COLUMN: Driftwood Outdoors: Processing adds to hunting experience

It's becoming harder to find quality deer processors. The good ones are so covered up in work, they can continue to raise prices, but the customers keep coming. I tried a new place this year and was charged 50 cents for every one-pound bag my ground meat was stuffed into. A lot of hunters can't afford or just don't want to pay $200 to have a deer processed. The alternative is an investment of time.

Here is a look at the tools you'll want for a basic at-home butcher shop.

Game Processing Knife Set

You're going to need more than one knife to properly butcher an animal. You're also going to need a meat saw. You need a skinning knife, a butcher knife and a boning knife. A skinning knife has a large round blade and dull point. A butcher knife has a large, heavy, sharp blade. A boning knife has a narrow blade and sharp point for slicing meat off the bone. A meat saw has a long, fine-tooth blade for cutting through meat and bone.

Electric Meat Slicer

When you go to the deli and ask for lunch meat, the person behind the counter slices it on a meat slicer. You want one of these machines in your home butcher shop. You can set the blade to cut different thicknesses. You can use a meat slicer to craft perfectly uniform loin steaks or cut hams into thin strips of steak. Smoke a couple of wild turkey breasts and slice them into lunchmeat.

Manual Meat Tenderizer and Jerky Slicer

Once you have sliced your steaks, you can run them through the tenderizer. Some people say venison is tough and gamey. Take big flat pieces of meat and run them through a tenderizer to produce perfectly sized jerky pieces ready to be seasoned then smoked or dehydrated. It doesn't take buying too many bags of gas station beef jerky to understand this economic benefit.

Dehydrator

Jerky is just dried meat. A dehydrator dries meat. First cure your meat, then place the strips on the tray and set the temperature and timer. Bigger is better but a four-tray dehydrator will get you started. An eight-tray or larger will make short work of jerky strips.

Grinder

After slicing steaks and backstraps, you're left with miscellaneous pieces you'll want to grind. Go over the carcass cutting off all meat you aren't saving as steaks or roasts and drop it in a meat lug. Use a grinder to turn these pieces into ground meat. Grinders come with plates to regulate thickness and tubes for injecting sausage casings. Grinders also allow you to mix beef or pork fat into your wild game. Meat needs to be cold when grinding.

Mixer

For mixing seasoning into ground meat before turning it into jerky or sausage, a meat mixer is the ticket. Not only does it make the task much easier on your forearms, but it also spreads the seasoning out uniformly. With a mixer like the 10- and 20-pound meat mixers allow you to season a lot of meat at once.

Sausage Stuffer

Once your ground meat is mixed with seasoning, use a sausage stuffer to fill casings. Casing comes in different sizes for summer sausage and snack sticks. Dump the mixed ground meat in the canister and attach the right sized tube. Hi Mountain Seasoning's Sausage Kits have everything you need.

Burger Press

Perfect burgers are formed with a burger press. A simple single burger press makes every patty uniform. Adjust the thickness to build whatever size burgers you desire. You need to separate burgers with a piece of wax paper. You've seen the stacks before with frozen burgers separated that way. You need to do the same. Vacuum seal or package your burgers in freezer paper.

Smoker

If you consider yourself a sportsman and don't already own a smoker, you need one. Smoked wild game roasts, loins, lunchmeat and especially sausage will get you through the year. Electric smokers make the job easier. I've used one for years that drops wood discs automatically.

Vacuum Sealer

Vacuum sealers package your game air-free, reducing freezer burn. They suck the air out and seal the package so no air can get in. You can store vacuum-sealed meat for years. Some food sealers can be used with a 12 volt DC adaptor – if you are trying to process an animal in the field this is helpful.

Accessories

You'll need basic accessories. For ground meat, use weight-specific freezer bags. Freezer paper and freezer tape are also necessary if you are not vacuum sealing. Meat lugs are big plastic tubs you want for holding meat at different stages of the butchering process. An apron is nice. A high-quality knife sharpener is a must. So are rubber processing gloves.

You can purchase everything covered in this article for under $1,000. When you consider how much it costs to have a deer butchered, especially when you have jerky and sausage made, the savings add up quickly. Sharing equipment with hunting buddies is an option. If you go three ways, your portion of the expense equals the cost of having a couple of deer butchered.

Not only is butchering your own animals cost-effective, but it also adds an entire element to being a hunter. You killed this animal, and now you are processing it. You own every step of the process from the field to the dinner table. The core of being a hunter is to provide meat for the dinner table.

See you down the trail…

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