As the season comes into full swing, it's worth revisiting what it takes to properly care for your meat in the field to ensure you are serving up the best possible table fare. Here are my top 3 tips for looking after your meat post kill.
Keep it Clean
This is one tip that can’t be emphasized enough, no matter how many times you have heard it before. There is a direct correlation between cleanliness, temperature and meat quality and its worth paying attention to.
Contaminants of any kind can potentially impart undesirable flavors into your meat, some more so than others. Stomach contents can quickly taint meat to the point that it is beyond edible whereas some pine needles on a skinned out leg isn’t the end of the world. What is important to realize is that contaminants will compound when imparting flavors into your meat, the more dirt and forest floor you get on your meat, the more likely it will be that you will taste that on the plate. You best bet is to just keep it impeccably clean right from the get go.
Before making a single cut on your kill, lay out all your game bags, spare blades, gloves or anything else you might need. Re-usable cloth game bags are a worthy investment. Unlike some of the stretchy, cheese cloth style game bags your dad used, cloth game bags will actually keep flies and dirt off your meat. Once you remove the meat from the carcass, put it directly into your game bag and set it somewhere cool. If you don’t have someone to help you put the meat directly into game bags, use a tarp or a space blanket to lay out the meat to make bagging easier. A lot of hunters will cool their meat directly on rocks or hang it in a tree before bagging it but cloth game bags aren’t great insulators so cooling directly on a rock or in a bag won’t make a difference. Bag them first, then cool them.
Photo Credit: Frankie Foss
Keep it Cool
This brings us to the importance of keeping your meat cool. The reason we want to keep meat as cool as possible is to minimize the rate at which bacteria will grow in the meat. The more bacteria growth the quicker your meat will spoil.
Managing meat in the field is all about time and temperature so there are no hard and fast rules. The higher the average daily temperature in the field, the less time you have to get your meat into a cooler.
If you find yourself with a cut tag and multiple days to go before you are out of the bush there is a couple tricks you can use to help keep the meat as cool as possible. If possible, hang your meat in a coulee, next to a river or in the shade of a glacier. All these areas will be significantly cooler than the ambient temperature and will help extend the life of your meat.
I would avoid submerging meat in a body of water at all costs for a couple of reasons: As clean as something looks or taste, we can't guaranteed that there isn't some contamination in the water that could taint the meat. Most of us don't pack in backs that are durable enough to guarantee the meat won't come into contact with water. Especially if we are pulling them in and out of the water multiple times.
There is no culinary benefit to soaking meat in a river or lake water. Bacteria thrives in moist, warm environments. By keeping meat dry and well ventilated, the exterior of the meat will form a sacrificial dry "crust" that will help protect the rest of the meat on the inside. This crust is easily removed during the final meat processing and depending on the state of it, can be used to make game stock.
Photo Credit: Adam Foss
Keep it Intact
Butchering game meat in the field goes against some of the basic principles of meat processing. We are not allowing rigor mortis to run its course, we are usually cutting fresh meat off of bones and generally making numerous cuts which exposes lots of surface area.
The science is too complex to explain here so to keep it brief, all of these factors lead to significantly less tender meat that is more prone to bacteria growth and more likely to spoil quicker.
If possible, keep animals whole until they can be processed back at your residence. On cool weather backcountry hunts, pack out the quarters with the bones in if possible. During hot weather hunts, it may be a necessity to de-bone the quarters to promote cooling and avoid spoilage. Other examples would be removing the neck meat in one or two pieces and cutting the belly meat off as a single flap of meat.
Packing out bone in quarters isn’t always feasible but where possible, keep your meat in large, uncut pieces. Your efforts will be rewarded at the dinner table.
Photo Credit: Steven Drake