A Deer (And Identify Primary Cuts)

[Music] we've got our deer quartered now we're ready to finish the process and debone it you know that's where a lot of hunters get intimidated because they think that that process is very complicated rest assured it's quite easy if you know just a few tips of the trade now good starting point obviously is is what you're going to use today we're using the game pro processing kit it's got a lot of great knives one i'm really focused on a lot today is their fillet knife it's a six inch blade fantastic for pretty much all the cuts you're going to make okay we're going to start with the easiest cut of meat and kind of work our way up to the more complicated ones by far the easiest piece of meat to work with is the tenderloin the only trick to a tenderloin is when you pull it out in its entirety you've got a connected piece associated with it and that piece just needs to be pulled off and that basically takes the makes the whole tenderloin that piece is great for you know chopping up for stir fry or just throw it in your grind all right the next kind of meat we're going to work with is the back strap and that's a favorite of the murphy household year round and really it comes with minimal knife work needed but we do have to do a couple of things first if you pull it over the underside of the the back strap you're going to find a seam and kind of an attached partial piece here using your hands you can kind of pull that out you can see i've got some some silver skin in there that's really not part of the true backstrap muscle itself so we're just going to trim that off nice and easy comes along the length almost the entire length of the back strap i just toss it in my grind you can chop it up and find her in that and put it in stir fry or in stews whatever your whatever your favorite is so now i've got the back strap but but now biggest challenge we have is to remove this silver skin if you don't do that it'll be chewier than boot leather and i promise you you don't want to eat it so most hunters traditionally would try to cut it off with the silver skin facing them and that's really the hardest way in fact by far the most difficult way so what i've learned over the years particularly using a flexible filet knife this is key and having an edge of the table as i've got here is is to put my back strap close to me here and to cut off about the section of back strap that we we like to eat at our household that's about six or eight inches that makes about three or four portions so if you come in to about whatever that portion is say six inch cut go straight down to that silver skin at that point turn your knife completely horizontal to the you're basically running along that silver skin and just with downward pressure just work your knife along again fillet knife is absolutely key and come right out to the end you can see removes that silver skin nicely and this piece at the end often will hang on you just a little bit so you can come back and cut that last little bit off nice and easy such and some of that you can obviously put into trim that it's not so so tough you can't put it into your grinder pile it's good stuff again just a real quick demo come in about six inches go down get your back strap turn your knife to lay it right along there just like you would be filleting a fish and as you get to the center of the back strap it actually gets cleaner and easier as you see there nice and clean done in just a matter of seconds and that and that once you get to the very end i like to turn around i'm right-handed so i'd like to always work to my right wouldn't cut this last section off and so now i've got you know three nice pieces of back strap there is a little bit of meat here left on this i wouldn't grind this part it's too tough you can just run your knife along there and cut that last little bit up nice and easy just trim it right off so that's the back strap okay so the next kind of meat we're going to tackle is the neck roast and if you're in an area that doesn't have cwd and you're not transporting the animal then you have the option of keeping it whole in this case it's off a buck so it's quite large i would recommend cutting it into two or three sections and leaving vertebrae in for a great pot roast and trust me the meat on the neck is fantastic flavor cole butcher once taught me that the flavor of an animal is best on the front end and decreases as you work backwards so therefore the neck is fantastic quality and flavor now since we're in a cwd area and we cannot transport this neck because the vertebrae potentially if it's an infected animal contains the infectious cwd material so in this case we're going to have to debone it and use it for grind or stew meat once we get home easiest way to do this and of course the first thing we did was remove the lower portion which contains the esophagus and trachea of the animal the windpipe and the food pipe so those have already been removed that's this section underneath here and so if you feel you can actually see an indention here right along the neck if you just cut down to the to the vertebrae you hit that just basically start to peel it just peel it almost like an onion back towards you just working against the bone and you want to take it off as efficiently as you can obviously time is is everything when you're trying to particularly we're always in a hurry trying to get back to our homes after a long hunting trip you don't want to spend a lot of time skinning so the quicker you can do it and and right the first time the better off you'll be again just following that the bone itself and with the neck because there's so many cracks and crevices you're not going to get all the meat no matter what you do here because it's just the way the structure of the neck and that's why it makes such a good necros once those vertebrae fall apart the meat just just falls right out there we go so we have our our neck vertebrae here again you can take some time and trim a little extra meat off that if you are fortunate enough to be able to to cook that or boil it up make makes great stock lots of ways to use that and this is a good a good way to also use a make a rolled roast out of it you've already got it rolled out the way you've trimmed it off there you can cut it in thinner sheets and wrap it up with cream cheese bacon jalapenos whatever you want and really impress your friends all right the next cut we're going to tackle is the rear leg and for many hunters this is really intimidating because it really looks complex and they don't want to mess up and obviously you want good quality and neat looking products look like you know what you're doing good thing about a whitetail animal you might break down is that if you just take the time to look you'll actually see the seams they give you a perfect road map to follow just by looking at where the different muscles start and stop first thing you want to do is just using your fingers often it'll have just a little bit of a protective layer on it and if you have the ability to pull that back and get some of that off of there if there's any superficial dirt or hair from your skinning and cleaning process that's a good way to get some of that off of there so first thing i look for is this is the sirloin tip we'll talk about the muscle groups in a minute but you'll see a nice seam running right between it and the bottom round so just by using a knife to get started the good thing about this is you can use your fingers a lot in this process and that will help you make sure you make the right cuts so you're just working with your hands pulling apart wherever you can use your knife intermittently just to help you work along the seams and as you start breaking those muscle groups apart again you can just see nice and easy once you get in here where these muscles start and stop you do have a lymph node right here at the base of these the uh the top round and basically the the lower leg and you want to pull that out particularly in with cwd areas the lymph nodes are often where some of that infectious material resides and also you just don't want that in your food you can see i've cut through that there you want to just see that that's a lymph node you'll just get that out you don't want that in your food regardless of cwd okay again using the same process here turn that around you can see it a little bit better and on this one you're actually going to use the femur as your guide cut that along nice and run straight along this is your uh your bottom round big cut of meat okay so we had our bottom round okay so we're down to really just a couple of three main cuts left you need this extra stuff here you can just take right off okay this back here on the back back end of the animal right at the end of your sirloin tip is the rump roast on a white tail they're very small rump roast though is fantastic some of the most tender tasteful meat you'll have on the animal so what you want to do with that is simply take your knife right off the back of that last ball joint and just cut straight through it'll actually come with a different little piece of meat associated with it that's not the rump they just cut that right off that goes into your trim pile and there's your rump again the rump on a white tail is very small but the meat is fantastic quality so be sure to save that for stews you know special occasions where you really want a tender cut of meat in something like a stew next cut will be to remove the sirloin tip some people call it the football roast because it looks a little bit like a football very easy to do now that we've got all the other muscle groups removed come in and take your knife come straight in to the bone come down the bone to the other end spin it around here come through the down to the bone again and come down the other side using that femur as your guide get as much of it as you can and come back lastly and slide it right down the bone and there you go there's your sirloin tip most people use this in a roast i love it as a roast i do not prefer it as sliced steaks as much as some of the other cuts it's just not it's a finer grain cut and can be just a little bit tougher so i recommend roast the sirloin tip the last step is to remove the shank meat now this is full of tendons and ligaments it's going to be super chewy it's really only useful for grind except in one situation that is to braise it very slowly in the oven for several hours if you do all that tendon all those tendons and ligaments will just dissolve it'll be some of the most tasteful possible meat you've ever tasted now you can cut it into sections and do a similar cooking style it's called ossobuco very common these days most hunters i hate to say in the past we've thrown this this part away i don't but in this case i'll go ahead and take it off the bone and put it in my grind all right our last cut of meat is the front shoulder and again this is a very flavorful part of the deer the one that is often very chewy and very tough so a lot of people put it in the grind and that's a fine use there are a couple of roasts you can get out of it as well the blade roast is a fantastic roast we're gonna go ahead and debone it today because that's what most hunters do trick to demoning a front shoulder is identifying where the shoulder blade is everybody's heard of the blade what is that simply just a kind of a mountain ridge that runs along the side of the the deer's front leg and shoulder here so if you just use your fingers you'll feel it what you're trying to do is is is cut right along that just like you would along the back bone on a back strap and you'll find your knife just kind of guide along and you can come down and once you hit the blade just the shoulder blade itself just turn turn your knife come with it and and again if you're putting it in the grind it doesn't really matter how pretty your job is here but again efficiency is the key if you're in a hurry or just want to do it as quick as possible all right so you can see i've i've i've exposed the wide part of the shoulder blade itself and you just usually have to go straight down through it when you get there so you can see i've got a an open shoulder blade there and just sticking the the knife up i can come straight down to the bone take it right off the joint with that piece so you got a lot of options with with that and then i basically do the reverse on the other side again using the shoulder blade the the high part of the shoulder blade is my guide just come down the edge of it work my way around this little bit of a corner spot turn around you can see it a little bit again just taking it right off of the blade itself okay okay don't want that one last little piece to do and that's underneath using a nice flexible blade like i have here with this uh fillet knife just come straight along the underside of it and take this meat right off the back of the blade again you could i could have cut through that maybe just a bone-in roast could have had a lot of other things to do with it but in this case just cleaning the blade up like that again with your shanks you can use that as part of your grind you can use it in alcibuco but if you're going to cook it as a primary meal you're going to want to cook it low and slow for several hours until those those heavy tendons and ligaments break down okay we finished quartering and deboning white-tailed deer wasn't that hard was it i want to go quickly over the the final cuts this is what you're looking for at the end of the day all your primal cuts ready to go got our pile of grind meat here some extra grind meat here of course our back straps back straps you want to cook on the grill primarily that's how they're most used for steaks if you're looking at your tenderloins these are again best cooked just like they are a whole on a grill is probably the best way with your favorite marinade of course this is a debone neck the neck is great for stews a number of different things you can use it as a roast as well one of one of the best tasting parts of the animal particularly used as a roast out of the back legs we've got the top and bottom round this can be used for steaks it's a coarser both both mussels are kind of used interchangeably in terms of how you cook them again coarse meat i like to use it for jerky for steaks and for grind here we've got our sirloin tip or the football roast that's best used in my opinion if you're not going to grind it would be a roast a standalone roast fantastic cooked low and slow the very front here we have our two rump steaks off the back back into the back leg again very tender very flavorful i like it in stir fry anything that you really want to present the quality of venison almost similar to backstrap in that regard really really good finally we have our shoulder meat taken off his sheets you can grind it most people do grind it but it is very flavorful so consider putting it in stews or other uses such as a rolled roast so the next time you harvest the deer hopefully you'll have a little more confidence that you can quarter and de-bone it properly and make that table fare envy of all your family and friends

Channel: HuntStand

Views: 15,238

Rating: 4.9194632 out of 5

Keywords: deer butchering, venison, how to, brian murphy, outdoor edge, deer processing, debone a deer, whitetails, deer meat

Id: rd5UYHBjm9I

Length: 15min 36sec (936 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 23 2021