Ep. 99: Butchering

literally cut up meat everywhere. I'm talking hotels, motels, back of the truck one time, in this multimillion dollar condo, which is kind of an interesting story, at a friend's house, on boats, various parking lots, and most of this for me is because I've been trapped, like just traveling to different places, out of state, hunts, what have you. So maybe you're traveling for a hunt this season, or maybe you're just not fully set up with a complete butcher

station at your house. Not everybody how space to hang the whole elk or have a walk in freezer, but you do want to process the animal yourself. As a self proclaimed I would say small space butcher expert. It's kind of a tongue twister. I have a few trips to help you successfully manage the butchering task with limited room and how to make the job more simple with limited time. But first, I want to answer the question

where's the strangest place I've processed gave meat. Now, for most people, that's if somebody said, what's the weirdest place you've processed gave meat, that would probably be like a strange question. But for me, that's a tough question to answer because there's been a lot of strange places that I've cut up and done some butchering. Uh Now, are we talking big game or just any wild meat? Because I know that off the top of my head, I

can think of a few funny stories. The weirdest place I've cut up any meat would probably probably be, Oh, yeah, this one time in Alaska, we're fishing and just staying in this motel and we caught some salmon and and some other stuff. We we processed some of it down by the boat, but we came back and we're like, oh, we want to We're gonna do up like a good

sushi like essentially sashimi feast. And caught an octopus on that trip, and so we had like no space, and I had a cutting board and I was were like literally cutting using the back of the toilet in this motel room like the as it was like the only flat spot in the hotel. It was like a fairly

small room that didn't have anywhere to do anything. So we have the cooler in there, We pull out this octopus, were like slicing up sashimi on the cutting board on the back of the toilet in the motel room, and then went out back and had our ourselves a sashimi a sashimi dinner that was that was pretty strange. We called it toilet sushi and sounds disgusting, but it was really good and it was a long day. Uh, nothing better than a little bit of fresh, fresh sushi cut

up on the back of a toilet. I don't know why that makes me laugh. Um, if we're talking big game.

The whole story is kind of long, but we actually got invited on this hunt and kind of somehow lucked into getting this really nice condo to stay in that was kind of camped, so it was like they were Anyways, we got this condo and it was like this multimillion dollar mansion on the ocean, which you're like, sweet, this is really awesome, except for this place was just pure white and we're hunting in an area that's just like red dirt, and we happened to shoot quite a few

deer and there's no place to put them. Um, so that like, honestly, that condo never looked the same and we never got the invite to stay in that condo again after the fact. I think another really random place that I butcher deer. It was actually in Mallie. It was my wife's first hunt, the first time she was successful harvesting a deer. But it just happened in the day that we could hunt was pretty much the day

we had to leave. So we had like an evening flight out and we went hunting with my friend Robin, and she shoots her buck and we're like okay, We're like looking at the time, We're like we gotta dude, we gotta get to the airport. Because as things go, when you're hunting, it's like, oh, we'll do that one more stock, we'll do that one more whatever. So we shoot this day, we pack it back, we get it in the truck. He's got a big yetty in the back.

We throw the meat in there and we're just thinking, like, dude, we don't have time to run back to your house, get to the airport whatever. Generally, when I'm traveling, I bring everything i've got, like a yetti backflip soft side cooler, and then I generally like, will vacuum seal the meat or put it in bags, somehow freeze it, put it in that bag, and go home. But I did bring some of these yetty ice packs, so they actually colder than then I settle freeze stuff that's in there, but

it will definitely keep it cool. So I had enough forethought to bring this with me. They were pre frozen. So I'm like, Okay, here's the plan. We're gonna cut this meat up, we're gonna put it in baggies, then we're gonna stuff it in the cooler, and then I'm gonna use those ice packs to freeze. It's like okay, and we're thinking like, well, we're pretty dirty. Uh, probably

should shower. So he's like, oh, there's a country club I remember too along the way, so we're like, sweet, this will be perfect, right, So we roll up to the country club and it's like we're parked in their dirty vehicle. There's all these like nice cars, golf course whatever. So he's like, okay, I can get you in. We go in shower up and I'm like, Okay, we're gonna have to butcher this thing like right here in the

parking lot. So you've got the back of the car open, and I don't know why this is funny, but well, I know it's funny. It's just kind of funny. So I'm thinking, like somebody's gonna somebody's gonna get like, see what are we doing. We're getting like all these weird looks, like what are these guys doing. We've got like a butcher setup going slicing Dyson on the top of the cooler, and then we're like assembly line into bags and then we're gonna be stuffing it into this backpack Cooper to go.

And we're like in the middle of like saying. People are like looking kind of like skirting around, and the one old guy goes up to my buddy Robin and he's like Meredith and where He's like, we're like covered in blood, uh in camo butchering a deer. And this guy like I think maybe he thought like we were where he was parked, or if he was just trying

to like didn't notice us and looked past. So we're like laughing because it's like, here's two guys butchering a deer in a parking lot in a country club, and he thinks that one of us might be his wife. So we're like, oh, man, um, are you okay? Man, Like, are you confused? And I think he was slightly confused, but then he kind of was like, wait, this is

obviously maybe he was trying to talk past us. We didn't know what was going on, but we're laughing because here we are butchering a deer and uh, Robin got mistaken for this guy's wife, which makes no sense. I don't know, it was just random. You know, of all the things that you think somebody's gonna say while you're butchering a deer, that was not one of them. So like, okay, so we got this deer butchered. Now like we run in shower real quick, come back out, make it to

the airport just in time. And uh yeah, that was the processing the buck in the back of the truck at the country club. But I say that to say you can really butcher an animal wherever you are, whatever your space or limited availability. I get a lot of questions of guys like, hey, I live in an apartment, or I've got a small house not a lot of storage area. How do I get uh an animal process

without just having to drop it off? I want to go through the process myself, So these tips are really good for that, or especially people traveling somewhere where you might be staying in a motel, staying in a tent camp, staying wherever, and you've got a long trip back. How to get that meat butcher and processed for the trip home? Or if you've got limited space. I'm gonna set this up with three scenarios that I think a lot of people will encounter at some point. So the first scenario

would be, maybe you're that traveling hunter. You shot a deer. Maybe say hey, drew Wyoming gear tag went out to Wyoming staying at a local motel, and you're like, well, what do I do? I've got a deer, but I've got a long drive home, or I've got extra time. Maybe your buddy's got a tag, or you guys have a couple of days before you got a head home, Well what do you do now? Another scenario would be you shot an elk and maybe you live in a small house or apartment with no yard. Um, I get

that question a lot. And then the third scenario would be, let's say you had what it doesn't even matter, but it Let's say it's a cow wok tag. Right, you go out the last day your hunt, you're hunting weekend, Sunday, you shoot a cow o, You're like sweet, you get home late, but Monday morning you have to go to work.

Now what? So this series is gonna be breaking down and answering the questions on a good way to cross us with small space and what to do or kind of this methodology of setting up your processing when maybe you've got a limited amount of time or you've got to be back and doing something the next day, but you want to you don't want to have to drop it off at a butcher. You just want to do

it yourself. So the first thing we'll do, we'll kind of touch on those first two questions, starting off the limited space thing, the motel, whether you're traveling, maybe flew whatever, or you've just got a small area. So here's the gear. Let's start with the gear that I kind of recommend. I always travel with these items. So I'm going on a hunt, let's say, flying to a recent one I just flew to Hawaii Hunting Access dere Um. That recent hunt was a little bit different because I had access

to a lot of different processing equipment. But here's some items that I always bring with me wherever I'm going cutting matt A filet knife, so I really like the Gerber Controller file a knife. It's made for fish, but it's incredible for processing, cutting up big game, small game whatever. I use it as a butcher knife. And there's a folding version as well as just like I like the one that goes into the hard sheet that has a sharpener on it. Just a six inch file at knife.

And then some sort of cooler, So even if I'm traveled, like flying somewhere, I use a cooler that I could pack, a soft sided cooler, you know, if I'm driving or whatever, I always have, you know, a big cooler full I somewhere to keep the meat cold. And then I've got bags of some kind, whether they're vacuum sealed bags or the big ziplocks. And then a marker to label stuff. And then generally I will bring some form of vacuum sealers,

so there's smaller vacuum seelers. I use the meat brand vacuum steelers found it meet your Maker dot com, so they've got a small one and then they've got more of the pro version. It depends on the type of trip, how I'm going, where I'm going, I don't generally bring like a chamber back with me. Which is absolutely the best kind of vacuum s heeler. We can talk about

all the processing equipment later. It um some kind of vacuum heiler because it's actually a really good way, especially if you're traveling or if you have limited space, because when you vacuum see it, you can store it in a different way. And we'll talk about that here in a minute. To give yourself to provide more space while you're butchering and between putting things in the like, if you need time for things to age, you can age them in the fridge in the vacuum sei there by

um wet aging them. Or you can also use it if you're traveling because it doesn't leak as much. Now the vacuum seiler, I would say it can be faster to wrap stuff. If you are going to wrap, I always would double wrap, so I use saran wrap and then wrap it butcher paper. But for stuff like traveling. I like that extra assurance um of having it in the vacuum sealed plastic. And it's also like a really

good preservation preservation method that works really well. Now I will say this to you, we're kind of I'm talking about two different things. Small space while you're traveling, in small space where you live. Small space while you're traveling, you can always do like just get everything broken down and use ziplock bags. I use that a lot. But the key about butchering in small space is kind of compartmentalizing.

So what we're doing is we're taking a big animal and we're breaking it down into pieces of work that can be managed in an area that doesn't really matter where it's at. So I broke this down into a few different steps. So step one is going to be the field breakdown. So I think about it. We're going big too small. Um, it's really great if you've got a lot of room. You know, when where a guide out of In Montana, we've got a walk and chiller.

We can put everything in there. If somebody wants to butcher, we can pull out pieces at a time from the chiller. We've got plenty a room, big table, all the processing gear in essentially a giant shop warehouse, plenty of room for that. But that's not the case all the time. That's a very rare case. So what we need to think about is, well, we don't have room to take

care of an entire animal. We need to kind of figure out the steps along the way and where to do these steps to make it super manageable in an area the size of your tailgate. So step one is going to be the field breakdown. What the field breakdown is going to be a skinning and quartering the animal in the field. This is the this is I always pack everything out. I use the gutless methods, so I always skin and quarter in the field anyways. But I know there's a lot of people that do the gut

and drag method. If you've got limited space and you're saying like, hey, I gotta come come home and I gotta process this in an apartment building and you've got an entire hole deer in your truck, it's gonna be really hard. I mean, I guess you could do it in your bathtub or whatever, but um, it's probably not

not recommended. So what I would do is I would essentially break the animal down in the field somewhere you know it's it's a great place because you've got the room, you've got the space, and you're gonna have you're cooler with you, one of those essential pieces of year, so you can start breaking down the pieces. Breaking down the quarters. I removed the hind quarter and front shoulder. I then can remove the backstrap, either off the rib or leave it on and use a saw cut it in half.

Doesn't really matter. You're just breaking it down into manageable pieces that you can fit in your cooler to take home. So that's gonna be your first stage of like where do I keep this stuff? How's it all gonna work out? You're gonna use your cooler as the storage space while you're processing those individual pieces. Now, let's say we get back to our motel, our hotel, the back of the truck wherever, and it's time to break down. So step two is gonna be breaking down those pieces into the

butcher portion. So while you're butchering one piece, everything else is gonna be chilled in your cooler to Step two is gonna be the de boning process. And I generally do this once I get like unless it's a super far pack out. I'll actually start the de boning process right at the kill site, like if it's an elk and I'm like, man, I'm way back here. Is heavy. I don't want to carry these bones. But most of the time, honestly, it's a little easier to just manage

things with bone in. So i'd say eight time, I don't really bone stuff out in the field unless I need that, and it's more of a space saving thing for me. Honestly, I was opposed to wait. But once I get back to wherever I'm gonna start cutting up, then I bring out that filet knife, that butcher knife. I've got my cutting matt, and I'm going to start deboning those quarters. Wherever I'm at this is. This can

be all the tailgate. This could be in the kitchen of your motel room, hotel room, condo, house, apartment, whatever. So you've got all your other piece in there, You've got you pull out one quarter and now you're gonna start breaking down deboning. You're removing the muscle groups and you're like, sweet, this is the first stage of the butchering process. And just as a little like hint tip the way the muscles grow. You know the thing that I do. If I got a front shoulder of hind quarter,

let's start with the hind quarter. You just start separating those muscle groups out. You'll see there's a fascion that kind of holds everything together. You'll go in there, you'll take your knife and you'll just start laying out and separating out the different cuts and the different pieces of meat from there. Once it's separated, we go to step three and this is the cut and separate. So I'll take that one piece that I'm working on. Obviously, i'll

separate it out. I'll say, okay, these are steaks. I cut that bag it tag it right on the bag, this is what it is. And then I have a separate bag set aside for the grind, because that's one thing. There's a lot of grind off these animals, and that's the thing that starts piling up. So I start one bag for grind, and then I start bagging out my individual butcher cuts. So I've got those cuts, and then I start to store and put away the grind and

the freezer. So if it's in a zip lock or a vacuum seal bag, I'll close that bag, seal it stick that in the freezer. One thing that you want to think about is, you know, I get the question a lot. Okay, I don't have a lot of space. How do I age the animal? So there's a couple of ways that I do that in the storage process, before I cut it or after I cut it, depending on how much time you have and how much space you have. So that's where the keep seiler comes in.

One thing you'll find like, so the aging process. What it does is it breaks down that rig of mortis and makes the meat more tender. You know, people ask like, Okay, if I freeze, if I freeze it right away, if I shoot it, I cut it up and I freeze it right away, will it be tough? The answer is probably yes, because what you're gonna get is a term called cold shortening, where you freeze the meat before the rigor has time to break down, and it's kind of

gonna always be tough. So here's your options. You can either dry age it or wet age it. Dry aging is kind of keeping it in a climate controlled environment and giving it a little bit of time to break down. The way that I do this in my house, um, I use plastic meat totes. I clear out my fridge and I try to stack everything on one thing shelf and then I keep the meat in the fridge for a little bit, but I try. You want it to be like spread out enough where it's got room to breathe.

If you don't have that space, you could do it in the cooler. You just want to make sure that it's not sitting in water. Um, it's not gonna dry age where it's going to develop a crust, but it will be allowed to age in that cold um in that cold storage. I don't suggest aging things in the cooler though, I think that they turn out not as well. Um they can kind of sometimes because it's really hard to keep them out of the water. So that's your

last case scenario. The next scenario would be you could do it one of two ways, which would be a wet age. And what that is is you're using your vacuum seal to remove any oxygen that could cause the meat to go bad, so you're kind of preserving it, and then you're keeping it under cool temperature, which could be a refrigerator. But the nice thing about this is it doesn't leak, it doesn't cause a mess, and you can stack things on top of each other um in

the fridge, so you've got limited space. I go with this wet age process almost of the time because I can start to butcher if I need to right away, and then I can use the refrigerator to let the rig and more to break down without letting oxygen get to it where it's gonna start crusting over. You don't have as much meat loss or whatever after the fact, and it still comes out extremely tender. So you can do this wet aging process in one of two ways.

You can butcher it, vacuum seal it stored in the fridge for a week and then freeze it, or even you can go up to two months like this um I've had I've done it where I've actually just like vacuum seal the whole hind quarter wet aged it. UM let us sit in the fridge for about a month three to four weeks and then taking it out, butchered it, sealed it back up, and put it in the freezer. But you can do it either way. That's where that vacuum sealer comes in handy for this process. Like let's

say you need a little bit of more aging to go. Um, you've got like enough time where you're like, hey, I can butcher it in a few days. I can butcher it next weekend. Then you would probably get the vacuum seal, create a long bag, vacuum seal each individual broken down piece, or maybe a big block of boned out pieces, vacuum seal it and then pull those out and start to process. Now,

let's answer that question. Maybe you were on a hunt and you you got something the last day and you don't have time to butcher it right away because you've gotta go to work or whatever. This is a this is a real life scenario. I run into this more times than not a lot of friends. I know this is the problem. You get home, you're like, man, I want to process this myself. But I just I was like, I feel like I don't have the time. What do I do? How long can it last? How do I

take care of it? I don't want it to go bad? Like this is the whole reason I went out struggle all weak. You know, I finally am successful. I want the meat to be really good. Do I just drop it off at the butcher or do I do it myself and that's that's a really good question to ask. But it is definitely doable to do yourself. And it's kind of on some of these things that we started to touch on. What I like to do is I

like to kind of stagger the time. So we come home, we got the elk, and you're like, man, I don't have room to hang this oult. What do I do? So the first thing that I do this is just me the way they're like, what my scenario would be. Let's say I've got room for one or two quarters in the fridge, or if I could hang in my garage and the temperatures right awesome, That's what I would do. You know, I like to keep it around. I mean I kind of I kind of play with it a

little bit. You want to kind of keep it around that forty degrees if you can, you know, as long as you get cool air running over it, it's okay. So what I do if it's a little bit warmer, if I've got room in the garage, I hang up the meat in the garage and then I have a little fan and I just turned that fan on and let it blow and keep circulating air pass the meat. You will notice that it's gonna dry it out pretty good, create this crust around it, but it's gonna protect the meat.

It's gonna break down. I try not to do that for more than four or five days, but um, you know, shorter is better if you've got three days or whatever. But it gives you a little bit of time to then mess with the meat. So you come back from work every day that week and you just grab a quarter, process that quarter, and then you save your grind up. So you'll put all your grind into the freezer or whatever, and then as you're processing, and then you'll do all

your grind at once. One reason that I like to put the grind and the freezer is because it actually grinds up better when it's semi frozen. So I'll just start to dethaw that in the fridge when it's grind day, so I get all my everything done, process done, and then I do grind day one day after I've done all the other butchering separates it out a little bit and also makes it easier because it's like semi frozen. You want you don't want it frozen, but you want

to like fairly cold for your grind process. So we're gonna go into um, we've got that that limited time. Maybe you've got the garage set up sweet, you can use the fan. That'll buy you a little bit of time that you can pull a quarter in once a night or whatever whenever you've got time that week and start processing and do it the same way, cut it up, vacuum seal that, put your grind in the freezer. You're

good to go. Next day. You maybe grab another quarter or however much you can do within that time that you've got. Now, if you don't have that hanging space, or it's too hot, or it's like, hey, I'm in Arizona, my garage is way too hot for this doesn't even matter. If i've got the got the fan on it. Then you can use a combination of the cooler refrigerator or that vacuum ceiling method and in the refrigerator. So I'll

do a couple of different ways. You know, when you've got an elk and a cooler, it doesn't matter how big you're it will they're are giant coolers. But what I like to do is keep it out of the ice but still definitely cold. Continually check the temperature of it and make sure that it's not in water. That's the biggest thing. So I'll probably pull a couple quarters out and try to make room in my refrigerator, putting them in the toates where they're separated, where Eric can

get around them. Or I'll do that technique of getting a really long vacuum seal bag out, sealing the bottom of it, putting quarter in vacuum sealing it and storing it in the fridge. That way, I can actually stack them. They won't go bad that way, and they give me. They buy me a little bit of time to actually get to the butchering process. Then I'll pull it out, cut it up when I can same thing, put the grind in the freezer, and then put my process steaks

in the freezer, and it's ready to go. Now when it comes to grind day or you know, if you got the time you come back, you've got plenty of time. You can do it all at once. That's great. But even while I'm processing the entire year, I stick or elk or whatever, I stick whatever grind. Once I get a good sized bag, then put that grind in the freezer, even if i'm doing it that day to start cooling it down to temperature, and then I'll pull out the

grinder and then do it that way. I will say, like, when it comes to grinding your own meat, that's one thing where you probably you want the better version of whatever you can get. So I like at least the half horse grinder. If I'm doing an elk or whatever,

it's just it's just a better process. I've owned some pretty crappy grinders in the past, So I will say, like, if you're butchering yourself, the two things you want to invest in, I'd say the first thing you'd want to invest in is a good grinder, and then the second thing would be that vacuum sealer or maybe simultaneously at the same time, those two pieces of kit, because it's gonna make the entire butchering process so much easier when you do it at home if you have those two things,

because it gives you the flexibility to wet age, it gives you a flexibility to to get a good seal. And whether you use it just for preserving things between the breakdown process or whether you use it for the final seal up set in the freezer, doesn't really matter. It's just gives you that extra ability to move things around and storm different places with a lot of ease.

And it's definitely great if you're traveling because you can um they don't leak as well, So especially if you've got something A lot of times, what I'll do if I'm traveling, I'll butcher it. I'll cut it up, I'll use big pieces, vacuum seal, freeze it sticking to my cooler bag and just take it his carry on, pretend like it's just like walk around like it's super light. I'll have about fifty pounds and that thing stuffing in

the overhead bin. Um. So that's that's a good way to do things if you're traveling, if you have limited space or a limited amount of time. I want to address that way of butchering because I've been getting a lot of questions as guys are planning for their season.

Maybe you know it's it's a question that comes up every year, and I figured, Okay, it's definitely worth talking about if so many people are asking about it for a little bit more in depth, like how to butcher If you're like, okay, that tells me, gives me an idea of the strategy. If I don't have enough space where to store things, how to move things from stage one to stage two, or some ways of you know, keeping the meat safe for a little bit longer period

of time. But if you want more in depth processing butchering field care, you can always go to my YouTube channel subscribe to that because leading up to the season, I'm gonna be releasing videos on pretty much every stage of breaking it down in the field highd court or backcourt or backstrap whatever, like every piece of it, and then the kind of the butchering process along the way, So feel free to check that out and it will kind of be a good like visual aid Q too,

kind of figuring out this in the field breakdown because it's really hard to explain everything just via podcast, So a little bit of an ancillary content if you will. Now, um oh, actually I forgot. I tried to work out a deal, so if you listen to the podcast, if you do need some butchering stuff I work with meat, it's meet your Maker dot com. They sell all kinds of stuff, high quality grinders, vacuum steelers up to professional grade, pretty good prices. But if you put my name in there, Remy,

you'll get a discount. So that's cool. Um, just if it's something that you you're like, Hey, I want to start butchering processing my own stuff. There's plenty of stuff on there. So something that I worked out for listeners of the show. I thought I might be sweet get a little bit of a discount. But anyways, thank you guys for listening. Keep the messages coming. Next week is our hundred episode. Is crazy man, hundred weeks of doing this. Wow,

that's pretty nuts. It just seems like yesterday I was talking about the biggest buck in my life. So gearing up for the hundredth episode, I've got some cool I'm gonna do a little bit of a cool giveaway something is a thank you for everyone that listens, and we'll talk about some of my favorite tactics and go over some solid tips, maybe even a little bit of flashback session, and maybe figure out the total sign off, the final sign off. So until next week, keep cutting. Well that

works good. That was good because it's like, keep cutting the distance. But I was talking about meat. It could be that that could be in the great that could be the goat of sign offs. I like that one. All right, keep cutting, guys. H