Carcass Care in Less-Than-Ideal Conditions, Hot Weather, Aging, Spoilage Prevention
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 26 ก.ย. 2016
- I got a second deer this year and thought this was a good opportunity to talk about preventing spoilage and aging meat under conditions that are not ideal. I have quite a bit of experience in that sort of thing from living without electricity and choosing to do things for myself.
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If you have to keep meat in warm weather, there are a few things you can do to help prevent spoilage. Meat can also be aged in warm weather, it just ages much faster. Spoilage occurs because of heat and moisture. If the temperature is low enough, spoilage bacteria halt completely, such as in a freezer. At refrigeration temperatures, they are greatly slowed. Bacteria generally require moisture and the inside of the meat is relatively clean. By drying off the outside of the carcass well, bacterial colonies are prevented from growing on the outside of the meat and then infiltrating into it as the colonies grow. Keeping a clean dry carcass is your number one way to slow the rate of spoilage in warmer weather. All crevices should be opened for drying, the rib cage split open with a knife, axe or saw and propped open with a stick, the inside of the body cavity trimmed of hanging bits and dried off. Propping open the back legs with a stick to prevent the insides of the thighs from touching is a good idea and I have split the pelvis and cracked it open before to increase air circulation, but if it's dry in there, that's probably good enough.
Doing a clean job of skinning and gutting helps a lot. I never wash my deer unless I need to. If gutting is very clean, you can leave it the way it is, or wipe it down with a damp rag soaked in vinegar water. Vinegar water, if used sparingly will never hurt, but it is not always necessary. The outside of the carcass will absorb water like a sponge if washed, but I will wash it only if necessary. Hair does not wash off and may stick even worse. It's better to scrape or brush hair off a dry carcass.
If it is cool at night, let the carcass chill and if it warms up during the day, wrap it in blankets or sleeping bags to keep it cool, then unwrap it again at night. Even in hot weather, a carcass can be kept for a while if managed carefully. I have enough experience to feel safe eating off of meat stored this way until is doesn't taste good anymore, and even beyond, but that is from a lot of personal experimentation under conditions where that was the only option. That is what people did before refrigerators to store fresh meat and probably often ate it after it went off, but well cooked.
At home, I typically hang outside if it's cold and if not, I cut the carcass up within a day or so, pack the large pieces into the fridge and allow them to age a few days before I cut and wrap for the freezer. I never use meat coolers in town because I don't want the hassle or expense. Works for me.
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I have been watching these videos for a few weeks now. I really do appreciate how you can share how you feel (with passion) but not tear down people who do use the shop to their food. If you want someone to listen to your views... that how you do it. Good on you!
Thanks. I try to keep in mind everyone's different perspectives and situations, though it's not always easy. I'm interested in influencing people's behavior, but the only way that matters is if I influence their motivations and values and stuff like that. I used to be all up in people's faces when I was a kid, but it never worked and pissed everyone off! Eventually I decided to work on improving myself and that has more than kept me busy ;)
Yes!! This is exactly the information I was seeking. Thanks for sharing
that's great. It seems kind of fringe, but I know it's useful if you need it.
Have you considered digging a kind of cellar? In the olden days, people used to cool their food stuffs in subterran cellars. The Bavarian beer gardens for instance were built on top of the underground cooling cellars they used to store their beer.
I know it's quite the project, but my late uncle built a cellar in his early 60ies that was easily 12" by 15" inside with 1.5" thick concrete walls. He mainly used it to store his home canned fruit. It didn't even have a massive roof, but it was noticably cooler than the outside.
It's on the list for sure, but we don't need them here as much. In cold areas they are needed to keep stuff from freezing. Here we need them more to keep stuff cool in the summer than anything else. I have all sorts of plans, but as things stack up, it's kind of a low priority right now.
After a half lifetime in restaurant kitchens, I'd guess your yard is about as safe a place as the kitchen at any Applebee's. Meat bees notwithstanding.
Thanks I hunt in the deep south been harvesting wild meat thirty years mo ice or power or freeze r I simply desperately the portions and hang and dry salt or home can for later I've eaten slightly spoiled road kill since the nineties with no problems thanks for your program I may be a wild man 😊
I'm thinking if I get a deer this year that it will go mostly into jars and into storage that way. Should make a pretty good burrito.
Great deer! We are still just a few days away from deer season here in Oklahoma. Always warm and in the 80s the first week or two here and I've always been nervous about aging but may give it a try.
Well, the deer are different everywhere too I think. Ours are pretty tender and tasty in general. The meat does improve with aging though. It becomes a lot more tender and that hard edgy fresh meat taste goes away. You have to wonder what it means that most people prefer aged meat, at least red meat. You usually hang in a cooler? Good luck.
Heh, I'm definetly not a vegetarian by heart. Watching this makes my mouth water.
Bless you brother! Great video.
Great tips👌🏻!! God bless🙏🏻. Just subscribed 👌🏻
ACORNS! Laughed so hard. But in all seriousness awesome video. Thanks!
Great info thanks
This video was really helpful thanks a lot man. Also "meat bees" sounds really funny to me 🤣.
that is some great looking meat! so much nicer than the often slimy supermarket junk.
Great video friend. I've a question for ya. Got a nice doe 3 days ago, did everything right, cooled down the field dressed meat with ice before skinning and getting into the cooler with ice. 2nd day I didn't check the ice as I was fleshing the hide for tanning, should have. 3rd day, yest, I checked it and a lot of ice had melted and drained out, good deal of exposed meat, still cool but not super cold on top. Quickly got it covered with ice and plan on keeping it covered daily and was planning on processing all of it in 4 days. do ya think the meat will be OK? If some is bad will it stink really bad? Many videos out there showed ice aging for a week was good. Thanks.
hope it worked out okay. I don't want meat wet at all and will never put we ice on it, or plastic bags. It's better to have the meat dry and keep it as cool as possible. In some situations it might be okay,b ut the water spreads bacteria and allows it to grow. cold and dry is ideal. Iv'e kept carcasses in hot weather quite a while by cooling at night in the open air (assuming it's cool), and then wrapping it up dry in a sleeping bag or similar for the day.
@@SkillCult OK thanks friend. I ended up adding some salt (spost to kill bacteria) and added ice each day for a week altogether after the hunt, while keeping the drain on cooler open so no water build up. Turned out perfect, no spoilage and it's unreal delicious! We cooked down all the bones and trimmings in a big canning pot and jarred up deer broth and got tons of soft tender meat from the parts most folks throw out. Been eating it all week and made spaghetti with some of the ground last night. Thanks for the advice and I hope you're doing great!
Nice
I’m Native American and hunt all year round What about a deer covered in ticks during a warm spring?
sometimes unhealthy animals have especially a lot of ticks or toher parasites. other than that, I just ignore them. Out here in the west, it is common to see deer covered in Keds. They are wingless flies that look like ticks, but they move fast are are not embedded. Really large numbers of ticks here are actually pretty rare, usually just a few here and there.
Noticed that you took this deer with a neck shot. Was wondering how long was it before the animal went down (instantly or after a 30 yard run)? I am asking because I am hunting with a crossbow and no matter how good your hart lung shot is they are always a bloody mess inside. Not sure if a neck shot would be as effective with a crossbow as with a riffle (I can shoot 4 inch groups at 40 yards so hitting the spine or jugular is not an issue). Also; have the same riffle, mine is a .32 though (guessing yours is a 30/ 30). Love your vids, lots of good info.
Very observant. It was a high neck shot. I was aiming for the head, but it was wobbling around and it was an off the cuff shot as it was trying to move away from me.. I actually stunned him first by grazing the skull. If I had been using a scope I'm sure that first shot wouldn't have gone high. I like hunting with open sights though. I think neck shots work with guns because they can trash the spinal cord. This one dropped immediately from that neck shot. I can't imagine a cross bow bolt or arrow could do that, but I'm not much of a bow hunter.
I saw some videos of a guy who has a montage of neck shot kills. All of them drop like stones. Makes sense to me. Which of the two combatants drew the short straw?
You are right on point! As we industrialized meat processing, we also created the pathogens that sicken us. Real food is inherently safe, or at least forgiving. A few years ago, I made 50 pounds of hard, nitrate/nitrite free French and Italian salami that never saw refrigeration for an entire year. The recipe dated back to the early Roman empire... I subscribe to FDA and USDA inspection and recall bulletins, and chose 2 decades ago to mostly eat short chain of custody meat or meat that I've raised, slaughtered and butchered. I'm also a huge fan of nose-to -tail cookery, and have dialed into a free or extremely low or no cost source for all of the odd bits others ignore. Tomorrow I will start preparing lardo from a friends hog. I've dined many times on coq au vin made from free roosters available in the fall. Processed food sucks, real food doesn't:-)
amen. Free roosters rock. Everyone is afraid to eat them, but 8 to 12 month old roosters are delicious. People are weird.
Does leaving the skin on for uncut parts help preserve better?
If there is hair on the skin, it will probably slow down cooling too much. For hogs, you scald and scrape the hair off, so you could probably do that. If the skinned part just dries off though, like everything else, it will be fine.
Right on the money. You can actually find actual rotting meat, cook it, and eat it without getting sick. It wont taste awesome, but just pointing out that cooking the meat does an incredible amount for bacteria.
Also people have been lied to about how long things are good for, because as pointed out in the video, they are kept in terrible conditions that necessitate keeping things cold. In theory, you could probably hang meat in 100 degree weather as long as you had a fan, and a sheet or another medium that allows the meat to breathe but keeps bugs out.....Anyways. Great video man.
Yeah, I've eaten pretty funky meat before. There may still be some amount of toxins left, I'm not sure, but it's better than starving lol.
When you age it in the bottom of your fridge are you boning all the meat out?
No, I usually break down into shoulders, shanks (front and back), hams, ribs, backstraps, neck and cut off the ribs and section the spine. I can stack that pretty tidily and sometimes I'll freeze a few things right away, but most I'll stack for another couple of days.
SkillCult right on thanks!!
My little cousin shot a buck and got shot it. I rinsed it out and it was 27° that night through the morning but reached 45° that day. We quartered and put the pieces in a cooler no ice and it says for a day in 40 degree weather. It doesn't smell bad but the deer meat smells a little stronger than normal. But he was a very rutty and stinky buck to begin with. And it smelled almost identical upon butchering him. Do you think he is still good?
It doesn't sound like it would have rotted. If you cook it and you can eat it, it should be fine. I find that a lot of times, super rutty or gamey smelling meat is actually from contamination when gutting and skinning. I'm super careful about touching the skin then the meat. I'm always rinsing my hands.
Beautiful meat you have there! Do you also smoke it sometimes?
yes, it is amazing meat. I don't smoke venison unless I'm making jerky in weather and conditions that require fire to dry it. It does taste good though. I smoke pork, like for bacon and canadian bacon. I've never really tried to venison the way you do pork. To really keep it, it has to be very salty it seems.
I also thought of dry cured (smoked and/or salted) ham like Jamón Serrano or Schwarzwälder Schinken or Prosciutto di Parma. You could also go for wet curing like, say, Pastrami.
The thing I'd most like to make with venison is dry cured/cultured sausages like salami. I've never got much into curing meat except for simple bacon and stuff like that. Just another awesome thing to learn. A few more lifetimes and I'll have it all down!
Try this. It's most of the recipes that I used to utilize 2 gorgeous pigs. Scroll to the bottom for a dry salami recipe. One thing not mentioned in the recipe, is to include casing from qualified salami in the grind mix. That beautiful white mold will inoculate the salami being made to help promote a protective coating. gimmerealfood-recipes.blogspot.com/2010/01/recipes.html
How the deer is killed and how it is handled AFTER the kill is critical to obtain good results. I hunt in Jackson, Mississippi, a semi-tropical climate where sometimes a deer will be killed on a 90 degree afternoon. If I am gun hunting, I prefer to shoot a deer in the head with a .22 rifle from a reasonably close distance. I've killed plenty this way and not a single one has ever even taken a step. If you hit them right, they drop where the stand. I do always follow up with a second shot. This completely avoids penetrating any meat that will be eaten so that none of the meat is tainted with blood or damaged in any way. My point here is that undamaged meat is much less likely to spoil quickly.
When bow hunting, which I normally do nearly 100% of the time, I use a crossbow and place my shots carefully to hit the vital zone. Some meat will be damaged a little, but mostly the lungs are what gets damaged. I don't gut or field dress my deer. Instead I take off the hide and cut out all the major meat sections without cutting into or disturbing the guts at all. This helps insure the edible meat doesn't get tainted with stomach or intestine contents or even get bloody. Untainted meat doesn't spoil quickly but tainted meat will spoil incredibly fast.
By cutting out all the major meat parts, everything can be wiped down, aired out, and covered or iced down quickly to prevent insect activity or spoilage. As explained in this video, moisture from water, urine, blood, or any other source must be kept off the meat if it is left unrefrigerated. Meat kept dry won't spoil nearly as quick as most people think. It will crust over however and the outer surface will turn dark. That portion will need to be trimmed off but it isn't very much meat that is trimmed away.
Rubbing a layer of salt over the meat is also a way to help protect meat in storage. Nothing grows well in salt, not even bacteria. Of course, the salt can be removed prior to cooking and eating the meat.
It's hard for some people to accept, but I normally make my deer jerky by drying uncooked raw strips of deer meat. USDA absolutely DOES NOT recommend doing this! Technically, there is a risk of the meat having bacteria in it. But as this video explains, if the deer is living in a relatively natural environment and not diseased, its meat should be pure and wholesome. So if meat is removed for jerky shortly after the kill and the jerky is begun drying right away, that raw meat should be safe to eat even though it was made from raw, uncooked venison.
Finally, buying meat from a commercial store is no guarantee it is safe. Tons of meats sold in stores are recalled every single year due to unsafe meat conditions. At least, by processing my own deer and other wildlife that I eat, I know where it came from, how it was killed, and how it was handled after the kill. I don't know any of that about store bought meats which may have been shipped across the country and exposed to all sorts of unsafe handling.
Mmmm now i want deer meat i got 3 tags to fill befor the 12th hoping all goes well. But we let ours hang for a day then hise it off pat dry it cut it up and into the freezer it goes then when ready to eat i take it out to thal like your friend said for a couple days then cook it up. Sometimes I'll pressure cook it. really good that way as well. I been doing this for over 30 years now and still alive. Lol
Yeah, if you get it in the freezer soon all of that stuff matters a lot less. I've done that too, but I will usually hang them as long as I can get away with, or keep in the fridge for a bit before wrapping. I often get out what I am going to eat in the morning or at the last minute, so I just want stuff ready to eat as soon as it's thawed. It's nice to just get it done with and put away though. Good luck!
I think you are doing a great service with your vids. I like your approach to using what you have available and being self sufficient. Meat can be a tricky thing in warm weather. We here in AK we are seeing warmer weather during the fall moose hunt and keeping it from spoiling is a challenge. This year I have made a subterranean cellar to store and cure meat during the warm weather. Smoking and drying meat helps keep meat for longer term storage. Would love to see your take on some of those methods......
If I need to get the meat safe and don't have a freezer, I'll dry it. Assuming it's a meat you can dry that is, otherwise you can salt it as with pork, though I'm not very good at making real old school pork products for long unrefrigerated storage yet. I use smoke for drying meat only if I need heat to dry the meat over a fire because the weather isn't cooperative. I remember in that movie about the dumb kid that went to Alaska and died, he let that whole carcass spoil when he could have just dried it. Darwinism at work. Everyone has different conditions and hanging a carcass in very hot weather may not work at all in a humid climate, but we all have to sort of slowly test out the limits in our circumstances over time if we don't want to be totally dependent.
I resort to smoking during wet weather and it helps keep the fly's off the meat. Once it is dried up some and smoked it will keep in the cellar until cold weather sets in which is about now this year. Freezing at night 40's by day. Love it...
smoke really helps with bugs. We get mad yellow jackets here and
they'll swarm all over the meat and actually carry quite a bit of it
off. I think it helps keep the meat safe from spoilage too as it dries
like you say. Here winter is rain with only occasional snow, so things
don't keep all that great.
Excellent video! Always glad to see those with even more experience than you travelling the same road and reaching the same conclusions.
I'm a huge fan of fridge ageing venison (well most things) post-freezing. After a few days it gets the nice crust on the outside .. getting hungry just thinking about it. A lot of the venison we eat will have been hung for a week in the cold, frozen for some time (usually keep it under a year) and then thawed/aged in the fridge from 2-6 days depending on the circumstances. A few days in the fridge (with or without a freeze between) also does wonders for rabbits, squirrels and so on ...
Cool, great to hear that confirmed by someone else. If you look up hanging venison online it's always just gives you temperatures like everyone can make that happen somehow. Food guidlines are always very conservative though. I like aging most stuff, even chicken and pork, but it sure is easy to let those two get away from you. Thanks for the cool comment. Reminds me to go squirrel hunting as soon as possible!
I couldn't help but think of this video while doing up a blog entry on roadkill. Nothing detailed, but if you have the time, I'd love for you to give it a quick once-over and see if it aligns with your views on meat handling.
optout-dot-killchair-dot-net/roadkill
Last comment for today. Have you checked out The Scott Rea Project? He does some old school butchering, might be of interest to you.
Scott Rea project is awesome. I'm moe of a cut it into pieces and stick it in the freezer kinda guy, but I appreciate his art.
The "spoilage" you speak off I believe is the original reason for the invention of ketchup.
that was a sizeable knife. lol
I like that you hang the deer from the neck. I have done it both ways and there is less hair on the meat if you hang the deer buy the neck (they probably don't like it because it looks like we lynched a deer by hanging...LOL but probably because they want to sell the deer hangers) I don't understand why people hang them from the legs. When they hang them from the legs...when skinning.... the hair gets all over the meet. When skinning from the neck down there is less because we skin with the grain!!!
that's one of those debates that could go on endlessly. I don't have a gambrel anymore, but I used to hang the other way a lot. I think it's fine either way when you get used to it. The neck is way easier to skin this way, which was typically the hardest part the other way.
There is a reason butchers hang meat upside down. Next time hang it Head down and let bloods flow.
Killer, you should be in shame oh lord,... I only eat grass fed big macs....and free running nuggets from heaven.
I once subsisted on free range chicken nuggets from the dumpsters of Marin county. I've never been the same since.
You are completely ridiculous thinking that you do a more sanitary job than commercial processers!!
I don't recall exactly what I said, but my point was about the well known fact that the strains of bacteria evolved as a result of modern farming practices are increasingly dangerous. Thus the warnings on your chicken and outbreaks of E. Coli poisoning. As far as overall bacteria on my meat v.s. commercial, I don't doubt that I have a lot more on my deer than a modern piece of beef in most cases, and honestly don't make many efforts against it. but I have control over the carcass from bullet to mouth and I know that whatever there is isn't from some antibiotic laced feedlot sludge, pork prison or chicken death camp. Anyhow, works for me. I eat my venison completely raw quite a bit.
I'm sorry but all I got out of this video was a whole lot of nothing.
This video is awesome
@@SkillCult Oh okay.