Butchering: Bare-Bones Basics

Enlarge Image Image Gallery The professional butcher would begin by cutting down the spine to split the carcass in half lengthwise. Each half is then divided into hindquarter, midsection, and forequarter. Each of these three main sections can then be butchered into large portions, as labeled above. The smaller drawings indicate a few, but by no means all, of the serving-size cuts and dishes that can be obtained from each portion.

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Here's a butchering technique that can help you cut an intimidating job down to size.

by David Harper

My first successful big-game hunt came at the age of 14. I learned then how to field-dress and skin a deer, but I wasn't quite ready to take on the formidable task of butchering such a large animal. (Besides, the Thanksgiving holiday was over by the time I got home from the hunt, and I was due to return to my duties as an eighth-grade delinquent.) So after I'd properly prepared the field-dressed carcass by removing the hide, head, and lower legs, my dad hauled it to the neighborhood butcher, who cooled it in his meat locker for a few days, then converted it into neatly wrapped and marked packages of meat . . . all for the very fair price of 3¢ a pound.

Things have changed over the quarter of a century that has elapsed since that first hunt, and these days, in the Colorado Rockies where I live, it would cost me more than ten times as much to have a deer or other biggame animal processed professionally.

So I don't.

Instead, I do it myself. Have been for several years now. And so can you. I'll tell you how . . . but first, take a few minutes to study Figs. 1 and 2 and read the accompanying brief description of professional butchering techniques. That way, you'll be in a better position to see how my somewhat unorthodox method differs from the norm.

Let me begin by drawing a couple of broad generalizations: In general, professional-style butchering involves producing cuts of meat that look like those you're used to seeing in the grocer's meat cooler . . . T-bone steaks with those T-shaped bones right there where they should be, for instance. But to produce such aesthetic cuts of meat takes skill and a lot of tedious back-and-forthing with a bone saw: A task that a professional butcher, working in a commercial meat-processing shop, can whiz through in a matter of seconds with a powerful electric band saw would take you or me a good deal longer to accomplish by hand. What's more, unless you're careful and have at least a smattering of knowledge about what you're doing, you're likely to wind up with bone dust polluting those hard-earned steaks.

My butchering technique is totally different: I remove the meat from the bones. That eliminates the time- and energy-consuming sawing chores, but at the same time produces some rather odd-looking cuts. (Visualize a T-bone steak with the T deleted and you'll have an idea of what I mean.) Of course, they taste every bit as good as their professional-looking counterparts—and, what's more, they take up less space in my cramped deep freeze.

Fact is, I'm proud of my no-bones butchering style, and I've had such good results with it over the past several years that I wouldn't consider attempting a more complicated method. But before I begin explaining how you can duplicate it, I reckon it's only fair to own up to how I "discovered" it: Truth is, my technique was born out of an equal blend of desperation and ignorance.

The very first hour of the very first morning of my very first elk hunt, I got lucky. My luck held through the day, as I was fortunate enough to talk a local outfitter into lending me one of his mules to pack the horsesize bull elk down from his mountaintop domain. But once I got my trophy home, it began to look as if my luck had run out.

There I was, the proud owner of 600 or so pounds of elk carcass that needed to find its way into a freezer pronto . . . and me without a spare $120, which is what it would have cost to have the meat processed commercially at the then going rate of 20¢ a pound (it's since gone up to 35¢ a pound). And to make things even more interesting, even though I'd been hunting deer since my earliest teenage years, I'd never butchered one myself. Hadn't even watched someone else do it. Worse yet, since big-game hunting season is a national holiday in my neck of the Colorado woods (they even let school out for two days!), every last do-it-yourself butchering book in the public library had already been checked out by the time I got there.

So I did what I had to do. I pulled a picnic table into the shed where that big old bull elk was hanging to cool. I assembled my knives, bone saw, sharpening implements, wrapping paper, marking pen, and freezer tape. Then, with my old yaller scrap-eating dog standing by to assist, I set to it.

It took me four full days of finger-numbing work to get the job done (the shed wasn't heated, and neither was the elk). The results weren't recognizable as anything you could put a name on ("Where's the T-bones?" my wife wanted to know), and I'm sure I wasted some meat in the process of amateurish experimentation and on-the-job training (much to my dog's delight). But by golly, I wound up with several hundred pounds of lean, top-quality meat in the freezer, that $120 still in my bank account rather than the butcher's, and best of all, the satisfaction of having overcome what four days earlier had seemed an insurmountable obstacle: my own ignorance.

Since that first time I've home-butchered another elk (the second one took only two days) and several deer (a day each), and worked most of the bugs out of the technique.

I'll lay out the basics of it for you here, and I predict that you'll be as satisfied with the results of your first attempt as I was with mine.

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