In our most recent video with The Hunting Public, Aaron Warbritton demonstrates how he processes his deer and provides tips on how to process your own deer harvest.
After making a clean shot and recovering the deer, the next thing you should do is field dress the deer. You can do this on-site where you found the deer or you can take it back to your car, truck or camp and field dress it there, if you’re close enough.
Once the deer is field dressed, suspend the deer, upside down, from a gambrel in a temperature-controlled environment that’s no hotter than 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Warbritton leaves the deer in this environment overnight. He notes that it’s incredibly important to keep your harvested game at the right temperature after you field dress the deer.
Once the deer has dried out, you can move on to processing the meat. Warbritton uses a meat grinder and vacuum sealer in his home, which lets him process the entire deer himself. If you don’t have access to a meat grinder or vacuum sealer at home, you can take your harvested meat to a deer processor and have them process your deer for you. You can even request how you’d like it processed: into deer sausage, deer sticks, etc.
If you don’t have time to process your meat immediately, put the meat into freezer bags and keep the meat frozen until you’re ready to process. Label the cuts of meat on the outside of the freezer bags so you can keep the cuts of meat organized.
At the end of the video, Warbritton recaps that the key to processing your own deer is to make a clean, ethical shot, recover the deer quickly, field dress it, then get the meat cooled to refrigerated temperature. This process will make the wild game taste better and keep it from spoiling.
Watch the video to learn more from The Hunting Public!
