Q: Personally, I think it high time someone rubbished the notion that when you wash a dressed deer you cause it to spoil.
In my experience working in an abattoir, this insistence on not washing a deer is pure nonsense.
All packers of meat animals, after skinning and eviscerating a carcass, wash it with cold water.
Cold water dissolves blood, whereas hot water sets or congeals it.
After its blood has been washed away with cold water, the carcass is hung in a cool room.
Just because it has been hunted, should venison be treated any differently?
Wayne Barlow
A: I agree with you! A deer — which should be opened promptly when killed — usually has a good deal of blood in the body cavity, even after a head shot.
With a body shot there is even more blood, and it often scatters the stomach’s contents throughout the cavity.
It is important, therefore, not only to wash the carcass promptly but also to cool it down to around freezing so as to prevent the growth of bacteria.
If you don’t wash blood and dirt off a carcass immediately, once it dries it won’t wash off — which means later it will have to be cut off, and that means more waste.
I’ve found that if the deer has been shot in the body, it will start to sour within 18 hours. Venison from a head-shot deer won’t go off for around 30 hours, whether it has been pepper treated or not.
Washing a carcass that has been pepper treated will double the time it takes to sour.
After killing a deer, the best procedure is to drain off its blood by cutting its throat, remove the musk bags from the hind legs, remove the testicles if it’s a buck, open the body and remove the intestines etc, wash the cavity in cold water, hang it in the shade to drain, and then skin the animal as soon as possible.
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