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Originally Posted by KC Kings
You process it the day after you kill it? What do the rest of the hunters here do? I was always taught that you should let it hang for a couple of days to "age" it, until regamortis loosens up, but with this warm weather you should quickly knock it down and get it in ice.
We don't run a bed and breakfast type deer camp, and our furthest stand is a 30 minute walk from the house and the part of the way is more of a bent over going backwards through cedar thicket than a walk. With a clean shot it takes an hour minimum to field dress a deer and drag it to the house, and the weather hasn't been cold enough for 5 or 6 years to let them hang, so we immediately skin it, knock it down, and get it in coolers with ice. An average Ozark doe can fit in one large cooler, and the cooler takes 3 bags of ice a day. We keep the meat in ice water with canning salt for the first 3 days, and fresh icewater for 2 more days before processing. Right now we have 4 deer in coolers at camp, so 4 coolers x's 3 bags of ice, x's 5 days is 60 bags of ice at $1.25 a piece.
Why we do it this way? Because my dad does it like that, because his dad did it like that, etc... If you can grind it the next day without affecting the taste I am all for that. It gets dark at 5:30, so instead of sitting around drinking beer all night, we could process the deer while drinking beer all night.
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i shot the buck at 9am.
gutted it in the woods and drug it back to the house which was about 100 yards thru the timber. hung it up and skinned it.
it was fairly cool the rest of saturday. but when i got up sunday morning it was too warm to leave it. so i went ahead and cut it up and ground it w/a large box of bacon ends.
i wouldn't have minded letting it hang another day if it wasn't so warm.
i used a jerky gun to make the strips and cooked the jerky in the smoker on my back porch while listening to the chiefs get orally ass-raped by mile-highs donks.
jerky tastes great...i'm about half done w/the deer, and ready to go out and fill another tag.
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