 Welcome back to the channel everybody. The time has come for us to go get, collect our aged meat. I don't know about y'all, but I'm so curious about this. I've been curious about it for years, trying to figure out the best process for getting the best wild game meats, like getting the best tenderness. And I've had some great deer. I've had some great elk. I've had some really bad elk. I've had bad deer. Just chewy, different tastes. I wanna try to dial that in. So we're going to go up and grab our meat today, process it and give it a taste. Another project soon to happen, letting my wood dry for the chicken coop over here. Big learning lesson last time. I put up wet wood. I didn't wait. And I ended up having to put in some spacers just to fill in the gaps. Because after a few weeks when it dried, the wood shrank up, and then I had to fill in the gaps with blocks. It's insane how much wood shrinks and expands. Just a little FYI, I always try to work the dry wood. Okay, y'all, let's take out the knives and let's get to processing some whitetail deer. I'm amazed every time I come up to this spot, I've been here like four or five times now. There's a high fence here that has a lot of really awesome animals, but then the whitetail hunting is just all low fence. Free range, you got free range whitetails. You've got some exotics, really amazing, tasty meats. We got some whitetail right here. At the refrigerator, and I wanna kinda walk you guys, literally walk you guys through what's going on. I want you to look at the meat right here. This is a buck literally from today. So you can see what that meat looks like. This is a deer from about three days ago. It's like a pinkish color here. It's a little darker over here with these fresh deer. It's definitely a process of breakdown. Juices are coming down. It's just, it's different. The meat is starting to break down a little bit. And some of the inside information from the butcher, if you have a really cold, like a good freezer, 27 degrees, 25 degrees, you can let those things hang for like many weeks. If you're just above freezing, kind of like we have here, I think this one was set on like 34, 35. A couple weeks is about what you can get away with. I don't know the specifics on how that taste level breaks down or if the meat gets bad or whatever, but that's just what I learned today. So I thought I'd share it with you guys. So I want you guys to look at the meat here now and look at the coloring, what this looks like. The meat is really dark. Juices have kinda been extracted or gone back in, broken down. Texture feel, I'm not feeling any wetness to it. The fat has kind of dried. It's like, almost feels like jerky. Same kind of texture jerky. It actually sounds like jerky a little bit. Hear that crackle? So this meat has been hanging for about a week, essentially 34 degrees and a walk-in cooler. And now we're gonna break it down. I'm gonna start with the shoulders and I'm just gonna work my way up. I'm no expert on cleaning. You can probably tell. But I am genuinely curious about this meat and y'all it just looks so much different here. You can definitely tell. Like look at the difference in color here on that inside versus the outside. And it's kinda got that, how do you say it? Frasciutto, frasciutto. That Italian aged ham, aged pork. Kinda has that look to it. What we're gonna do next is the back straps. I don't have a meat grinder or anything like that. I'm gonna let the butcher handle all that. But the best parts, the things you think about, steaks, tenderloins, that's just some tasty looking 100% organic natural meats. Yee! Before we cut the back straps and the loins out, I wanna share with you guys product that a company sent me that I think is worth sharing with y'all. And as I was actually looking for some battery and electronic solutions, as you guys know, I carry lots of camera gear, computers, things like that with me, came across this product made by Jackery. It is a portable power system and it's rechargeable. So this is actually the unit right here. I'm gonna use it right now as a vacuum sealing. They are actually offering these units for 20% off if you use the code that's linked down below. If you're an adventurer, big outdoorsman, spend a lot of time at your tailgate, which I do. This is a perfect system. This will actually charge your phone, I think up to this model right here, like 45 times for an iPad or something like that. It's 30 something times. My GoPro batteries and things like that are endless. 50, 60 times more than I would ever need on most of my trips, your power, your laptops, you can power a refrigerator. It's got this LCD display right here so you can see what is going on with the battery. You can see the charge, what levels you're at when you need to recharge it. And it takes about seven hours to fully charge the 500. You have the option to get their solar panel and then that can recharge in like a day's worth time, like if you were at camp, you just set that out and that's gonna be like a 16 hour deal to totally recharge that. But then you're good, again, for a number of days of going off this. So it's a way to just get off the grid and not have like a really loud, noisy generator. So this is the solar panel right here. You can hang it up on like a tree or hang it up on your tent. I ran into the problem of not having enough power on my first Colorado trip this year. And so I will definitely be having the jackery unit with me when I go. They offered to send me one and I wanted you guys to get a discount on them. So there it is. That is the story of the jackery unit. And I'm gonna be using it to vacuum seal the rest of our meat. Backstraps and loins coming out right now. We've got a bullfied, beautiful backstrap. Much of this little scrap meat off as I can. It's, that's good. Just looks like some tasty meat. You see that, see that outside area? It's like hard if you can hear that. And then the other side is what looks really good. I'm just gonna throw it in there. Sure, make some hammer. Just cut this whole flank off. Look at this little loin right here that I'm pulling. I'm basically pulling it out. I'm gonna clean this up. This should be a really tasty piece of meat right here. All right, y'all. We are loaded down with meat. Yeah! Woo! I'm excited to try it. So in this cooler, basically got our quarters. Quarters, got the front shoulders in there. And then over here, I've got a lot of the scrap meats. So that's gonna be burger meat. And then also the loins and backstraps are in there as well. They look really good. So that's probably what we'll cook up tonight. Let's do back seal. I've had this thing running around in my truck with me. Just charging different camera batteries, iPhones. Still at 97% after a week, after the first charge. Sealed really good. Those loins are ready to go whenever. We can eat these a year from now, they'll be fine. Throw it in there. And let's head home for a taste test. Lordy is looking backstrap before us here. So actually on the way home, I talked to a professional chef that works with venison quite a bit. He gave me some awesome information. Always cut the fat off of the deer as soon as you skin it, because they actually don't have fat. Like what you see in beef and even elk, they have what is called tallow, which is basically like wax. And it gives the meat a gamey taste, flavor. So you always want to take that out. I've confirmed like the look of the meat and everything, the feel, that's all normal. The aging process is outside, you know, it kind of almost looks like a jerky, but that is standard, that looks normal. But if you want to freeze it from here, you basically just leave this on and then you would cut it off later because it's a protective layer. It gets freezer, you know, any kind of freezer damage. And then always try to vacuum seal whenever you can. What I'm going to do is actually break down that back quarter, back quarters even more. So I'll put the roast in vacuum seal bags and we'll have those later. But tonight it's all about the straps. This is some of the scraps that I cut off from the silver skin. It was a little bit easier to work with after the aging I noticed. It's still something I struggle with is getting that silver skin off. It's kind of a pain. I was just going to try to like fillet it off, but it just looks like you're taking so much meat, extra meat, so I tried like scraping. I'm going to chop these up into little chunks essentially and then I'm going to throw them in small bowls with spices. You want to make sure you don't overcook venison. There's a lot of blood in it and if you overcook it, it gives it like a burnt liver flavor. It's just not good. Kind of want that little pink center, little blood, little juice. It's not going to hurt you, but if you want to check with the thermometer, 125 in the middle. So I'll cut the straps up into chunks and we've just gone with just a regular old multi-purpose steak seasoning. I put a little cayenne in there as well. I'm already a fan of the aging process for simply the processing of the meat too. I just think it made it a little easier. Pull things off the bones, see the muscle separations. I usually end up just field dressing them and take them to the processor. So it was nice to also see those little extra things that I don't normally get to. Got the grill around 400, 450. We're going to just go bam, bam! Right on the sides, about five minutes apiece. Then I'm going to cover up the grill, let them sit in there for about five minutes, bring them off, let them settle for about five, 10 minutes, just sit in their own juices, let the meat cure, and then we're going to bite in. And I already know it's going to be good, but we're going to see how much better it is. Mm-hmm. I think I'm inside. Are you excited to try these? I am. Because the last ones, they were okay. I think these are going to be much better. I think so. What do we got? Mm, it's not even, it's that 140. 140, oh, it's overcooked, actually. Really? Yeah. Are you sure? Yeah, we're looking for 130, 125, 130. Oh, it's actually climbing. Oh no. Had to change my mic battery, had to go downstairs. It's been five minutes since they've been sitting there by the way, pardon the whispers. We just, we've got to be a little quiet because we don't want to wake the sleeping beautiful monster. Let's sample this meat. This is what it's all about. All right. Cooked to 145 degrees internally. It's way more specific than I normally am. Let's see what it looks like on the inside. Let's check the tenderness. We want to evaluate. It looks actually nicely done. Yeah. Oh yeah, juicy. Keep in mind last time. Much more juicier. More chewy than last time? No. It's not chewy? No, it's not chewy. It's not chewy. All right, what about flavor, like gaminess? Oh, it tastes like a steak. I don't taste anything. Seriously? Mm-hmm. Wow, all right, cut me a slice. I would say it's a little bit overdone. Okay, yeah, well. But it tastes like a steak that was just slightly overdone. Yeah. But it's good. Yeah, you want it bleeding a little bit in there. Way better. It does taste a lot more like a store-bought steak. Yeah. Like, not at the best aisle, like the prime cut, but you got, you went and like skimped a little bit and got like a decent steak. But zero gaminess. Like the meat, I think the meat breaking down. Wow. Good. That's the move. Y'all seeing this? Dang it, I'm sorry. It was a little bloody in the middle still. My apologies. Back to the flavor though. Wow. It's a big difference. There's just a difference in that meat that you could tell. Just, I'm trying to get like aftertaste of gaminess and there's none. I think that was one of the biggest things. The break, I mean, this is also a difference in how the animals passed on to the next life too. Like, I know this one died really quick. This was a quick death. And the other one was real tragic, stressful death. I think purely from a meat breakdown perspective, aging the meat is important. If you have the ability to do this, if you live in a Northern state, you can obviously do this where it's really cold. You just like let them hang. You can probably let them hang in your garage or something. Down here in Texas, it's a little harder. We have to have walking refrigerators unless it's just a week of really cold weather. You know, one great thing that you got, I appreciate though, babe, about this. You know 100% where this meat came from. That would give me like anxiety to watch it just sit there. It honestly looked like jerky on the outside. Like in some areas it literally did look like jerky, but on the inside it just, it looks awesome. So, okay, I think we've learned a clear lesson here. I will be aging all of my deer from now on. Five to seven days, just depending on the temperatures. I might play around with this a little bit more. If you have the opportunity, definitely do it. Get that hide off right away. Hang that meat up and let it sit there in a nice comfortable environment. Make sure you do it real cleanly and the best you can. Make sure that deer's comfortable. Just keep the hair and things like that off of it. And I'm gonna try to do a better job like breaking down deer and go home with some more people this year and just try to learn more. I learned a lot today. Literally from talking to a chef and another hunter. I love learning these things going out there, experiencing them and then bringing them to you guys via the camera lens and the internet. So, go ahead and smash that like button for that. And if you wanna stay tuned for more action with the Lake Life Family Channel. We got a video coming up this week. We do. Very soon. You've been rolling in the hay with some deer. You got deer hair all over you. It's just deer hair. I was rolling with the deer's mane. Thank you guys for being here. God bless you. I'll see you on the next one.