From the Rockies to the Butcher Block an Exclusive Elk Processing Session

Step into the rugged world of wild game processing with Blondies Butcher Shop. In this episode, Lindsey covers the intricacies of handling elk meat straight from Colorado, as she shares insights into the challenges and rewards of processing wild game. Learn the art of bone-out techniques, discover tips on preserving meat quality, and get a glimpse into the unique flavors of elk. From gunshot damage assessment to creating flavorful burger packages and jerky, Lindsey provides a fascinating tutorial for both seasoned hunters and culinary enthusiasts. Don’t miss the behind-the-scenes action at Blondies Butcher Shop!

What You’ll Learn:

• Wild game handling skills for elk processing, highlighting the challenges and rewards
• Elk butchering techniques from bone-out methods to flavorful burger packages and jerky
• The unique flavor of wild game with Blondie’s signature techniques that transform elk cuts

Transcript:

Lindsey: Alright. So the first the Wild Game has rolled into the butcher shop. I don’t do a ton of wild game. I primarily harvest beef. They’re kind of my favorite thing to do. I do pods only for specific farmers that I really enjoy working with, but primarily beef. I used to get into a lot more wild game. I just don’t have the time now. I think I found what you’re the best at and the fastest at Wild game is kind of a season where you almost need to completely shut down and processing any other animal and just do wild game. And my facility is really not set up like that and hopefully down the line I’ll be able to show you guys some of my friends in the butcher industry that have really phenomenal deer setups and how they make really good money this time of year and they shut down their other stuff. So hopefully sometime we’ll go take a tour of St Joe’s Meat Locker. They have a phenomenal setup as well and some really great meat lockers in Wisconsin. Hopefully we’ll get to tour, but this is an elk that came overnight from Colorado yesterday. Most of my hunters that I do work with or tell that I will usually harvest their elk and they’re on the road the next day with it. Otherwise they’re spending thousands of dollars, leaving it in the state and giving it a process to meat lockers out there. That I wouldn’t say price gouge, but I mean they’re there to make the money and it is the industry in that area. So a lot of my hunters will pack them on ice, throw them in their trailers and they’ll high tail it here in the middle of the night. Luckily this hunting season we had really great weather. Average outside is about 40 degrees, which is the same temp as my harvest cooler. So it’s been great hauling weather for food safety and stability of getting elk crossing winds. This is a bull elk that I’m going to bone out here quick and we’ll probably run across a pair of testicles in here because they actually have to keep the appendage attached and prove what animal they are crossing state lines with if they do happen to get pulled over by the DNR or an inspector. So I’m just going to go ahead and start de-boning the bull elk.

I didn’t even ask him what size this was. It’s a nice one a lot of times my wild game will come from out west and it’ll be really dirty because they feel dress it right away. Therefore I don’t take a lot from people I don’t know, for food safety reasons. This happens to be my taxidermist elk so I’m always bartering him with my husband’s deer or a fancy skull. I get in here on a beef that might be a longhorn or a highlander. We’re always going back and forth bartering so that’s how I got stuck here next week. So most of them feel dress them when they’re socks. If I can keep them, they wash up super nice and you can use them again in your next hunt. So the guys that were on this hunt are all professional marksmen, taxidermy guys. So the meat’s super clean and it’s really a butcher’s dream.

You can see. Here’s the front. It’s the front shoulder, the elephant’s left shoulder, so you can kind of see where there was some wound damage, where he shot him. This bruiser you saw I’ll cut off. You don’t want to mix this in with your meat. Not that it would probably be bad. It might have a little different flavor to it. It’s definitely going to be more irony.

Granted, elk bulls are a little bit out of rut. I would still taste it. They’re not my most favorite. I would take a cow over a bull when it comes to elk. Bone structure layout is similar to a deer A white tail deer Just a bigger concept. They actually got lucky on a ranch and there was a pile of elk sitting there and they went and happened to run into the ranch manager. He’s like go get him, go get him right now.

Ranchers out west are huge fans of elk. They’re a great acre tourism and cash flow resource for their ranches. A lot of people consider it a huge hindrance. When I worked on the galt ranch, one of my very first jobs as this Midwest farm girl was being exposed to wild game. Wild game that was a lot more aggressive than a white tail deer. They will just walk through a six-tranded, far more fence and get into a hay pile. Out west you’ll see ranchers constantly have hay piles and all different pastures depending on if they’re running first time calving heifers to three year old cows calving for the second time. They’ll have hay piles in all these separate areas so it’s easier for feeding throughout a snowstorm in the wintertime, easy access to this. That also brings in the wild game, especially the moose and really especially the elk.

So one of my first jobs when I worked on the gall ranch which at that point in time I think Bill was running about 100,000 acres and I think 4,000 had a beef. He had a whole herd of elk walk through his hardware fence and they eat the bottom row of the hay out and all the top bales fall over onto the elk. So they’re very much a nuisance Mind you, when those bales fall either they kill them or they suffocate them because they’re stuck under there and by the time you find them you’ve got 30, 40 dead elk and all of your winter hay destroyed, or at least a good chunk of it. So elk are considered a huge nuisance when in the hunter world they’re a prime hunt. So it’s a good trade-off for both the hunter and the rancher on west.

Enjoying unsalvageable dead elk that have been there for weeks is not a fun thing. So on this elk we’re just going to, I’m just kind of taking I call it the crusties, the gross stuff up. Anything I wouldn’t want ground in my hamburger. Here’s also glands. I’m not a huge fan of leaving anything like that on there because they don’t probably still have some hormonal smells to it. Or can you leave that in the meat if you grind it in. So yeah, some nice mussel chunk If you’re doing deer whitetail in the area here and I’ll hopefully get a whitetail in here at some point in time. It’s hunting season this weekend in Minnesota, so it’s going to be madhouse my favorite thing to do.

I’m not a huge fan of washing carcasses. I like to take a torch to them and torch the hair off of them right away, and then I always wash them last. So if you can torch and burn as much hair as you can off your carcass, you’re going to have a really clean, great meat. If you start with water, you have to remember that the high is on elk, deer moose are. They’re almost like a needle, like a needle you give your shop self with. So the hair follicle is hollow on the inside and it’s long, so it insulates, it repels water, it hides a lot of junk and you’re not going to get it to wash off, because it’s the job of the hair itself is to repel water and weather elements, right? So go ahead, burn that off. That burn, you know, isn’t going to do anything negative to your meat, I mean, unless you sit there and cook your meat. But you’re good, I’m one meat locker. Some do, some don’t.

I’m not a big fan of mixing venison batches, I think, or even both batches a lot of time. The bigger boys will do it. You know they have so many orders for mile sticks or so many orders for summer sausage. They’ll do a massive batch, which I’m fine with. I think a lot of those lockers are really cautious of how clean the meat is before they mix it. It still blows my mind that people will bring high-end game in with incented garbage bags. That is the number one thing and that will rep your meat. It will destroy it. You will not want to eat it, trust me, and I’ve had it happen every year and you should see the guy’s face is like you’re kidding me and I’m just saying like how did you not smell it when you opened it?

I tell people they need to bring me at least 10 to 15 pounds to make a batch. The more the merrier. I like 25 pound batches. I can always add more pork or beef to it if you don’t have enough trim. There’s enough cleaning and then this type of stuff this is all gunshot damage. Oof Smells like a bull, that pheromone testosterone smell. If you know it and you’ve smelled it, you know it, you know how you smell it. This is one of those moments where your smell of vision would be like a really good learning tool. So most of this is external bleeding, capillary damage, bruising, you know, depending on how the animal went down, if they fell, if they were able to walk, you know a couple hundred yards, or maybe they really had to track them. This is actually a super nice bull elk. There’s minimal damage and I know he was able to drop him pretty quick in his tracks, which is always the best kind of harvest for meat quality.

Animal weakness I don’t think there’s anything worse than a hunter knowing he wounded something and it’s still out there. I think last year I had one of my former friends was out in the field. He had this gorgeous, gorgeous buck come across the field and I think he was on by three legs. He had a shotgun with him so he ended up harvesting. He had a tag with him. He ended up harvesting. The buck brought him into me quick, parked with her actor and I got into him and he had arrows growing into shoulder blades. So this big, tough buck had been wounded for the last couple years and had survived every wound, except for broken legs.

You never survive broken legs. They have hollow bones as well. So when they break they’re done. That’s why car accidents with deer you can get the tag from your sheriff when they come on scene, whatnot. It’s not my favorite, depending on how you hit it. Did it destroy their gut, sock? Did they have fecal material in their body cavity? Whatever the case may be. So this isn’t like the most prettiest bone out I’ve had, but this is where the gun shot was. So a lot of damage. You might have clean muscle, but it’ll have capillary breakage on the other side. I don’t even mess with this. I don’t want it in my burger, so I’m not going to put it in his. The shoulder blade bones have a ridge on them. I’ll show you that. You kind of see the ridge on it just like a white-tailed deer would have, or he’ll lead.

If you are out west, a lot of times you can get antelope tags over the counter. If you do and you’re new to handling antelope know that they have an enzyme in their meat that retains other meats. It will rock your other meats. So if you’re doing antelope, make sure you’re gutting them last. Or cleaning your knives up super, super good. Make sure your meat does not mix with your elk meat or your white tail meat or your mule meat. Keep antelope separate. When antelope comes into my meat locker I handle it completely, away from everything else. I don’t want to touch the table that I have then this and that, because it will change your meat and your customer will be like this is horrible. So that’s a side note on you. My boss used to call him speed goats, so that’s what I’ve always known an antelope to be speed goats.

Which do you think of? Antelope? Like a lot of tendon? This is like white tendon in here. Beef head this too, my grinder hates it. This is actually in the beef. This type of tendon you can kind of see here it’s a neck tendon. We make band-aids, rubber bands, those types of stretchy things out of this type of tendon. You won’t want to eat it because you won’t be able to chew it. The grinder will not like you if you put it through it A little more tedious. So this is quartered. So he already removed the linoid, the tender linoids. We’re going to get to those. I think he kept the heart here, so we’ll process the heart. Otherwise we have four quarters two hind roms and two french lures. We’ll clean this up some more.

You can see the really good ridge there, front leg. Sometimes you do a really sharp knife and you get to the end of your shoulder blade. I’ll show you this. When you get to the end of shoulder blades or even to like end of ridge sections whether it’s a beef or pig well, eat whatever should come out really well. You can see here how easy a sharp knife which is better this way how easy a sharp knife can take home. The shoulder blade turns to cartilage on the top. It’s really soft, pliable and my knife just cuts it’s a bit of a cut that bone. If you don’t remove it it will dull your knife blades in your grinders, your blades and blades, blades and knives. Also, you’re going to have it all in your camera and you’re not going to like it because it will not break down enough. You can walk behind me. I’m sure they’ll just pass forward through this. I already did not paint you. I went all the way. I did not paint you. Yeah, he wasn’t here. By the way, he has a knowledge for April. Yet again, I wonder how big they are. April said they weren’t as big as some Andes, but I was expecting them. They’re big.

Sometimes, when I’m cutting these deer. I always think about the trauma patients I would bring into my trauma surgeons in the ER and now I have the utmost respect for them because putting some of this back together is creasy. A lot of this stuff. I call it snot. You’ll see it on Range Buffalo that come in that. I’ve had People hunt for a pack up in Montana and bring them back. They’ll get res license to go shoot. It seems like snot Sometimes. It doesn’t matter how sharp or many if you have, it’s still just snot and it’s like cutting snot.

You remember these are not farm animals, they’re range. So their diet is very, very different from a domesticated elk would be. So you’re not going to see the marbling that you might see in a farmed elk. They’re going to have more of a sagey smell to them. They eat a lot of bark, twigs, branches, pine.

You can show all the lymph glands out. Lymph glands will add a taste to your meat. You won’t want to eat it. I’m not saying you can’t, it will just add up a few flavor. Same on meat as well. I always do my best to get them removed and you’ll know them. They all look like little jello nodules, on beef especially. It’s a nice little meat. It’s a nice little meat. It’s just going to peel the top muscle off. This is residual. This is almost like muscle that was bled on. It might be a little damaged but I would still grind this. I don’t feel like that’s something that I would keep out. I’m not going to do that.

If you go into some of the Yuzumi hawkers out west, they’re insane. They are well-oiled machines. This is all they do. They live for hunting season. People fly in special to work. The community comes together Because the hunts are moving in. There’s a lot of disposable income that comes to a lot of those small western towns and that is a lot of times what people live off for the year. Hunting season is a huge commodity, huge agritourism Out west, down south Midwest.

I think we’re doing everything in this elk into burger packages. I am going to add a little beef tallow to it, which is the kidney fat that hangs in the belly of a beef. I like beef tallow with elk over pork fat. It’s just my personal preference and he wanted his burger company. So we’re gonna shoot for like a 90-10. So I’m just gonna do that calculation and wait off of what my final term numbers are.

Some of you might be curious what kind of knife I’m using. I’m using a six inch boning knife. This is a Victor Knife Victor Knives. The other thing we’re doing is jerking with this. So some of these larger muscles we’ll keep and we’ll go ahead, we’ll go through them and we’ll slice them up, marinade them and come in the pan and they’ll smoke for probably about I don’t know seven to eight hours, probably not that long, because this is a lot neater than say, like a feature, he would be Sorry.

We’re harvesting some pigs, if you hear them Sometimes. If you have hair, see if I can do this. If you have hair and you don’t have torch with you and you don’t want to dull the blade on your knife, you can peel this piece of skin up and you can kind of work it back with your knife and take all of this kind of dirt and grossness off that basically nobody wants in their meat. Kind of peel it off, you’re not losing much meat. It’s dirty meat, you don’t want it. You always run your hand along the top of the blade here too, and tie in your bone right. Follow your knife right along that. Okay, so that is my Wild Game tutorial.