Feasting: the second half of the hunt

Tonight, Whitney prepared a stew featuring our venison, our potatoes and carrots, garlic we traded honey for and many dried spices from our garden. I smelled the amazing aroma all day from the crockpot, and when I finally tasted the stew, it was wonderful. Full of rich flavor, hot and steaming, and the meat was perfectly tender. It was the perfect meal after working outside today, doing chores and mucking out the chicken coop in the gently falling snow. As I sat and enjoyed the stew, I was thankful yet again for the ability to grow our own food, and harvest our own meat. And that thought led me to think how much it bothers me when people talk poorly about game meat. The animals we hunt are beautiful, and the meals they provide should be just as amazing.  



Venison Tenderloin Wellington

For me, eating the meat that we harvest is a reward, but there seems to be a large number of people out there who think that eating game is the price you pay for hunting. As in the saying: "you shoot it, you eat it" - like it's a punishment. Even here locally, where it seems like everybody hunts and the first day of hunting season is something of a holiday, this seems to be true.

Most people who say they don't like venison, claim it's because it tastes bad. But what they don't seem to realize is that the flavor of meat reflects what the meat has been subjected to. Blaming the meat for tasting bad after you don't treat it properly is unforgivable in my mind. Game should be treated no differently than beef or any other fine meat. It should be kept clean and cool, properly aged and butchered with care. Finally, it should be cooked according to a recipe intended to showcase the cut's natural qualities and texture.

Can you imagine if a professional butcher shot an old cow in the field, left it dirty for hours while he drove around showing all his buddies and then chopped it up without aging it? If he then took a coarse grained cut from that beef and tried to cook it as a steak, I guarantee that would not taste like a choice steak from the grocery store. Venison is no different.

Here in our house, Whitney and I take great effort with our venison. Starting with the shot and following through all the way to the meal, we try our very best to make certain that the meat is clean, and well cared for. The other trick is matching the cut to the meal. Tender cuts are steaks, coarser cuts are stews or roasts, and the coarsest are burger or sausage. Younger animals provide more tender meat while older ones are more coarse. As a result it is not uncommon for people who come over for dinner to remark "That wasn't beef"?

  As I said earlier, for me eating the meal is the final reward of the hunt. Months after hunting season is over when we unwrap a package of meat and prepare a meal with it, often I find my self recollecting that day in the field. It really is the culmination of the hunting experience, and I am always grateful for the opportunity to hunt and thankful of the animals that we harvest.

KJ 

  

Hunting Meat

Every now and again as a hunter you have to ask yourself: What am I really hunting for?
For me that question entered my mind one evening this week when a young, fork horned white-tailed buck stepped out in front of me and paused. I was sitting on a rise, watching a stand of dense brush and timber that bordered a grassy meadow. The meadow was crisscrossed with deer trails and the ground littered with deer droppings. I had already seen two does, and as the whitetail are coming into rut now, I knew chances were good there would be a buck in the neighborhood.
It was almost my last opportunity to hunt for the season and as I sat there wondering if I was going to fill my tag, my mind was replaying scenes from earlier in the hunting season: I kept seeing the bucks I'd let go.
There was the 4 point mule deer buck that I saw on the first morning of the season. "Beautiful buck" I had thought, "but too early to tag out now". Then there was the nice pair of white-tails we saw while retrieving Whitney's buck. I had stood there in the rain with my cross hairs on the larger of the pair. "No, one buck is enough to deal with today" I had thought to myself. Next there was another nice muley that I saw on a ridge after riding my mare seven miles behind a gate. The muley was a nice tall fork or maybe three point, but "not big enough for this far back" I had thought. And lastly there was  the big white-tail I had seen, the one that I really wanted. I had gotten up extra early that day and driven an hour and a half to get to the gate I wanted to hunt behind. I hiked for two hours to get to the spot I wanted to hunt even though it was 15 degrees when I left the truck. I spent all morning working slowly through the bowl with no luck, and finally stopped for lunch. It was still only about 20 degrees out with a stiff wind and it didn't take long for me to get cold sitting down. I decided to hike up the ridge to warm up and see if there was anything up there. I took about a dozen slow stiff steps and then looked up. The buck rose out of his bed like a bird flushing out of the grass. As he lept I had time to watch him turn broadside before landing and taking one more leap. That was all I saw, but it was enough. He had a wide, tall rack: a big 4 point at least maybe 5. A big body, mature white-tail buck, one that any hunter would be proud of. I had only seen him for about a half a second, but I spent the next two full days searching for him. At the end of that second day I had hiked over ten miles and still only had the one glimpse of the buck. I decided to try a new place, but that buck still haunted me.
So now here I was, on my last hunting day with evening drawing near watching the does graze. The question entered my mind: Are you hunting for meat or a nice rack? This time I was hunting meat. Having eaten nearly all the venison in our freezer it was time for me to fill my tag. And as I sat there looking back on another great hunting season, the young white-tail stepped out of the timber and paused. I raised my rifle, steadied the cross hairs behind the shoulder, exhaled and squeezed the trigger.
To my dismay, the buck did not lay down in his tracks as is always my goal. My shot must have gone wide because instead, this one spun and ran back into the brush. I stood there watching sadly while night came on dark and fast. After marking the last spot I saw him with my orange hat, I walked back to the truck to get another flashlight and call for back up. I felt terrible, I've never lost a wounded deer yet, and I sure didn't want to now. Whitney came out and we spent the next two hours of the pitch black night searching in the thick brush with flashlights and head lamps. We finally, and thankfully located the dead buck, but not without some real doubts. After I thanked the buck for his sacrifice, I dressed and cleaned him, and as I dragged him back to the truck I breathed a heavy sigh of relief. I had filled my tag and we had recovered the buck and that's what really mattered. It didn't matter that this buck was only a fork, because after all you can't eat the antlers and I know the big bucks are still out there. Somewhere.

KJ  

Images of hunting season

One night last weekend I was driving home after an exhausting day hunting with no game to show for my efforts when a thought came to me. Isn't it strange that the only images of hunting that we share and celebrate are ones that show a happy hunter posing with a harvested animal? While this is of course a pinnacle moment, it tells nothing of the work and dedication it took to get to that point, or the work that remains to be done after the shot. This is only one moment in a wide range of images that actually make a hunting season, and could be part of why non-hunters don't understand why we hunters feel so strongly about hunting.
If you were to actually show images of my typical hunting season, there would be many many pictures with no game at all. Pictures of cold dark mornings, long silent walks, trees bending in whistling winds and red numb fingers. Photos showing entire days with no words spoken, where no animals are seen and long drives home with nothing to show for the effort.


Whitney preps garden produce and venison for hunting camp stew.

But there would be more than that. There would be pictures of friends around a campfire, corn bread from a dutch oven, and smoke curling from the chimney above a wall tent. There would be pictures of golden larch needles, white snow flakes, and red huckleberry leaves. There would be pictures of vistas and mountains, streams and rivers. Elk tracks in the snow, fresh droppings and a recent bedding spot. Wolf tracks the size of desert plates, and lion tracks on top of your own tracks made only hours before.
But there has to be more than pictures, you have to convey the sensations too. Not only of the frozen fingers and tired legs, but of the sudden spike in the heart rate when you catch a glimpse of something. The disappointment that comes after a long silent walk when out of nowhere a doe stands up and just like that, effectively warns the entire mountain side of your coming. Of your heart pounding in your ears when a buck spots you and gives you that one second stare before bounding away. The wet sheep smell of your wool pants after hiking all day. The sensation of being soaked in sweat from dragging an animal out even when it's so cold the water in your backpack has frozen. And of finally, finally having made it back to the truck well after dark with the narrow beam of your headlamp guiding the way after trying not to think about all the hungry carnivores that have been watching and smelling you go by.
I guess the thing is that there is way too much about a hunting season to try and share all of it, so we just boil down to the one moment of success. The one moment that proves it was all worthwhile. But success without effort is fleeting. For me the hunts that were the hardest are the stories best recalled, and somehow the meat tastes a little better when there is a good story to go with it.
So for any non-hunters that may be reading this, and especially ones that don't appreciate seeing pictures of dead animals and grinning hunters, just remember your only seeing part of the picture.


KJ

Chicks!

If you've been hoping for a chick post, here you go!

The chicks are now a week and half old, and growing like weeds. We've already had to replace the first brooder box with a second one for more room. They are very healthy and active and are constantly exploring their environment and learning new things. They really like scratching in the wood shavings and pecking at the newspaper. They've also started trying out their wings by running across the box and flapping. Today we saw one happily dust bathing just like a miniature hen. Here is a look at our brooder setup.    

We've got the heat lamp on an adjustable stand so that the warmth can be regulated.  This week it is at 85-90 degrees at chick height.  We will decrease the heat 5 degrees a week until it is 70 degrees, at which point they will be fully feathered and will be able to venture outside.   Also, because the heat lamp could cause a fire if it fell into the shavings, we've screwed the clamp to the stand so that its more secure (before we did that the lamp fell from the table it was clamped on. Luckily we were here when it happened). The long red feeder allows them to find feed even if part of it gets filled up with wood shavings. The jar with the green bottom is the waterer and works well, except they fill the tray with wood shavings constantly.  Whitney changes it at least 5 times a day.  And the wood block in the corner is there for them to roost on, and they really seem to like that. It is nice and low to the ground so when they fall off they don't hurt themselves.  It also helps keep them from roosting on the feeder, and getting a lot of poop in the feed.  

Speaking of roosting, I had to add this photo since it was a new development last night. When we checked the little girls before heading to bed we found one had taken to roosting on the water jar! This was quite a surprise because the jar sits well above head height and she had to jump and flap to get up there, but managed it like it was nothing. It's also a surprise because chick brooding books say not to expect roosting until 4 weeks! I dunno, maybe these are AP chicks :-). The down side to this is that when standing on the jar, the little one can nearly look out of the box, so today we'll need to fashion up a chicken wire top for the box so that they don't take to getting out while we're not watching.

Okay, I better get outside, looks like a nice day coming.

KJ

Time to Grind

With the holidays behind us and a foot of snow outside, it was a good time to turn the trimmed venison in the freezer into something usable. We butchered three deer this fall ( Blog post: filling freezer), and had fifty pounds of trim to work with, so we decided to make burger, brats and snack sticks.

Like most things, there are many ways to do this; this is just how we do it.

To start, all the trim gets run through a coarse grind. This is 100% trimmed venison.

The next step is to measure out the meat by weight and add the proper amount of fat for the product you are making. We used tallow (beef fat) because that's what we had, but more often pork fat is used for sausage. Beef fat is perfect for burger. 

If you are making burger, then all that's left is to mix the fat and the meet and put it through a fine grind. If you are making sausage, it's time to measure your seasoning and mix it into the meat and fat. To make things easier, we used packaged mixes that come with seasonings and sausage casings.

Once it's all well mixed, it goes through a fine grind and gets stuffed into the prepared casings.

Folks that are well practiced at this can do it with one or two people but for us, three worked well. One to feed the hopper, one to regulated the grinder and one to stuff and twist the casings.

Whitney turned out to be very good at making bratwursts, and stuffed these dogs right as they came out of the grinder. 

We decided to try snack sticks for the first time this year. This was different because these are done without casings. All the steps up this point are the same as the other meats, but from the grinder

we ground the meat onto a wire rack and then baked it in the oven on low heat for a couple hours.

This could have been done with a smoker too, if you have one. This is the first round fresh from the oven.

Finally, all that's left is to bag up the meats for the freezer. Again there are many ways to do this, but for the burger, we've had really good luck using these common ground meat bags. Filled right off the grinder, it makes the process of bagging really easy and clean.  

For the brats and snack sticks, food saver bags work perfect. Here is the first load all bagged, dated and ready for the freezer. Makes me want to BBQ just looking at it! A big thanks to Alyssa and Mac for all the help getting this done, and thanks to everybody else for stopping by.

Until next time,

KJ 

Filling the Freezer

Whitney and I don't take butchering lightly. It is an important part of the fall, securing the meat that we'll use for the next year, and beyond. Very little gets given away and only to people who appreciate what goes into preparing it.
Why do we Hunt? the plain and simple reason is for meat. Yes, there are many other reasons too, like: recreation, commrodery, exploring new areas and excercise, but you can do all that with out killing animals. Likewise, you can eat meat your whole life and never kill anything personally(this is a subject for a whole different conversation). To me, a true hunter places just as much importance on the meat as he does the trophy. That said, I enjoy a large rack as much as the next guy, but never at the expense of the meat.
For that reason, we clean our meat to a point some people find ridiculous. Many guys I know claim to be able to process 5 or more deer in a day. It takes us a full day to process one animal. However, many people I know also claim venison is gamey, tough and a struggle to eat. In comparison many people we have served venison had no idea it wasn't store bought beef until they were told. We also aim to get every ounce of meat we can from the animals we kill, honoring the animal's sacrafice as much as possible.
Clean meat starts with a clean shot. It continues through dressing and caring for the animal in the field and proper handling at home. We always strive to kill on the first shot, although at times it takes more. In her four animals to date, Whitney has yet to shoot any more than once, always hitting a vital spot. I can't claim this impressive achievement myself, but most of mine fall to one shot, and I have yet to loose a wounded animal. I don't write this as a boast, simply to point out that good stalking before the shot, and followup after are a part of hunting that should never be down-played. A long range or unsure shot that wounds an animal is far less impressive than a long sneek ending in a good shot and clean kill.
All of our game gets hung for seven to ten days, allowing the meat to pass completely through rigor mortis and begin to age slightly. I have skinned animals "hot" before aging and "cold" after the aging. The only real difference I have found is that skinning hot is much easier. It does dry more meat than cold skinning, but use of a game bag to cover the carcass can help keep in the moisture.
The pictures below are from a recent weekend of butchering. We had our good friends Mac and Alyssa over, the Montana State Bobcat Vs. University of Montana Griz rivalry game on the tube, and two bucks to keep us busy. The following is our style of butchering. It is not the only way and I can't say it is the best way, just our way.


Mule deer hind quarter

    The first thing I did was go out to the barn and separate the front quarters from the hanging carcass. We start with the fronts, then the backstraps (loins), neck and ribs and end with the hind quarters. The pieces were brought in and cleaned completely of hair. Next the dark dried out meat was trimmed off and the muscle groups separated from the bone. Venison fat is not enjoyable to eat, it taints the flavor of the meat and ruins the cut. All fat, tendon and sinew gets trimmed completely.

cutting trimmed meat into usable pieces

 Once the muscle is totally cleaned, it gets cut and sorted into various products. We aren't big on roasts, so we don't wrap any. We have found that it is much more enjoyable to pull packages from the freezer that are 100% ready to go, so nothing gets wrapped until it's totally ready. As our friend Alyssa pointed out, we tend to do the work upfront, while some people put off the final trimming until it's time to cook. That's just a personal preference.

the sort top to bottom: meat to grind, jerky strips, steaks.

One product we really enjoy eating is venison jerky. This year I applied for and filled an extra tag, just so that we'd have extra meat to devote to things like jerky and sausage. Otherwise we would have been using steak or stew meat for jerky. In this photo you can see how we sort the meat: bits to grind all the way down to good steaks (stew chunks aren't pictured). In the middle are strips that we'll dry into jerky. These are cut with the grain of the meat as opposed to steaks and stew chunks that are cut across the grain.




Once the meat is cut and sorted, it's time to wrap. This usually falls to Whit, while I keep cutting. First the meat is arranged on plastic wrap, in groups of like cuts one to two pounds at a time. The plastic is wrapped up and all the air is pushed out.  

Then, the package is placed on freezer paper and wrapped again. This double wrapping has never failed us, even with meat staying in the freezer for more that two years at time. However, you should aim to use the meat within a year.



 Finally, the date and cut is written on the package. We also name our deer and write it on the package. This sounds odd at first maybe, but it is a simple way to remember what deer it was and recall the hunt.

At the end of the day, the packages were loaded into the freezer and the jerky strips were loaded into the dehydrator. The meat for grinding was stockpiled in tubs and frozen, waiting for a day this winter when we'll make burger and sausages (future blog post?).
The Griz beat the Cats soundly, making it a good day all around. Thanks very much to Mac for help with the cutting and taking these great pictures.
KJ

Hunt 2011

It's been a great hunting season!

 Early on in the season, we enjoyed a really fun camping trip with friends, and I took some rides looking for elk. While these outings didn't turn up any game, they were both very worthwhile hunting trips. Hunting is about a lot more than bagging a trophy. A big part of the experience is spending time with great people in the places that we love. This season we were really excited to have Whitney's Dad here for a couple of weekends.

We've had a great time with Gary revisiting some old favorite hunting places and trying out some new ones. We took long hikes, at times not seeing anything. Other times we saw many deer, and even a herd of cow elk. One day Gary and I saw nothing but some mountain lion and really large wolf tracks.

 Eventually, Whitney and I were both successful filling our buck tags, each taking nice mule deer. We got to share the experience with Gary which made it even more enjoyable.  We've both shot deer with larger racks in years past, but we are meat hunters first and foremost, and these will be good eating. These two deer will keep us well fed for the next year, I'm really looking forward to the tenderloins! We'll let them hang for a week and then the work starts. Until then we still have some time left to look for elk, and I'm looking forward to hunting with  a good buddy next weekend.

No matter what the outcome, when you spend time in the hills with great people it's a great season!

Whitney's First Buck

Whitney's First Buck!





Whitney bagged her first buck this fall, a beautiful mule deer 4 by 4. Whitney did a great job hunting this buck and made a very good single shot. We are both very greatful for this successful hunt and I am looking forward to the rest of the hunting season.
I hope you are all well and happy, and of course, Go Griz!
Kyle

Antelope Country

Whitney and I took our second trip to antelope country this year, here are a few pictures from our adventure.

This picture shows some of the area we were hunting. Anyone who says central Montana is flat has never hiked it!

This is a bunch of antelope we watched quite a bit. There was some very nice bucks in that herd, but of course they never came anywhere near the property we could hunt.

After a lot of hiking, we found a bunch that we could hunt. We managed to belly crawl within 130 yards, and each made a goot shot. This is the view from where the shot was taken looking at me standing where the animals are.

Whit's first animal wasn't the big buck she was hoping for, but she made a good clean shot and can certainly be proud to have filled her antelope tag.

The dogs were very excited to come with us to retrieve the game, wearing orange of course!

I loaded both critters on the game cart, and we made our way back to the truck, about 1.5 miles.
It was a great trip, and fun to see some country new to us. Now both of these animals are cut and wrapped in the freezer, and we are looking forward to the general season opener on sunday!

That's all for now - Kyle