Meat quality of high country deer

[pickardjw]

It's explained pretty well here.

https://muleyfreak.com/2018/11/26/the-how-to-and-whys-of-cooler-aging-venison/

And yes, the Hunt Backcountry podcast put on by the Exo guys. Episode 341 with Joseph von Benedikt. They gave the method a ton of praise.

[Stein]

Thanks for the link, interesting.  I have a charcuterie refrigerator I was going to set up for aging this year but might give this a try.  If you bring salt, you could do it all at camp.

[Karl Blanchard]

Someone summarize for me. Im not listening to an entire podcast and I'm DEFINITELY not listening to anything put out by muley freak 🤮

[jkononen]

Marinade quarters in ice and salt for 7 days.

[mburrows]

Someone summarize for me. Im not listening to an entire podcast and I'm DEFINITELY not listening to anything put out by muley freak 🤮

  

[WildcatRanger]

Someone summarize for me. Im not listening to an entire podcast and I'm DEFINITELY not listening to anything put out by muley freak 🤮

I haven’t tried it (yet) but you layer meat and ice in a big cooler for 7-10 days, changing out the ice as it melts and draining the bloody water. The rind of the meat develops a grayish tint but supposedly that won’t affect anything. I don’t know about the salt but seems like it could work.

[Karl Blanchard]

Marinade quarters in ice and salt for 7 days.

thank you sir 


So while I've never done that exactly,  back in my commercial fishing days we did a variation of that once. It was the tail end of coho's and we were gonna head back to port the following day. Had a pair of little sitka blacktail bucks feeding on the beach where we were anchored so took advantage of the good fortune.  We did a simple gut job, split the rib cage, tied them off and overboard they went. As a lower 48 kid taught that moisture was bad I was a bit concerned. Skipper assured me it would be the cleanest, tastiest meat I'd ever had. When we pulled them out of the ocean the next day he was certain right. Spotless meat. Not a drop of blood left in them.

[Okanagan]

Steak/chop from a high country mature buck.  His neck was beginning to swell so we assumed he would be a bit tough and maybe strong, and we planned to make hamburger of all.  But we did a test grill of chops from the outer strap that were so tasty and so tender that my wife said to make as much of him into steak as possible.

That looks amazing, I’ve ate a lot of deer and elk steaks and never seen one cut like that

That's what would be a T-bone steak on a beef, cut fairly thick, melt in your mouth kind of tasty and tender on this particular buck. The reason I took the pic was to show my son the unusually thick outer layer of fat on it. 

[Skyvalhunter]

The high country mule deer taste is horrible!! Your better off staying close to Tri Cities and hunting that's where the prime tasting meat comes from.

[dilleytech]

Blacktail is my very favorite of deer fallowed by whitetail then mule deer. We have noticed the wyoming mule deer and whitetail are significantly worse eating then our Washington black tail.

[dilleytech]

I have never left meat in a cooler for over a week but I do practice wet aging in vacuum bags in the fridge for up to 6 weeks and it absolutely makes meat much more tender. If ever I have a tough animal I want to make more tender this is what I do. Very simple and safe.

[WildcatRanger]

The high country mule deer taste is horrible!! Your better off staying close to Tri Cities and hunting that's where the prime tasting meat comes from.

Yeah probably

[dvolmer]

My hunting partners father and grandfather owned a meat cutting place in Waitsburg back in the day and did a lot of meat cutting in the Washtucna area also.  He always told me deer didn't need aging at all, Elk need to hang for 7 days, and beef need to hang for 21 days.  All of my deer I de-bone in the field and bring home in game bags on ice.  My ice is frozen gallon size jugs that I put on top of the meat in the cooler to cool the meat quickly but not get wet at all.  Once I am home I spray the meat off with a house and brush to clean it and trim off all of the fat and sinew.  Then I freeze it all immediately.  Backstraps I vacuum seal and all of the other goes into big bags and froze until the hunting season is completely over.  After the season is over I take all of the big bags of all of the animals I have harvested that year and defrost them and weigh them.  Then I go buy boneless pork butts at Cash and Carry that equal 1/3 of the weight of my frozen bagged meat.  Then grind it all up and mix pork and wild game meat into burger and stuff it into one and a half pound tubes for the freezer.  Been doing it for decades and it works great!!!

[boneaddict]

I rarely disagree with Karl, but I think he fell and hit his head the last time he was out.  Though in short, there are a lot of things that will effect how an animal tastes, especially field care, prep etc. or even how the animal was killed, I do believe environments do have an impact on taste.  I’ll take a high mountain buck over an old sage buck any day.   Just like a mountain bear versus a garbage eating or fish bear. 

[Ricochet]

I haven't kept up on the literature since I studied wildlife biology at OSU many moons ago but I remember a study that suggested field care wasn't a big factor in palatability. Some deer in the study were skinned immediately, some after 24 hours, some were gutted immediately, some after eight hours. Several other variables were included in the test. Blind taste tests revealed little difference in how people enjoyed the meat. IIRC only two factors stood out for improved taste, people overwhelmingly favored doe meat over buck meat, and greatly preferred properly aged meat over others. Most of the other field care variables had little or no impact in palatability. As for bears, try cooking one that had been feeding on skunk cabbage, as a friend did while working in an Alaska logging camp. The smell cleared out the entire bunkhouse, he never tried that again. It stands to reason a deer feeding in a lush environment would be better tasting than a deer working a little harder to survive in a different habitat but it might not be noticeable to many people.