Hanging deer with hide on.

[oldwood]

Rule of thumb........Old meat cutter once told me told me , 6 Hours time , , @ 60 DEG.F. , red meat is spoiling. Foul and fish spoils much quicker.

 

[Kaycee]

Raised in Northern Wisconsin, our Deer hung with the skin on until season was over, then they went in to get registered. Most years they were froze solid, now I try and skin before they freeze but still hang for a couple days before cutting up.

 

[Howard Pippin]

Throughout the years, I did worry about meat spoilage and even built a small walk-in cooler with an old fridge built through the back wall with the door off. By opening the insulated door and shutting a heavy screen door at night, I could maintain some kind of fairly good temperature. Sometimes in the late fall I would even have to put a small lightbulb in to keep from freezing.
Now we have a good local butcher shop in our small town. He only butcher's custom animals, has a half a dozen employees, and is just busy all the time. What amazed me most, is no matter the temperature, he is butchering five days a week, both beef and hogs. His kill site is about a mile from town, where he drops the innards, cuts off half the leg, lifts them up on a four-wheel-drive pickup With a bale hauling frame and brings them to town. His crew is ready and they proceed to skin out the legs and then hang the beef To finish skinning. He might bring 2 at a time. Pigs are skinned pretty much on a cart. They work with the door open, and when the critter is done, it is hoisted up and moved into a cooler. I remember when I was a lad, we never butchered on the ranch, during the heat of the summer. Watching the procedure at the butcher shop, change my mind when you could actually butcher a game animal, if you got the hide off and figured out some way to cool. True, you might have to bone out and place in a fridge, but it seems that an hour or two from kill to cool takes care of any problems.
Squint

 

[kje54]

Only saw a deer hanging once as a kid, (I'm not a hunter). My dad and uncle went hunting in the UP, Michigan, the deer was hanging with the hide on. Later he had cooked up some of the deer for us to try, I took one bite and nearly spit it out. He loved his venison really gamy.

 

[Eric Krewson]

Where I live it is $80 to skin and cut up a deer, $40 for a cooler deer skinned and quartered. It is a common practice here to put a deer in a cooler with ice and water and drain the water off and add more water and ice for two days than pack the deer in ice for 5 or 6 more days. This takes the stink out of big bucks, some of my friends add salt and vinegar to the first soaking on a really rank buck.

On another board a guy who cuts up deer for a living said we would end up with a cooler full of rotted deer meat using this method. I have a deer in the cooler right now, the cooler is outside in the shade, it was 25 degrees last night, after the initial cool down none of the ice melted.

Someone explain to me how this meat is going to rot under these conditions. The picture is after draining the water off for the last time prior to filling the cooler up with about 30# of ice on top of the meat and keeping it that way for a few more days. The deer in the cooler was a buck that field dressed about 180# that a friend gave to me when I was too under the weather from surgical complications to hunt. After this treatment you can't tell if the meat is from a buck or a doe.

I freeze ice in a variety of plastic containers rather than buy it, I have 30# more frozen, ready to top off the deer I have in the cooler right now. The cooler is a 150-quart monster that will hold any sized deer. I have metal stove racks in the bottom of the cooler to keep the meat draining and out of the water for the last few days, I leave the drain plug open.

The above deer as delivered would barely fit in the bucket of my tractor. As a side note, those chain hooks I put on the bucket of my tractor are the handiest accessories I ever bought for lifting anything with chains, no slippage.

 

[Loyalist Dave]

Yeah
I've always skinned as soon as possible, processed, and got the meat into the freezer (or cooked!)

When I went to school in Wisconsin, you could drive through suburban neighborhoods in Kenosha and Wauwatosa and tell how many hunters lived in each house as the bucks were hung skin on in the front yard ..., but it was cold. One guy told me it was "aging" but I don't think that's how that works, after the deer have cooled and muscles have relaxed, BUT it was a good way to show the rest of the guys on the street that the hunter bagged a deer. I mean you could stand at one end of those straight and level streets and see a dozen deer hanging or more...

When I use a deer processor in my town, Tim hangs the deer as they come in, dressed and skin on, in his meat locker, until time to process, but that's because he doesn't have time to skin the deer before it's time to fully process the deer.

LD

 

[Hawk54]

If the temp was in the 30's or lower we have always hung them with the skin on for three days. Then on third day or so we would hunt the morning and then come in and cut them up, package, and freeze them. Then go back out and hunt the afternoon. If warmer we process them quickly.

 

[Okie Hog]

Sometimes we are required to keep a skinned and gutted deer in a big chest cooler for a few days. We fill gallon jugs with water and keep several in the freezer. The ice never touches the meat; no water to drain off.

 

[waksupi]

They are a lot easier to skin when freshly killed. When in a hunting camp, I would leave hides on, to keep off camp robbers and magpies, or in warmer weather, yellow jackets. One year hunting near Jordan, Montana, it was minus 35. Trying to skin a deer or antelope at that temperature ended with several deer and antelope half skinned, as the hides were freezing so quickly, it wasn't possible to remove them without ruining the hides.

 

[senseisugarbear]

AGING is the reason that I hang deer & beef, actually any red meat animal, doesn't work on Pork considered the other White Meat. Natural Enzyme action tenderizes an otherwize tough cut. In many parts of the world where dining is considered a fine art even birds are aged for 4-6 weeks. A very good friend of mine who owned & ran a Custom Butcher shop/ Meat market, Was a conosuier of fine meat Venison included. He would take whole sirloin and cryovac it and set it in the cooler or fridge for 40 days ,then open it and cut steaks for the freezer,A steak off the grill would cut without a knife,
A fine steak house in England will trim dry meat and Mold off of your steak before cooking...that steak will have never have been frozen.I leave the hide on my deer to keep the meat clean and Critters off while aging.....to each his own ... I learned a long time ago not to try to tell someone else what they like.....Be Safe>>>>Wally

 

[pwbsmokey]

I have killed deer early in the morning in below freezing temperatures and skinned them in the late evening and the neck and hams are still steaming. I get the hide off at soon as I can. They skin easier when warm also. I would never let a deer hang for days with the hide on

 

[Stykbow]

I’ve always either dropped at a processor asap or skinned & butchered the same day except for two deer. One I killed in 2016 late in the evening. It turned brutally cold (for East Tennessee) that night and he froze solid before I could do anything. He stayed that way for several days till I hung him in my garage to thaw out. Best venison I’ve ever had came off that buck. The doe I shot yesterday morning is hanging in my shed right now. Never got out of the forties yesterday and is supposed to be in the thirties all day today and fifties tomorrow, so I’ll skin and process this evening.

 

[senseisugarbear]

Seem that an awful lot of us use PROCESSERS...to me its all part of the hunt, Plus I get it done the way I want it.....Sausages, Jerky, etc Make for a $300 Deer Pretty Quickly....Be Safe>>>>>>Wally

 

[Walkingeagle]

Been a long time that I’ve gone without a processor. Learned to cut meat from my ex-mother in law at age 17. I lived up North in them days and moose was the annual staple, plus a deer or two. Life threw a few lemons my way and I ended up in a small apartment in a larger town. Moose had been put on draw only so elk became the priority. My buddy opened a cutting business and I had no place to hang elk, so processors entered my life, for elk only. Deer could be broke down and placed in cooler for cutting back at my apartment.
Walk

 

[Notchy Bob]

I ran across a historical reference that I thought might be of interest to readers of this thread. This is from "Memories of a Bear Hunter," by Col. William D. Pickett, in Hunting At High Altitudes: The Book of the Boone & Crockett Club. The book was published in 1913, but this particular quote is from Col. Pickett's memoir of his time camping and hunting in the Judith Basin in 1878:


Col. Pickett and his small group were camped near a band of Bannock people who were led by the chief, Tendoy. There were also a few lodges of Crow Indians camped with the Bannocks. It was not clear whether this passage referred to the Bannocks or the Crows, but this method of dealing with a deer carcass may have been common to both. I found it interesting that they left the hide attached to the meat that way.

Pickett was shooting breechloaders, but this was still in the day of black powder, and there were still buffalo on the plains and in the mountains, along with plenty of other game. His hunting stories are very well written, but he was also very much interested in the native people. He showed very little of the prejudice you see in the writing of that time and place, and as a hunter, he was clearly impressed with how the Indians processed meat.

Best regards,

Notchy Bob

 

[Stykbow]

You can always count on @Notchy Bob to come up with an interesting bit of history. Always enjoy your post's sir.

 

[Walkingeagle]

That is very interesting Bob. Thanks for the post.
Walk

 

[Spikebuck]

A lot of interesting responses. I'm sure a lot has to do with how we were taught from the start and/or worked for each of us over time.

Personally, I have never aged venison. My Dad never did and we always had great venison. In addition a local guy that owned a meat processing plant and who was also a very successful big game hunter told me to never age venison. He said that unlike cattle, wild game fat is a different chemical makeup (more polyunsaturated fatty acids) that will turn rancid more quickly. I don't have other references to substantiate that, but those two factors are what has lead me to never age venison.

 

[Trooper]

I shot my buck November 2nd this year it was an instant kill. The animal was hit in the spine just back of the front legs. I field dressed my buck then hung it in my garage skinned that animal straight away then started to debone the critter the next morning.
Because it was an instant kill, we didn’t need to hang it any length of time to deal with Adrenalin. The whole purpose of hanging and aging is to let bacteria soften the meat. We’ve had steaks already that were tender and sweet from this buck. A spinal shot is definitely the best shot you can make as it instantly paralyzed the deer preventing messages of panic tracing the adrenal glands. 200 meters.

 

[Howard Pippin]

As I mentioned in a post above here, I even built a small meet house so that I would not have to instantly cut up a fresh deer and I did believe, and still believe, that aging it a few days was a plus. As a lad, we didn't have electricity, and being I was raised on a sheep ranch, we ate mutton during the hot months as we could eat one a week. Generally, the day following the butchering we were eating that mutton. For the rest of the week, it was placed in a tarp inside an old building that was quite cool in the daytime, and hung outside at night, and would be gone in a week. Now in my later days of hunting, me and two friends bought a fairly good tenderizer and we cut up the next day following the kill and put all the stakes through the tenderizer. It seemed to be the only reason to hanging was to make it more tender and this little machine did that. Couldn't tell any difference in the taste of the meat, It just made it easier to take care of.
Squint