Aging Meat

[GregLaROCHE]

How many people age meat with the hide left on as in the video?

[Winger Ed.]

How many people age meat with the hide left on as in the video?

I had a Uncle that did.
He said it protected the meat, and was a perfect fit.

Not exactly aging:
When I was still deer hunting, if the weather was cold- I hung them up in a tree inside a cloth bag,
and didn't skin and process them until I got back home and did it the next day.

[10x]

This subject comes up frequently and people tend to have very strong opinions. Like most thing it's relatively easy to test yet very few ever do. Split your deer in half and compare. I much prefer my own test results to others' opinions.

When testing it must be from the same animal. I have done the aging verse none aging test several times and for me I find little value in aging venison for tenderness. Aging longer periods does change flavor. Some like the flavor change and some don't. Even with beef I don't care for the flavor change if aged much more than 21 days.

Then some deer defy explanation. My muzzleloading buck from a year ago was about a 150 class buck with a very swollen neck and actively chasing a doe. Due to leaving for a trip the following day it was cut up and in the freezer within 8 hours. I expected tough and strong flavor yet it was mild and very tender???

I have lost count of the number of deer that I have harvested and butchered over the past 50 years.
It has been my experience with deer and moose that aging does not make a difference in flavour or tenderness.
In my youth we used to slaughter 2 steers a year on the farm. The quarters were aged for 21 days before cutting. The flavour and tenderness was better than any beef can get from the store now.
Aging takes up real estate, real estate costs money per square foot. 21 days of aging costs too much in rent and cooling (electricity) costs for most butchers do do this and still sell the beef at competitive prices.

I have aged deer for 2 days, 10 days and 20 days at 38F - 2 days is enough for the blood to leave the meat. More than 2 days aging deer is wasted time.
Backstraps and tenderloin are as tender on the day the deer died as they are after 2 or 10 days aging. in fact after 10 days aging, the tenderloins seem to be tougher.

The poorest quality meat was a Mule deer buck with about 20 does in his harem mid rut. His meat had a different and not so pleasant flavour - his flavour was much like a deer that was wounded and lived for a couple of hours before the coup d'grace . No amount of aging changes that flavour.

With venison I age until the blood stops dripping from the quarters - usually 24 hours- then I cut and wrap.

[HWooldridge]

A bad taste can sometimes come from what an animal eats. I’ve heard people scoff at that idea but we’ve experienced poor venison which came off an area where the browse was only fit for goats, so they were mostly eating sage and cedar. The meat was very strong tasting, even when ground and mixed with pork.

[MT Gianni]

I age with the hide on but where I can check internals by sight and smell. If it's cold enough to age it's too cold for bugs.

[Winger Ed.]

A bad taste can sometimes come from what an animal eats.

One season, my relatives in the Hill Country told me it had been a real dry year, and there wasn't hardly any acorns.
The deer had been eating a lot of cedar berries and they told me I probably didn't want to kill one that year.

A neighbor up the street did. He hunted in the same general area, and brought one back.
You could tell when they cooked some it. You could smell the funk out in the street.

[MrWolf]

1/2 steer we get is aged about a week or so and is some of the best tasting we have had. My last two deer were processed within hours and were nice and red and tasted great. Just sayin.

[GregLaROCHE]

Now that I’m aging, I think I’ll keep my hide on.

[Winger Ed.]

Now that I’m aging, I think I’ll keep my hide on.

There's where I'm at.
And it fits pretty well too.

[Fishman]

I learned to wet age deer in ice here in Texas. Generally that involves skinning and quartering the deer, but I have had just as good a luck deboning it completely. Put the meat in a large cooler full of ice. Drain the water out every day or so and add ice as needed for up to 7 days. There is a definite improvement in tenderness and the meat is less "gamey" although that isn't a big deal. Maybe this improvement is due to leaching the blood out of the meat, since most deer don't fully bleed out even with a good lung shot. I've eaten plenty of deer that were shot and immediately processed, and my family prefers deer aged at least 5 days using the method described.

In those cases where I have access to a walk-in cooler, I leave the hide on while the deer are in the cooler and wet age after initial processing if more time is needed. Leaving the hide off wastes too much of the already tiny deer we have around here.

[Rapier]

We here in NW Fl use the ice chest method, pretty much everyone has an A frame hanging set, with a rope and pully with a tennis ball. a gut hook, cordless sawsall and 4 wheeler makes short work of skinning and processing a deer. Fill the big fishing cooler 1/2 to 2/3 with broken down deer, be careful not to get hail on the meat, fill rest with ice, pull the drain plug, keep filling it every day with ice for a week, done.
By FL law you must keep proof of sex, a zip lock in the cooler.
A properly hung aged meat must be kept at a controlled constant temperature for around 10 days, so outside does not work at all. Ice in a chest does fairly well when you allow the liquid to drain. In a PU, the chest can be recharged at an ice house by buckets.

[white eagle]

could it be that because wild game does not have the fat that domestic animals do that it just takes longer for this process to be effective?