Off Topic: How Much Meat On That Deer?
 

Semi - that is a really great pictorial of a job well done... Man you have skills!

Thanks

nice job showing quality meat . makes me hungy. i shot 6 deer this year & ended up buying another freezer. i cant tell you the last time i bought beef .all 6 deer that were butchered i would say i got aprox 450 lbs 1 was @ 100 lbs packaged up couple of 70-to 80 lbs couple of 60-70 & one @ 50 . my buck itself field dressed @ 239n& 1 doe @ 170 1 buck w/o antlers during muzzleloader season was @ 210 lbs.

Great stuff!

How's the tri-tip on the grill?

way to go!! think i'll go warm up what we grilled last nite:rock:

Great flavor, but it can be a little chewy unless sliced thin after cooking. I season it liberally with McCormick Montreal Steak seasoning. Rub the seasoning in and put it in a ZipLoc bag with a few ounces of Kraft Zesty Italian dressing. Squeeze the air out of the bag and let it marinate in the fridge for five or six hours, or overnight. Cook to medium rare with lots of hickory smoke and serve the 1/4" slices with a baked potato and your favorite veggie.

You should have been a butcher!! Great looking cuts, better than I can do for sure!
I also cut up my own, I took a big 10pt (165# field dressed) to a local butcher here in 2015 due to the heat (lower 80's in early Nov.) so it wouldn't spoil, only $100...but better than taking a chance.

On any hoofed mammal you will get about 40% of boneless trimmed meat. 40% of 130 is 52 lbs so if you add in the bloodshot and the trimmings you're right at that number.

Great pictorial post !!!

Nice Semi. Excellent post as usual. And a good eatin buck to boot. I always laugh at guys who get their deer from the butcher and say that he must have kept some of the meat. A guy shoots a 100 lb doe through both shoulders and expects to get 70 lbs of meat. NO way Jose! You ruined 5-10 lb of meat right there out of the 40 or so lb you would have gotten.

Plus the liver, kidneys and heart but not many have a heart left that i can use. I tend to break them.

Sounds about right though. I had a doe close to that size. Ended up with 40lbs of meat and i didnt weigh the dog's portion.

When I first started reading this I kept waiting for your humor angle to kick in. It was a great report.

There's nothing funny about boning a deer Deer655.

That sounds good, I'll try it, thanks for sharing

BTW I really like the looks of that Browning rifle. Is that a 78 or an 1885?

It's the B-78 in 25-06. I have two cartridge guns in deer calibers, the B-78 and an 1885 in 45-70. Sweet guns.

Let me modify that statement. The largest caliber cartridge gun I have that loads multiple cartridges is a Marlin 1894c in .38 Special/357 Mag, though I've never hunted deer with it.

[url=https://flic.kr/p/23QtUzZ]

We're sort of like two peas in a pod. I'm fond of MLs, single shot rifles and lever rifles and the old .45-70 cartridge.
I have a Pedersoli Sharps 1874 replica in .45-70 that I'd love to hunt with but I either have to get me a gun bearer or put a wheel on the stock to haul it around! It has a 34" octagonal barrel on it that I believe is 1 1/8" across the flats. What a beast.

That's funny Bronko. I sometimes call this one "The Beast".

Thanks for the original post.
When I got back into deer hunting about nine years ago I decided to process all my own deer. And being the somewhat anal science geek, I weighed everything. I found that my yield was always around 40% of field dressed weight and I wondered whether I was "doing it right" or if I could get more. Now I feel more confident about my "work".
Thanks again.

very nice semi

awesome post.. (Lbs of meat from an average deer) now I can calculate just how expensive the deer meat I feed my wife really is.. she thinks at least $500 dollars a pound! After the new side by side, deer lease, corn, bullets, new scope and spotting scope, it is probably a little more.. boy will she feel special tomorrow night eating a deer burger worth a couple big ones! .. LOL Shoot strait and don't waste bullets:)

Nice pictorial!

I'm assuming the 130 pounds was live weight, which gives you a boneless yield of 37% - the average is 35-40%, so job well done.

A tutorial for estimating the different weights (live, carcass, etc.) can be found here:
http://askthemeatman.com/estimate_deer_weight.htm


Also - for anyone reading through this thread, I implore you to field dress your kills. As an animal scientist with formal meat science training, the biggest factor affecting quality is temperature. The faster you get the meat cooled, the quicker you stop enzymatic breakdown, fatty oxidation and free radical formation (all of which reduce quality).

Field dress, hang (head DOWN to drain the blood from the primary cuts in the rear quarters), de-hide, prop open the chest cavity and store in a 38deg locker - all within 60 mins - and you'll have the optimal results. We all know that sometimes this just isn't possible, but if we aim for that then we at least are striving for the best quality meat possible. Buck poles may be fun, but I'd rather look at other people's prizes, because hanging them from their head for an extended time is very simply reducing the quality of their meat...

S&R

Many hunters here don't bleed the animal: That is a big mistake.


First thing i do after recovering the animal is hang it head down from my truck hanger, cut it's throat and let it bleed out.

Nice job Semi!... Congrats!

I haven't been on here much lately so I just noticed your thread. Had this been a survey I would have said 40-50 lbs. depending on how you butcher and how the animal was shot. I say this because I've been butchering our deer (and some for family/friends) for so many years I can just about guesstimate from the hanging dressed weight of my deer what I'm going to get out of it. Recently I've been writing down the hanging weight and weighing all my cuts, ground meat, etc. before wrapping and writing that down so I can tally it all up when the job is done.
I don't like bone marrow or bone dust on my meat either so nothing is saw cut, the only thing I use my saw for is removing the head, legs, and breaking down the carcass for disposal.
I do all of my cuts with various knives that I keep sharp with both steels and a strop (I hate working with a dull knife). And like you, I prefer to trim my meat well removing as much fat, gristle, and silverskin as possible. I usually strive to get a 35-40% yield.

The buck I killed this year weighed 130 dressed and I ended up with 49 lbs. or about 38% of hanging weight in boneless edible cuts and ground meat.
Backstrap - 5 lb 12 oz
Inner loin - 1lb 6 oz
Ground meat - 13 lb 10 oz
Hot Dog meat - 17 lb 4 oz
Roasts, steaks, etc - 11 lb
By comparison, the buck I shot last year weighed 156 and I ended up with 62.5 lbs or 40% yield from that one.

BPS

Here's a handy step-by-step tutorial for those who have never broken the hind legs into those cuts. I have it in Word.doc format that prints on one page. If anyone wants it in that format send me a Private Message with your email address.

Great post Semi. Many folks have no idea what to expect on how much meat they'll get back. I've only ever taken one to a processor, never again. I'd never done sticks and summer sausage and had them do the whole deer for me. That was many years ago. The cuts I see come from the local butcher is enough to gross anyone out. And based on word from their employees, you likely wont even get the same deer back that you brought in. Thats wrong on so many counts. I do my own now, and have for years. As well as for friends and clients of the company I used to work for. It's really such an easy process once you learn what you're doing. Thanks for your post and helping inform the others! Enjoy the harvest!

Very good post!

-Jake

When I bought my new truck a Ford Lariat, I had an iPhone app to track stuff on the truck. Well the app said I had to name my truck and I called it the beast:

Had a friend who used to be able to separate all the different sections of meat from the bone by hand. Watched him one night. Amazing.

rafsob - I once watched a chef and student have a race for spatchcocking and deboning 2 chickens by hand. The chef ripped the backbone out of the first bird, then finished both birds in under 2 mins - he ended up with almost perfect boneless cuts. If the meat temp is around 40-42 degrees you can separate many of the primary cuts by hand on most carcasses, including beef. On that note, I taught my hunting partner how to debone by hand some of the bigger cuts (like the longissimus) on elk while in the field - when the carcass is warm it's not even a challenge...

Nice job Semi! :)

Glad you mentioned "doggy treats" Semi...

I always take the sinewy strips and the leathery exterior strips that I take off my cuts and dehydrate them for "doggy jerky". I also take a lot of the clean but gristly or gnarly chunks that get trimmed off and run them them through my grinder after I've ground my own good stuff so our little spoiled rotten Jack Russel Terrier gets her own jerky and burger from each deer we kill!!

BPS