Processing a Moose in Alaska | Canned Chili, Ground Sausage & More for Winter

so so [Music] foreign a little higher probably higher higher like high that's like right there right great today we have something super fun on our agenda we are going to be processing this moose behind me we've got a moose hindquarter and a moose shoulder over here we acquired this mousse through the estate program we got really really lucky and we actually shared this one with our neighbors and this one it's not like the last one we got it wasn't hit by a train it wasn't hit by a car it was confiscated from a hunter we don't know why but they took it from him and the good news is we got it like this it was already butchered and ready to hang up so it wasn't too much work this is our first time hanging meat in the new little carport and this middle beam here we purposely made it a little bit thicker so it's about three inches thick eight inches wide and we got our pulleys up there and we got our mousse meat tied up both really excited about this because moose season has come to an end and this moose meat has actually been aging for about a week am i right yep so that's supposed to help it get a little bit more tender but moose meat is already so delicious we did put in some time moose hunting but we just didn't have that much luck we weren't able to put that much time in this year with everything being kind of late and you know you want to get there's a crunch really at the end of the season where you have to get things done yeah we're really busy around here we had a lot of gardening to do a lot of preserving to do we did go out like on a three or four day moose hunt saw a bear and that was about it but it was still a fun trip and luckily the last day of moose hunting season our neighbor went and picked up this awesome moose for us we have a teeny tiny bit of last year's moose left so this will be a really nice start to our winter food yes and a half a moose is a lot of meat these animals are huge these these things weigh probably about 100 pounds each they're extremely heavy we did really well on fishing this year so we got a bunch of fish we did really well in the garden so we are gonna be eating extremely good this winter we're gonna get started on these ariel's gonna tackle the hind quarter i'm gonna do the front shoulder front shoulder is mostly gonna be for grinding we're gonna do sausage and burger meat and since this has been aging there's kind of like a tough layer on the outside so we're gonna skin that off clean it up get rid of some of the fat and uh we got a little bucket over there for dog food we'll get going get a package yeah we have quite the variety of knives that we like to use i'm going to use this one this is a victorinox bony knife i love that one we have a mora knife this is probably going to be the one that ariel used to start off with this is like a 20 knife it's a really good knife we have the little havalon ones with the uh removable little razor blades those work good and we have a really nice benchmade knife that we like to use and we have our skinny knife this is more for taking the skin off so i don't know if we'll use this one but we're going to get started i'm working on this front quarter so that's what i'm taking off a little thin layer right there it's kind of hard on the outside that's where i took it off oh you got some nice nice tender meat in there it's gonna be good what's going in the dog food wow you're a little fat on his legs huh yeah that little sucker this knife is like crazy sharp right now this is a little fun it's a nice little roast right okay yeah it's just making noise i don't know about you but i got like look can i show you what i got going on and then you you keep going and it works like a strip i don't know i just all of a sudden started doing it started working really well that's like skinning an animal but harder wow so i think i found where this moose was shot this is the front quarter this is the left shoulder i think anyways i got it looks like an entrance room right there i noticed a little bit of blood in the meat and i have a big exit one on the inside right there that's a good piece of bandit pure meat i like this more knife what's that i like this more knife yeah it's a good knife i like it that you can use it for skinning although i like your bench made better for skinning and the other one the cory starfox one like does a lot better for uh skinning but this one i think is neat because you can actually bone out but you process you can't really do it's all-purpose knife what you're doing right now is actually a lot easier with this knife that's more like a processing like when you do the cuts well that's just my opinions but she went down a huge muscle on them you want a piece of moose there you go i don't know why i went russian gangster on that but thank you okay and then let's just admire this beauty oh my gosh how much does that weigh compared to your cat how many pounds is that 12 pounds what does a bowling ball weigh there's all different weights babe aren't they pretty heavy though yeah this is more than one 10 pounds this is way more than that probably 18 pounds feel this maybe 20. i believe it no feel it i believe okay okay i feel like it's 20. right well i think we're getting close to being done we're gonna be saving some of these bones for bone broth and we ended up with like a five gallon bucket of roasts and steaks actually it's over that and then same thing with the ground meat ended up with all of that it's a lot of meat yeah that's gonna have to be for the dogs that dropped it oh no sad it's the dog's lucky day see look at this poor little sad thing do you think i should do what to make they'd take an arrowhead and fasten it to the end of a stick with those and they put it on raw and as it dried it shrunk down and tightened up see how that's real hard and tight and it used to like secure arrowhead on the end of a stick that's like the toughest thing in the world i don't even know if i can get through that with this knife yeah they used to use like tendons from like bison and whatever they could how do you know this my mom's part indian switch to my little tiny knife doing some little detail work here i wanted to keep this scapula to do um some moose calling with it we have some but i'd like another one this is work i shot there's supposed to be bone there and this thing just got just really messed up not gonna be saving that a lot of this meat where it gets shot it gets kind of like bloody so that's gonna be dog food banana cake this is awesome or chicken food but yeah this right here the knuckles those are gonna be great we're almost done ah okay i love the heart huh oh my gosh that's way heavier than it looks 70 pounds no that's not the same as concrete concrete's 80. okay yeah it's under concrete it's probably 60 i was going to say 60. that's 50 or 60. it's heavy it is heavy these are all of our moose roasts i don't know this has to be 50 to 60 pounds i'm guessing so ariel went along outside she cut them into big pieces in here i'm going to clean them up a little bit cut them into more manageable pieces that we'll want to cook probably about that big roast are probably our favorite way to eat mousse probably like them even better than steak so we got a lot of them to work with look at this oh my gosh all right this is long kind of flat steak yeah do that i'm just gonna thanks beautiful i'm gonna show you everyone you know i have like a cross section of a different kind of muscle group this is the one that i didn't separate okay tell me that's not more than 20 pounds touch it touch it that that's what i was trying to say it's over freaking over 18 pounds or it's 18 pounds or more oh my gosh hey you said another knife [Music] see it just does it on something like that oh you know this little lady doesn't know what's going on half the time i was like oh cool i figured out how to use this thing [Music] [Music] let's put this let's do him like what do you think [Applause] [Music] last four packages oh i didn't know how much we have here but errol's gonna get a little scale out and she's actually gonna weigh all this see how we did and then next up we're gonna head back outside we're gonna grab our bones we're gonna start making our bone thinking right broth holy cow look how much look at that merrell we're gonna be trying something new we're going to be roasting our bones or browning them before we make broth thanks to a few of you leaving me a tip that sounds wonderful it sounds like it will make for a much you know even more developed flavor of a broth so i'm gonna get these in the oven i have to do probably two or three batches and then we'll get started on the bone broth [Applause] well those look absolutely delicious so we're going to add them into our pot in fact i already added the other batch those are already browned and eric filled this up with water about two-thirds of the way this is our pressure canner we're going to be pressure cooking these bones in our pressure canner because these bones are so big and they take a really long time to break down we want the bone marrow to break down the collagen to come out i left a lot of the cartilage and tendons and all that good stuff i'm even putting in the kneecap too past we've cooked these in a pot but they take like two days to break down two days or more continuously running your range so this way is like an expedited version and it works a lot quicker and once i get these in i'm going to be also adding some onions i'm just going to add them in and a tomato because it is acidic this is a really beautiful tomato known as moon glow so we're just gonna add her in once i get all of these in we're gonna start cooking this and let it go probably for about two hours tonight and then we're gonna pick back up tomorrow morning [Music] [Music] all right time for breakfast we got a late start today so it's like almost noon but we stayed up till two in the morning last night doing a bunch of stuff but we're continuing on with the moose and we're eating the moose bone marrow this morning these little chunks i cut out last night and we cooked them in the oven at 400 for about like 30 minutes i got a couple eggs frying we got some bread and we're gonna eat see how it tastes [Music] pretty excited to try this bone marrow since we've never had it it looks what does it look like i the best thing i can say it looks like is if you cook a meatloaf like the extra meat juices that are there on the side of the meatloaf i don't know smells like mousse but let's let's give it a try i'm gonna try and never oh whoa it's hot it's soft oh it's super soft yeah it is and there's probably some bone in there hi wait the fork the fork's not working it looks like just fat or something well it's just the stuff that's out of bone it just tastes like uh doesn't taste like much it's just more just oily we have some fermented cabbage that we made it is carrots onions oregano and thyme i think it's called cortito which is i really liked it with that it's like sauerkraut but just like kicked up a notch it's so good it doesn't have much flavor with the bone marrow i agree that's why i paired it with that it's like just just oily richness oily i mean yeah you get some bone in there i know we gotta watch over now normally would just make the bone broth but i wanted to try roasting the bones for the bone broth and i saw that a lot of people eat bone marrow like this so i figured it was worth trying it is good beautiful look at it it's quite tasty we had the oil dripping off there oh my gosh that's it so on to the agenda today we're picking back up with the mousse we're going to grind our meat for burger and sausage and first we're going to finish up on the bone broth that's just like so yes i think the roof i think browning it really added another flavor to it too where's my little blade that shirt may run you through the grinder little girl nice [Applause] those are nice you can use this right here [Music] yeah you know the best part is we have a way bigger bucket is that it's sunny out i don't have to run the generator at all doing this ah nice crisp and clear we've been really lucking out with whoa we've been getting full charges like every day it's crazy charges and the frozen yeah that really is actually like yeah year-round wow i got the big one [Music] is that it dang well that is it we have a whole five gallon bucket and probably like another three gallons right here so we got a ton of meat one trick we do when we grind our meat we always like the meat almost completely frozen so this meat has been outside it's like the perfect temperature this time of year it's getting above freezing during the day just a little bit but at night it's down like the 20s so our meat was just almost frozen went right through our grinder we're gonna be making three things today we're gonna make burger meat which is just uh ground mousse meat we're not gonna add anything to it we grind through the course we're gonna grind through the fine that'll be the burger meat we're gonna do a sweet sausage which we're gonna grind through again we're gonna add some sweet seasonings and then we're gonna try a new one it's gonna be almost like a chorizo that one we're gonna do some spices and we're also gonna cut in some pork fat oh we got another bucket right here let's clean that one out well our grinding came to a halt our machine got a little too warm and i guess some of that meat was starting to warm up surprisingly even though it was outside so we're gonna switch gears and package that ground burger meat that we processed and get that put away first you ask and you shall receive thank you babe see you around through that one great i know it was that meat was colder i think at the bottom of that batch little hands come in handy whoa your energy came back you're super tired but no that's how you did you spinning like that yeah but you did it with some major pizzazz because we're a team we don't we don't what's it called you don't leave another man hanging yeah you don't know me i'm living up above me no no man left behind damn you said it right there did you coin that i made that sure i did that terminal phrases if it ain't broke don't fix it that's another thing that's another saying i think all kinds of sayings going on today ah we're scraping the fat off of our bone broth that i had outside chilling and there's a lot of it this is just too much to can in my opinion we've done it that way and it just ends up being like a real greasy oily bone broth so we usually leave a little bit but not quite this much last year we were able to get a lot of fat off of the cow we harvested and i still have a few jars left of that which is awesome this year because of the circumstances we did not really get that much tallow which is okay i'm gonna get this heated up and we're going to be canning it you know what this reminds me of the missed out fire scene oh when he put the cake on his yeah whoa where's the smelly do you smell that well it should smell good like what just like baby food butter fat like a really good barbecue joint or something hey you know i can make out of that it feels like it's a lotion like a mixed bird seed in there you could make some little bird chips i have always wanted to do that all right i think these are ready to go in our pressure canner i think we're going to have about 10 quarts so we're going to run two different pressure canners i have one heating up in the back i want the water warm because these are so hot i don't want to shock them and it smells delicious i think roasting it really made a difference this time around roasting those bones it has a just a different flavor i honestly can't even put it into words [Music] okay we've got both pressure canners going i have the back one that vented for 10 minutes and i put our weight on we're gonna pressure can them for 25 minutes at 11 pounds we ended up with 10 quarts i just want to show you what last year's bone broth look like it's really pretty it's a little more translucent i'm guessing that's because we did not roast the bones and you can see there's a thick layer of fat these are the ones that we left the fat on we decided that we don't want to do that again and it is quite gelatinous it's hard to tell but it's nice and thick with all the collagen and this is what the tallow looked like from last year so once it's rendered and you get rid of all the water this is what it looks like it's actually quite like a pure cotton white color [Music] so [Music] we're back at it with our grinding and we let this meat sit outside overnight it was just getting a little too warm and our little grinder wasn't having it but it cooled down it's not frozen but it's really cold it's going through no problem we're going to finish up on this one which is our sweet sausage and then we'll work on our chorizo way better still not 100 but way better man this grinder only uses about 100 watts isn't that crazy i'm sure when it starts up he uses a lot more but that's it all right for the sweet sausage we're adding about two cups of brown sugar and we have an herb mixture of fennel sage celery leaves coriander rosemary and thyme and we've got some really good vermont maple syrup we've been saving this for this recipe so we're gonna put what maybe a cup in there i was thinking more than that like two cups okay let's you have to put a lot of sugar in order for it just to be sweet when you cook it i think okay we should probably cook one of these before we do anything right what do you think make sure it's to our liking whenever you're ready it's not done yet i know it looks good let's give these a try they smell so good and from the mousse that we've processed we've kind of decided that we don't we don't think it's necessary to cut the mousse meat with any sort of fat like pork fat so this is just straight mousse meat the burger it's just straight mousse meat it's delicious that way and the chorizo that's more of a fatty sausage so when we get to making that one we are going to grind some pork fat in there but let's try this see how it is oh yeah probably no more let's put a little salt in there mix it up and put her outside all right one half is enough [Music] a big pretty big head yeah [Music] that's it my little grinder did good that's about all she wants to give right there add some fresh garlic and oregano into this mix and then we're adding a whole bunch of herbs salt pepper red pepper flakes paprika is like an essential one for chorizo in fact i think it's smoked paprika we have some cayenne i added i skipped the coriander because we had coriander in the last one and then we have cumin ancho powder and some ground cloves and cinnamon so should be pretty spicy we need a few splashes of vinegar maybe less than a quarter cup so this is not traditional chorizo because it's going to be loose and we're just going to be storing it like that just ground ground sausage we call it sausage but it's actually just ground meat that we are freezing over the years we've processed a lot of meat and i don't know what it is but we're not really a huge fan of just frozen sausage if it hasn't been cured or smoked sausage links yeah just sausage in the freezer so we're not going to be doing that again we like it a lot like this in the future if we have a better environment we may try to cure or smoke some of our own but it's just not really realistic with what we got going on in here i'm going to taste test that i got the panel whoa that smells good smells like uh you can smell the cloves the spice wow you go first baby let's take a bite you're gonna burn yourself not too hot i'm getting a flavor right away is it cumin no i think it's an maybe anchovy ancho powder okay that's really good it's not like crazy like it grazes so much flavor like too much but it tastes like a really good mild teresa we nailed it this chorizo sausage is awesome so we're all done processing that mousse we got we ground everything we need to grind we got the roast in the freezer we need to package these up we've got quite a bit of work to do there but we're not done yet because we're gonna head outside and we're making chili this morning plus when you use that frozen pork fat it just cleans it out you just do it every once in a while it's like perfect i mean where would the world be without spices cloves cinnamon it's all coming through the final tally is in between the ground meat the sausage and the roast we end up with 90 pounds of moose meat which is awesome we're gonna get this all in the freezer so we're cooking moose chili we're going to do a huge batch we're not going to be using the mousse that we just processed we have about 20 pounds of ground mousse meat left over from last year so we're going to make some room in the freezer which we really need i got it all thought out in the ice chest we're going to get to cooking that soon got a bunch of onions in here garlic celery act we're going to saute these down in this pot we have another batch of bone broth ariel took the bones and she reprocessed them into another batch of bone broth so we're gonna be cooking our beans in this one and our beans we started these yesterday we soaked them in water and apple cider vinegar we did that for about 18 hours we have about five pounds of beans here we got black beans pinto beans red beans and kidney beans chili is one of those things you can do pretty much whatever you want in there i just added some frozen celery we're gonna do some frozen uh hot peppers put a few of those in there to get some heat we're also gonna do a couple jars of our salsa that we made that's the green salsa our tomato sauce is not ready yet so we bought a big can of tomato sauce tomato paste we're gonna do a bunch of spices we've got some tomatoes and some carrots we're gonna put in there so even though we don't have tomato sauce we haven't made it yet we have some really nice tomatoes that have ripened inside got orange ones too you wouldn't eat a tomato sandwich pesto tomato on bread dipped in tomato soup is that too much grilled cheese pesto those ones are super like gushy oh my gosh we're using our i think it's a 21 quart pot i'm hoping all this chili is going to fit in here but i don't know it's a lot of stuff but we're going to add all of our tomatoes and our carrots in here oh my gosh it smells good [Applause] the beans are getting close to being done so we are going to add pretty much all the rest of our ingredients and we're going to be putting some of our leftover cowboy candy marinated in there and that's just sugar vinegar cooked with jalapenos nero also made some chow chow the other day and she had some leftover brine so this is just vinegar and sugar and some spices some of that in there let's get in there oh my gosh it's a lot of meat we had to split up the moose meat because it was just too much for this one cast iron pot and it smells awesome i don't quite know how to describe it but it just smells like really good browned meat and mousse meat to me and eric i mean it's really it's an incredible flavor it tastes i want to say it tastes just like cow but better but it does taste a lot like like a grass-fed couch it's very similar to that oh my gosh well it's time to combine this chili it took a while to cook 20 pounds of mousse meat so we have some of it there we've got a big pot of it over there i think what i'm gonna do is try to take some of this chili here or the tomato sauce soup mixture add it to that meat so that'll be a finished product i'm gonna take that meat add it to this big batch to get some of these beans stirred up in here can i ask you a question are there enough beans in here well i'm getting beans i can feel them when i can see them oh do you know what that is the color is phenomenal all right let me add some meat to this one all of it oh no i thought you were gonna do more beans oh my gosh tell me this doesn't look good yes the meat oh it's gonna be a meaty chili there's gonna be so much meat in here uh yeah i'm seeing a lot of beans it should be a good ratio let me try it though oh my god it's spicy yeah i had a feeling it's so good it warms you up and it's so cold out here dang well this looks fantastic we're gonna let it cook for probably like 40 minutes or so and then we're gonna head inside we're gonna be canning a lot of this chili or all of it it's gonna take forever and of course we're going to eat some with some cornbread tonight it's the colors it's like a rainbow of chili but the the colors you're not really impressed with the color it has so much flavor i think my most favorite part is the big chunks of tomato that's hot scary stuff it's already hot here's the other this is legitimately five gallons of chili i know i have a nice jalapeno on the top yeah i would say jalapeno butter a whole tomato oh there you go first round of chili i guess second bash first round is going into the pressure canner and we're gonna have to probably do two rounds and we're gonna eat because we're very hungry very excited to try this chili we have some cornbread that i think is done some corn bread muffins coming out this looks so good we haven't eaten today did we eat today we ate breakfast we had sausage patties we had sausage pies for breakfast that was it we didn't eat lunch and it's like six o'clock at night right now i'm so hungry and this chili never looks so good let's get that cornbread out of the oven that's really good chili she's been saying it's no surprise to me that it's really good chili really really good chili oh my gosh i think i like i think we both kind of like all the different chunks maybe that's common for chili but there's like all these different like you've got tomatoes carrots the peppers we we make chili all the time we've been making chili for years we've never canned it this is awesome it's gonna be great to have i think for us it sounds weird but we're really into convenience foods and we make a lot of our meals but to have like a canned meal is so i can't even like put it it's just it's incredible because there's times where you're just really busy and you come in and you want good food or a meal and you just have to dump this in to a pot oh yeah meet up on the wood stove and you're good to go snow machine trips road trips this stuff's going to be great this moose just really went a long way for us we got 90 pounds of pure moose meat which is great it's going to last us a long time the dogs they got a bunch of the scrap meat the chickens they're still working on the bones and some moose meat meeting there so everyone's happy around here totally and here we have found i guess this is true everywhere it's never for granted that you can you know for sure go out and hunt a moose or receive a moose from this or even go out and get a fish and you're you know going to get a fish so it's really just something that we try to like be appreciative of i'm super stoked for this winter we have like a total array an assortment of food yeah that's going to be good in the food department yes it was a total shock and surprise to get this mousse just super grateful for it we got a lot more work to do tonight like errol said i think we got four batches to do so we're gonna stay busy we're gonna eat our meal and we hope you enjoyed the video really though this is good you like chili cat

Channel: Simple Living Alaska

Views: 876,184

Keywords: off grid living, living in alaska, homestead alaska, cabin life, off grid cabin, daily life off grid, winter in alaska, off grid in alaska, living in a tiny house, winter cabin living, day in the life off grid, harvest moose, moose alaska, self reliant alaska, greenhouse alaska, chickens alaska, processing moose, butchering moose, grinding moose meat, how to grind meat at home, grind burger meat, processing large game, knives for butchering, moose hunt alaska, chorizo

Id: Mm3N-81xCMk

Length: 43min 6sec (2586 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 10 2021