Pleasant House

The leaves have turned, the air has crisped, and the hunters have hit the woods to stalk the wild, local deer. Venison is one of the best wild game meats available in the Midwest. Venison is lean and highly nutritious, and a single animal can provide more than 100 pounds of it. Knowing how to safely, properly, and skillfully butcher a deer is a way for you and your family to appreciate fully what the animal has to offer. You may have seen a couple of my previous posts that detailed the butchering of a whole deer and talked about the philosophy of whole animal butchery.

The lesson of this post is the same as the others, which is to get the most out of your food. But in order to do that, you have to become skilled at the process. After one lesson in the “field” with my brother John last year, he felt comfortable breaking down a whole deer by himself. John was able to skin the carcass and break the animal into primal portions, and then remove the meat from the bone in large pieces. In other words, he was able to get the deer into his freezer cleanly and safely, but not with any real precision. So, John decided to stop at the point where he broke the animal down into primal portions and then bring them to me, in the city, to learn how to get the most out of them. In doing so, he learned more about the process of butchering, which includes sanitation, organization, planning, and precision cuts.

venison primals and notes

When you look at a whole animal carcass, it is important to have an overall plan for its processing. A whole deer can take at least eight hours to fully process. Let’s look at the important parts of the butchering process, step by step:

1. Sanitation. After the deer is hung, it should be kept cold; its temperature should be held at or below 40 degrees Fahrenheit. When the deer is skinned, great care should be taken to not get loose hairs on the meat. The carcass should be sprayed clean, dried, and even sprayed with a light acid such as vinegar, which I myself learned on Twitter by following Chris Raines, a meat scientist, who writes a blog called Meat is Neat.

Sanitation doesn’t stop at the rough stage of hanging the deer; it has just begun. Your butchering area should be spotless. You should have a nice, large, sterile work surface, various containers to put your meat in as you cut it, and easily accessible ice just for your butchery and refrigeration.

2. Organization. Sanitation and organization go hand in hand. The better you are set up the less time it will take for you to grab the things that you need to cut up the meat, and the less risk you run of cross contaminating anything not related to your butchery.

safe and sanitary

3. Planning. Planning and organization are related. Planning is knowing what you want to do with the meat that you butcher. What kind of roasts and steaks do you want, are you going to make sausage and jerky? If you so, do you have the recipes and ingredients ready, and do you know how many pounds of the various muscles you are going to need?

4. Precision cuts. As you learn more about meat cutting you will learn more about the variety of cuts that are available in a carcass. As your knife-cutting skills advance and the animal’s anatomy becomes more familiar, you will begin to divide the muscles at their various seams and to make cuts that may include the bone. You will learn which pieces of meat are better suited for stewing and which are better for grinding.

John seam-cutting the leg roasts

venison for grinding (sausage)

bone-in venison leg roast

If you keep this general guide in mind, you will start to envision the whole carcass in a series of parts before you make your first cut. Think of the whole process as you would a map and itinerary of a journey, and you will get the most out of your trip while staying safe and having fun along the way.

Check out a collection of deer butchery and venison processing photos here. If you have any professional or home butchery tips that you would like to offer, please feel free to share them in the comments.

processed venison