bear with this beginner as I look to you veteran deer slayers for you recommendations. I'm hunting some private property this fall and while I've never harvested a deer, there are many on the property I'm hunting and am optimistic I'll be able to take one.  I've never field dressed a deer but have a good idea of how to do this.  My question is how do you have your deer processed?  I'm guessing many have the tenderloins, some ground, some venison "sticks" etc. Just looking for your ideas on how I should have a venison processed (I won't do this myself)?

This year i'm eating the heart, backstraps and tenderloins as is, grinding everything ribs forward and making jerky out of everything else. I'm over fancy cuts and other stuff. Ground and jerky is easy and practical.

Standard cuts including backstrap and tenderloin for the grill.

We have pan sausage (ground) made up for biscuits and gravy or other recipes that need sausage.

Tons of regular ground.

Jerky is good if you're into that. Snack sticks too.

Sausages, like bratwurst, are hit or miss. I've had some killer sausages and others not so great.

All depends on what you like to eat and what you're willing to pay for

thanks fellas, great suggestions so far.

I skin, debone, take my roasts, backstraps, tenderloins, and then make the rest into ground meat or sausage. I've been hunting for decades, my family eats about three deer a year. Very good meat, and also good for you. I'm sure there is plenty of info about skinning, and butchering deer on the internet.

Cut out the backstraps, tenderize, season, and fry up for sandwiches same day of harvest. Everything else goes to a local locker. Usually get some sticks, breakfast sausage, bacon, etc. Also these delicious McRib looking things, eating one now. I don’t get much if any ground. It’s fine mixed with pork but the wife isn’t a huge fan.

Good luck!

Keep tenderloins whole, halve backstraps. So you'll get 2 tenderloins, and 4 half backstraps. I like to cook half/quarter backstraps for a small gathering. Or cut backstraps into steaks, and freeze family portion sizes. Keep one roast from each quarter (2 shoulder, 2 rump). Grind the rest into whatever you want, burger, sausage, meat sticks, etc. This is my routine.

We get steaks, loins whole and stew meat. Everything else gets ground into burger.

We have a guy that cuts our up for about $70 depending on what we have done. He makes sausage for us as well.

Genuine question here, what is deer "bacon"?

I’m guessing it’s ground venison with pork fat added. Formed into the shape of bacon

Yep.
It's good stuff.  Similar to turkey bacon.
Ground, formed, cured, smoked at low heat, and sliced.

https://www.foxvalleyfoodie.com/venison-bacon/#recipe

Cool, sounds delicious. Never seen that done before. We usually keep our processing pretty simple but that sounds like a great way to use shanks and trim, and end up with a product that everyone would like. Thanks

I always eat the inner loins the night of the kill.
It doesn't take much to get those out, usually can damn near pull them out with your hands.
From what I've read you don't want to wash out the deer carcass with water after field dressing as this can
introduce bacteria.
You'll want the butcher to label the backstraps as these are the most tender steaks of the deer.
You can generally get roasts out of the back legs if you're into that.
If I brought mine to a butcher, I'd want backstraps, roasts, steaks, and the rest ground up with some 70/30 beef to add some fat so it doesn't dry out when cooking.
Here's a good video of field dressing.

thanks to all that gave recommendations. Looking forward to this.

I highly suggest you invest in your own butchering equipment and do it yourself.  You will save so much money in the long run.  Victorinox 6" curved semi-stiff boning knife, 18x30" cutting board, and a way to hang the deer by the rear legs is all you really need.  That's less than $100 worth of stuff.  1 deer at the butcher is going to cost you more than that.  Lots of videos online about how to do it.  Try to find one that's done by an actual butcher, not just some random guy.

IMO vacuum sealers aren't necessary.  We just had backstrap that was from my 2021 deer.  In the freezer since then with only freezer paper and no freezer burn.  I've never had freezer burn on meat wrapped in freezer paper.  I've never ground a bit of venison so no need for a grinder either or the expense of getting pork fat for adding to it.

Inner loins: Super easy to remove.  Salt and pepper, sear the outside and put in oven until 120ºF internal.  Slice across the grain and serve with a loaded baked potato and caramelized onions.  It literally doesn't get any better than this.  
Backstrap: I cut these into about 6" long chunks.  Prepare and eat generally the same way as the inner loins.  
Tip Roast: I pull this before removing the rear quarters from the carcass.  This is the only roast we take.
Top/Bottom/Eye of round: Jerky.  These are the perfect muscles for jerky.

All the rest of the scraps and all of the front shoulders we can.  Canned meat is delicious and shelf stable for many years.  Plus, it doesn't take up any freezer space which is a huge plus for me and you can eat it right out of the jar if necessary.  

For the canned meat, you can make spaghetti, tacos, hamburger helper, etc.  Basically anything you make with ground beef that doesn't need to stick together like burgers or meat loaf, you can make with canned meat.  Usually though, I just heat it up in a pan, drain the juice off of it and make gravy with it.  Then we serve that with mashed potatoes and whatever vegetable you like.  

Can you shed a little light on the process for "canning" meat?  Not sure I'm familiar with that.

Just take the meat to a butcher or game processor.  As someone who also had their first game tag this year all we did was gut the animal, strip the hide, and I took four legs to the game processor.  I should have taken back straps and tenderloins a bit oh well.

Mine put it into 1 pound of ground meat, and steaks. All vacuum sealed.  Best advice I can give you is take it to a professional instead of trying to be cheap.

It's not hard, but it helps if you can have someone show you the first time.

I usually do 4-5 deer a year.  Sausage, roasts, all vacuum sealed.

When I was a kid, we water bath canned meat every year.  I ate dozens of deer that were water bath canned.  However, water bath canning low acidity food like meat does put you at risk of botulism so pressure canning is recommended.  Once I learned this, we stopped water bath canning and started pressure canning our venison.  

We started with an off the shelf Farm and Fleet pressure canner that uses a rubber gasket to seal the lid to the pot.  This worked great but we had to replace the gasket every two years.  I wanted something that wasn't so reliant on a part that I couldn't service/make.  So we ended up spending quite a bit more money on an All-American canner which uses a precisely machined metal-metal seal and it works great.  You just need to take care to not damage the sealing surfaces.  

There are a couple different ways to can venison but the way we do it is a raw pack.  So we cut all the meat we plan to can into bite sized pieces (remember they will cook down a bit so leave them a bit big), pack the raw meat into the jars leaving about 1" of head space, add a bit of canning salt to taste.  We do quart jars (use wide mouth...easier to get venison out) and use 1tbsp of salt.  Do not add any liquid, the liquid will be created when you process in the canner.  Then you wipe the sealing surface clean, add the lids and bands.

The instructions that come with the canner that you get will tell you how to set up the canner and process the venison.  Follow that, but generally you add a certain amount of water to the canner, add the jars, heat the canner until you get a steady stream of steam out of the outlet for 5 minutes (this evacuates any air), place the weight on the exhaust nipple and let the canner come up to pressure.  For venison we use 10lbs of pressure but this can depend on your altitude.  Process for 90 minutes at 10lbs of pressure then turn off the heat and let the canner come down to 0lbs of pressure by itself.  

Once it's at 0lbs of pressure you can remove the jars from the canner and let cool to room temperature on the counter.  We cover them with a towel as if you somehow splash cold water on the jars, they can crack as they are still very hot.  

Canned meat, mashed potatoes and gravy with corn was my favorite meal as a kid.  Super cheap, simple, and filling.

EDIT: People ask me a lot if they could add stuff to the meat to make chili or tacos or whatever.  I tried this once and realized that it's actually better to just leave the meat as is because you can do whatever you want with it when you go to make a meal out of it, but if you can it as chili and don't want chili when you go to eat it...well...you're screwed.  The other issue is the process of getting those recipe's correct.  We tried a few and never ended up liking the final result so it ended being a lot of wasted time and meat.  So I suggest just canning the meat as it is and then it's flexible when you go to make a meal.

The cost of processing a deer is pretty high these days.  It’s a lot more if you get spiced type processing of sticks, sausages and jerky.


I have done my own processing for years now.  Not usually more than two a year for me though.   The last time I paid a guy I got shorted meat and slim jim’s that were not processed right and spoiled in the vac packs.    I used a guy on a recommendation that was way off, apparently the guy was fine one year and a drunken hack the next.

If you do it yourself, you’re never shorted and have full control.  No mixing ground meat with some other schmoe’s gut shot deer that was left in the sun or missing overnight in the woods.  Let alone all the shop jerky samples they give to their friends.  Wanna know where the venison for the free samples came from?

A couple boning knives (flexible blades are my preference) and a cutting board and a freezer wrap, ziplocks or vacuum sealer will do for now,

I have a huge plastic cutting board
two boning knives
a breaker knife
a meat saw
a freezer wrap dispenser and a tape dispenser
oh and I bought a stainless table for the garage next to my gambrel hoist set up.  

I used to do it with a fish filet knife, a big cutting board and a cross cut wood saw on the dining room table, bring in one leg at time from the old small garage.   Finish a leg, go get another one to process.   Garage was unheated and way too cold to work in for long.  The meat was partially frozen which is ideal for clean slicing.  

FYI, you can cut the large muscles of the rear legs into roasts and freeze them that way.  You can cut them in to steaks later if you wish but gluing steaks in to roasts is more difficult.

If you’re not familiar with breaking down a carcass, and don’t have anyone with experience looking over your shoulder and showing you how, the truth is, you’ll probably make a mess of it.  Not that it’s particularly hard, there are just a lot of tricks to it and it takes a while before you get a feel for it.  Having someone show you how it’s done really helps that process.  You can only get so much from YouTube.  Eventually, though, it gets to be easy, so there’s that.

The first thing you’ll need are sharp knives.  Seriously- trying to butcher an animal with the wrong knives or dull blades totally sucks.  Look online and get yourself a 6” boning knife from victorinox. It’s not expensive, plus you can brag about your 6” boner (really, that’s what it’s called on the invoice). It’s just the right size, has the perfect curve, and feels good in your hand.  Wait, what was I talking about again?  Sorry… distracted.

Field dressing is easy, but it also takes a little practice.  Roll up those sleeves, open it up from pelvis to ribs (don’t cut the guts in the process), cut the diaphragm all the way around, reach into the thoracic cavity, cut the trachea, hold onto the trachea etc. and just kind of “peel” the guts to the back.  Alternatively, hang it right away, put a big bucket under it, and let gravity so the work.  Most important thing- get the guts out of it ASAP.

Skinning and quartering come next.  Hang it and get to work. There are a hundred videos on skinning- take it slow if you’re not used to it and don’t be afraid to grab ahold of that skin and pull.  I’m a fan of hanging head down - some folks hang head up and I don’t get it, but whatever.  A quartered deer is a lot easier to deal with than the whole carcass. Take the backstraps out first- start at the backbone, work your way around to the ribs, then try to get the whole thing (on each side) off in one big piece. You can clean it up when you process the rest.  Inside loins come next, then the front shoulders. Watch how the joints work and use that when breaking down the quarters.  I cut out the neck meat at that point, take as much trim meat from the torso as you can (hey, don’t waste meat), then separate the lower quarters from the torso.  Again- it takes a little technique and experience to get the hip separated, but once you get the feel for how the joint is put together it’s not that bad.

If you cleaned the torso well, you can get rid of it at this point… there shouldn’t be much there.  Put those quarters on ice.

Now comes the actual butchering.  Remove all the fat, silver skin and connective tissue that you can… they’re not good eats and (IMO) poor butchery is most of the reason why a lot of folks don’t like deer meat.  Break down along major muscle groups. Take the tougher cuts and grind them.  Save the large muscle groups for the good stuff. Clean up the straps and t-loins and do something special with them,  if you save the heart, trim out all the valves and the pericardial sack.  I’m not into deer roasts, personally,  but if you are, look at some videos how to cut them and go for it.

Throw any meat scraps in your grind bowl.

Wrapping takes some technique and practice as well. A vacuum sealer is your best friend, and so easy a caveman can do it.


Finally- don’t be afraid of the word “kill”. Words like “take”, or “harvest”, are for folks that are too squeamish to deal with the fact that they’re killing something.  

That’s the basics. A lot of advanced cuts, bone in chops, etc. are much easier with a freezer and a meat saw. Been there, done that, but most folks don’t have the right saw anyway.  I’d keep it simple until you get the hang of it.

Definitely take it to a processor if you have never cleaned one before, that’s more than enough to get used to if it is your first time. YouTube is your friend, I’m sure there are tutorials. Do not cut the stomach, bladder, or intestines. It will taint the meat and smells worse than it sounds.

https://rokslide.com/forums/threads/step-by-step-deer-butchering-pictorial.92472/

Are you in Dallas by chance? I'd love someone to show me the ropes. I don't mind buying equipment, I just don't know what I'm doing. Processor is expensive and we try to for at least 2 year a year

I hear this all the time and I don't understand it.  

I've gutted, cleaned, butchered and ate numerous gutshot deer (mainly back when we were doing a lot of deer drives).  There was urine, fecal matter, stomach matter, and everything else inside those deer and the meat taste just fine.  Even the inner loins after you wash them off taste fine.  

Yes, gutting out gutshot deer sucks and stinks terrible...but it's definitely not 'tainted meat'.

If you were to let it sit there gutshot for a while, yes.  Gutting it promptly and cleaning it well? No problemo.

This is probably it

Gutshot a deer. It runs off. You can't find it. Gets dark. Go back 8+ hours later when you can see, find the deer. Meat has been marinading in yuck.

vs a deer that's been fatally shot, but maybe something got clipped due to the way the bullet traveled, bullet separation, or you boo-booed with your knife work. If it's dealt with immediately, I don't think it's as much of a problem.

A dead animal is a perfect growing medium for fecal coliform bacteria leaked within a body cavity.  Similarly, sepsis when the critter is still alive.

I don't think so.  Maybe if a deer is left when it's hot out...but here's a few that got left full of guts overnight+.

Last year my buddy gut shot a doe that wheeled on the shot.  Slight quartering to shot, she turned hard on the release of the bow and caught it in the gut.  We found here approximately 18 hours later with a tracking dog.  Overnight temp was about 40ºF

I shot one with a 30-06 hard quartering away probably 10 years ago now.  I tracked it by footprints for 50 yards before it got on a heavily used deer trail.  No blood at all that I could find...and there was even some snow on the ground.  It got dark.  We drove that parcel out the next day in the afternoon and one of the drivers found it dead.  Bullet caught guts on the way in blew up and never exited 125 yards into some real thick stuff...but didn't bleed very much at all as guts plugged the only hole.  Overnight temp was in the teens.  I stopped shooting SST's because of that deer.  

Ate every last bit of both those deer.  No issues.  


I wonder how many deer just get left in the woods dead because it's gut shot and 'tainted'?  Sounds like a lot.

I don't disagree, but it's not like that bacteria is going to make it into the muscles that you're going to cook and eat.

I take mine to a local processor. My standard cut sheet is just to cut the tenderloins in half, cut the back hams into steaks about 1-1/4” to 1-1/2” thick, and grind the rest. I do not have any fat added.

I further process the ham steaks myself depending on what i want to make. Usually I cut them unto stew meat, or thin strips for jerky.

Lastly, that field dressing video of Steve Rinella posted above is excellent, I always recommend it to first timers.

I doubt it.  Far more are lost because they were poorly shot and never found.

The real problem is the poor shooting.