Hanging deer

[MikePal]

Do the best you can in your situation without ruining the meat!

Exactly...I wouldn't risk spoilage just on the off chance I would get more tender meat by hanging it in less than ideal conditions.

Most of my meat gets cooked in a Slow cooker. I could throw in a piece of shoe leather with a can of diced tomatoes and after 8 hrs it would be edible

[werner.reiche]

When aging deer - or any other meat - contamination is the enemy, not temperature.
Moisture and warm temps will make the problem orders of magnitude worse if you do get contaminated meat.
One thing I would recommend is that under any questionable conditions, you check the deer every day.
If the exposed surfaces are not drying or you can detect any odor, you need to clean it up and cut it immediately.

Mikepal - as far as the crock pot - do you do this even for backstrap, rump and tenderloins? That would seem like a real waste.
Then again, so does putting an entire deer into sausages which a lot of guys do.
Generally I cut up a deer and use the cuts similar to as I'd do beef, except when cooking, I do it a lot rarer than I would beef.

[Fox]

When aging deer - or any other meat - contamination is the enemy, not temperature.

Moisture is in the air, you cannot stop that, unless you vacuum seal the entire enemy. Temperature is the critical factor in bacterial growth, period, anything about 4C is in the danger zone, irrelevant of what people claim they did in the past, it is science.

[werner.reiche]

Moisture is in the air, you cannot stop that, unless you vacuum seal the entire enemy. Temperature is the critical factor in bacterial growth, period, anything about 4C is in the danger zone, irrelevant of what people claim they did in the past, it is science.

If the outside of the meat is dry, that provides the bacteria.
Moisture is equally important to temperature.
Not sure why you are so insistent on something you are so wrong about.

Many meat preservation methods rely on drying meat so it does not spoil.
It's not like natives use curing salt when preserving meat and fish - they just dry it.
Also, a lot of the old European meat preservation is done by drying the meat - literally anything air cured.

[MikePal]

Mikepal - as far as the crock pot - do you do this even for backstrap, rump and tenderloins?

Sorry, I should have clarified...I slow cook roasts etc that way because cooking in an oven dries out the meat...anything that can be cooked over an open flame...gets put on the BBQ

[punkrockerpj]

most of my deer this year went into sausage. bit of a mis communication with my butcher when i assumed my roasts would be cut into steaks. 60 pounds of sausage isn't anything to complain about though!

[longpointer]

We gut them out in the field but they get washed/rinsed out back at the farm house then transported to the butcher. Our butcher often complimented us on such nice clean deer we brought him. LoL ! From the truck they go onto a hoist to be limbed and skinned put on hooks and into the cooler by this point they have bled out and are dry. They will sit for a few days until butchered. We have never had bad tasting meat as we pay attention to the ambient temperature and of course care of our harvest. It doesn't hurt either that we are getting "farm raised deer" down here in Norfolk County which has a huge bearing on meat flavour.

My brother has been a butcher for over 40 years and explained a lot about the aging process of red meats and how Temps vs. Time plays into it the breakdown of the tissue thereby making it a choicer piece of meat. So , yes there is a science to aging meat but not all meat needs to be aged.