Grinding Deer 2020

So our successful deer season from last fall has finally come to the bit where we process the venison into edible bits.  To date, all we have done is hunt the deer, shoot the deer, tag them, gut them, remove the hides, take the meat off the bones, and cut it into strips that will fit into the grinder.  Yes, this took several hours to complete.  It was stored in the freezer until yesterday, February 29, 2020.  We took this "extra day" to almost complete the cycle.  All that remains now is to Eat the Deer.

We met up at 6 am.  Delayed only slightly by RePhil, but that's to be expected.  We landed at Rob's place for breakfast at 7:45.  He had prepared biscuits, gravy, and hash browns, which we ate with Rob and his Dad Bob.  We then proceeded to the garage to process venison.

We had a crew of 5 (down one man, Nick, who was at the semi-state robotics meet with his high school team).  Attending was Davey, RePhil, Eric, Alex, and myself.  Bob was our supervisor and Rob was our manager. 

How it works:  Deer meat is weighed to 20#, to which 5# of pork butt is added.  This gets seasoned and then coarse ground.  The entire 25# gets reground to fine.  That lot is then put into the air-driven hydraulic stuffer and put into what ever package we desire - brats, salami, or bags.  We added snack sticks this year too.

The salami and snack sticks then go into the smoker until they reach 155F.  The rest is frozen until ready to cook.

We ground 6 batches like above with pork and seasonings to make the brats, sausage & salami.  Then we ground about another 120# of straight venison - no pork and no seasonings - to be just ground meat for chili, spaghetti, lasagna, pizza, meat balls, etc.

We spent 3.5 hours mixing and stuffing.  We spent about another 1.5 hours cleaning up.  Not bad for 250# of ready to cook meat, in our opinion.

Many thanks to Rob for opening his house, garage, and equipment to us.  We appreciate it greatly!  He puts on a wonderful breakfast in case anyone is interested!


 
Eric & Alex on the grinder.  This is the first or coarse grind.
Davey in the background with the stuffer, fixing to load another 25# of meat.


 
Here are RePhil & Davey showing off what 25# of deer brats looks
 like before twisting into links.
 
 
 
As you can see, their job is the easy one with plenty of times for breaks,
 beer breaks to be exact.  They took lots of those!

 
Here's our supervisor, Bob Vincent, overseeing the "work" and I do use that term loosely.
Bob's advice:  More Work - Less Talk!
Does he know us or what???

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