 Well, I had another successful beer season, luckily this year, since we don't have any other way to get meat. So I was really glad I was able to get to eat beer about the time ago. And so I'm in the middle of processing it now. I'm here cleaning up my beer stand, so that it can sit empty from winter. But yeah, I just want to kind of walk through the process of how I was able to get the beer and what I did with them to save the meat so we can eat it all next year. You can hear the beer season, which is one of my few ways that I can now get meat. Seeing as we can't just pop over to the grocery store and buy anything. So I am out and I've been out here since sunrise. I've already seen seven doughs, but I'm going to wait to shoot a dough or a female deer. At least for a day or two. Just because it only takes one, two, and pregnant a whole bunch of doughs. But a dough is only going to produce one or two deer every year. So I might as well leave that alone if I can help it. Going up a little lunch. I've seen plenty of doughs and one buck, but the buck didn't come this way. Now I'm just having a bit of lunch, taking a break, looking forward to the afternoon. This was surprisingly not as hard as I expected to bring in a deer on the back of a bike. Glad to know I can do it without a truck if need be. The deer is one of the best insulating animal hairs. It's hollow, it's really warm. And so right now all the body heat from this deer is stuck inside. So I need to get this hide off of him as soon as I can and open up his chest cavity so he can cool down. So the meat can hang and season a little bit. I've been hunting deer since I was a little kid. I've been helping butcher deer since before that. The big part of growing up and getting most of our meat. Well, a lot of our meat, I don't know if most, but quite a lot of our meat from venison, from my great uncle's property. It's quite the family tradition. Then when I left Northern Minnesota, went to college and other things, people kind of looked down their nose at hunting and wild game. And I didn't do it for years and not because of peer pressure. Just I didn't have the time or capacity. I didn't have a vehicle. I lived in a place I didn't have access to hunting land and I just never got a chance to do it. And then when we moved to somewhere where I could go hunting, we started talking about buying only grass fed organic beef from farmers we could meet that sort of thing. Looking at a more ethical way to source meat because of just craziness that is industrial meat production. We wanted to get a more healthier, happier animal sort of thing. And so I floated the idea of Laurel, what if I start hunting? Because even with the violence of shooting a deer and butchering it myself, this animal has had a much happier life I would imagine than any cow or any domesticated animal. Even those with the best life. I think this deer probably had a better life than our chickens and our chickens have a pretty darn good life. And I try and do my best to kill them quickly and cleanly, reduce the suffering as much as I possibly can. Try not to take chancey shots, running, anything like that. This deer, for example, probably died within 10 seconds of getting hit because it went through both of his lungs and his diaphragm. So he essentially couldn't breathe almost instantly. And he wasn't able to run away or anything. I feel good about that. Doesn't always go that cleanly. But that's what we tried for. So a deer like this, which is probably judging from the horns a year and a half old. So he would have been a fawn born not last spring but spring before. Maybe a year before that. It's hard to tell sometimes. We're probably going to get anywhere between 40 and 60 pounds of meat depending on how closely I clean in this year. I'll probably be cleaning them pretty close because we don't want as much meat as we can get. Even if it's meat that we end up giving to the dog without access to dog food. It's going to be nice to get her some more protein and us as well of course. We're just about out of meat from last year because we can't go to the grocery store and buy meat. This is it. It's like taking off the world's most stubborn fur coat. Hit him in the back. He was 200 yards away so I aimed actually a little high. But it looks like I didn't need to do that. I thought I'd hit him in the lungs because he went down so quickly. You can see the steam. I don't know if the camera's picking it up but the steam coming out of him will only increase once I get the chest cavity open. A lot of fat on his back. We may try and render that and make soap actually. Something we have to look up on the internet to see if that's even possible but deer soap. Not a huge deer. Not small either though. It's a medium. Now I've got to wash the hair off him and get the limbs off. But otherwise he is just going to sit and open up his chest cavity here. You just see the steam. I don't know if you can but the steam is just rising out of him. So I want to get this meat down as cool as possible as quickly as possible so that it'll be good to eat. Well it's now a few days later and the deer has been hanging up. So now I'm going to basically cut it up into bits. I've got some bins over here for saving fat, saving hamburger and then saving stew meat. And then also saving roasts and things like that. Right now I'm just pulling off chunks of fat. Deer fat unfortunately isn't as delicious as pig or beef fat. Never mind the boy there. So instead of using it to flavor things like sausage I'm giving it to Lauren after I render it to turn into soap. To use the fat to turn into soap. So my butchering I just use a filet knife. That's all I really need. So first I'm going to take off this elbow. So I'm not going to make an instructional video how to do this. There are much better videos out there for people who know a lot more about what they're doing than I do. I'll link to the best one I know of. I learned how to butcher the basics I learned from my dad. Growing up this used to be a Sunday afternoon. At the end of an airpunting weekend we'd cut up and grind whatever meat we had gotten that weekend. Usually watching the Vikings game. But now I live in Wisconsin so I've got to keep that a little quiet. And here now is a nice small roast with some excess meat or excess fat on it that I'll save for soap making. So that'll get ground up into hamburger. This bucket when I'm not actively cutting up a deer will go outside because it's a refrigerator temperature outside which helps me because I don't have a lot of refrigerator capacity. So being able to use the outdoors as a fridge is super useful. I've had the deer hanging up in the garage for a few days now. And now we have another shoulder. Time to get this second shoulder off. Like I said the shoulder isn't really held on by anything other than muscle and tissue. So it's really just pulling and cutting the connected tissue. I'm going to take this whole deer apart with a four inch boning knife. There it goes. Take space at a minimum. The reason for doing that is stew meat's going to get cooked anyway. So I might as well cube it and cook it now. And then we can add it to chilies and foods. Deer meat has to be canned in a pressure canner for 75 minutes for pints. I have a little amount of pressure. It lids on here. You don't have to add any juices. It's just cut up venison and it cooks. It creates its own juices and literally stews in its own juices. And then they're shelf-stable for a year so I can pop them on the shelf instead of taking up freezer space with nine more pounds of venison. The pressure cooker underway. We're at about 12 pounds. It's been 15 minutes and then these will be done. Nine pints of stew meat. And then here I have all the deer fat and that's rendering down. Put it in a half a cup of water. Drops all the fat out and hopefully I'll get a big fat, thick layer of fat that I can pour through some cheesecloth and then Lauren can make some soap out of this. Never had deer soap before. Supposedly actually makes pretty good soap because that's good because deer fat is basically useless for anything else. You can't eat it. It coats your mouth with this oily feeling. It's not very pleasant. It's not a great eating fat unfortunately. The choke point of our... And slices it and pushes it through a little bit of a gate. Kind of like this. This is the fine. I've got the course on there. I'll run it through once. Chill the meat again. And then run it through on the fine setting and then package it up. After about 45 minutes I've got just little... Krispies there. And then almost three pounds of fat. Which will get turned into soap like I've said. So we'll wait for that to cool. I'm trying to get just a little bit more fat out of there. A little more water. Which steams it and all the fat drops out. I pour it through the colander. And then I pour the fat right into these cans. Deer fat. Rendered deer fat and coconut oil. Is that right? Yes. We're making... Are we? Lauren's making... Soap. That's not terrifying. Safety first, huh? Professor? Yes. Wear gloves. So what's being poured in the lye? It's being poured into the... Lye into the oil. Lye into liquid. Not the other way around. And this nice butter color? Yes it will. It may fade a little bit but... Crisis averted. We found a cap. A lot of soap. Yeah. How many bars will that be? Depends on the size of the bar you want. Okay. I'd say it's probably... 12 to 15. Right. Well I'm quite literally back to the grind. I'm working through about 27 pounds of meat and fat that I'm grinding from chunks into small bits. It's been freezing outside all night so it's nice and cold. Not quite frozen but dang near. So I'm going to run it through on my thick dye and then pop it in the freezer. And then pop it in the freezer to cool back down before I stuff it into casings. Alright now that I have a bowl full I'll take my pan out of the freezer. I've got three of them in there. Three big pans. I'll do a couple smaller pans rather than one big pail. Because then when I'm working with these later, a little bit out of the freezer at a time rather than letting it all warm up together. So now this goes in the freezer. Empty. Empty. Now I give this thing a quick clean to get the connective tissue off. Yeah is that a hat? So yeah here we got some sinews and things stuck on here. So I'll pull these off now. If I were to run it through another bowl I generally get it. It generally ends up being over clogged and it just takes forever. So better to clean it before it needs... Before it gets all clogged up. Then to wait. Okay I've got everything ground and cold. And now I've mixed up some good bacteria. These guys will put the right amount of lactic acid and other things in the sausage. Essentially what I'm doing is I'm putting these good bacteria in so that they eat all the bacteria food in the sausage. Leaving cured meat. So this will help drive out or out compete the bad bacteria. Stick it into this tub. Okay pop that back in the freezer. Luckily it's cold enough outside that I've been able to put all of my frozen meat from my dear previously outside in the cooler. I pour in my mixture and I want to make sure that gets everywhere. Because I don't want any large bits that aren't inoculated with this good bacteria. I want the good bacteria in. So I'm breaking up any frozen bits here. So I had to modify my filling thing because the... Never mind the music there. The KitchenAid mixer it was smearing. It was crushing all the different granules of meat. Which is not really what you want. You want to compress them together into the casing. And it was smearing them into a gray kind of goop. Which is not what you want. So I have at the top of a vinegar container. Which is the right diameter to accept my fibrous fillings. And then I made a plunger that fits exactly in here. Now I take my casing. Get the excess water off. I'm sorry about the background. Luckily it's all public domain. So then this goes on. Put the casings down. Obviously I'd like to have a longer, smoother horn. That would make it easier to get as much of the casing on there as I can. But I didn't have access to go buy more stuff. I had to make it. So this is what I came up with. I could probably make something out of PVC if I had access to it. That would work even better. The casing on here is kind of tedious. I should be big. Now I take my funnel. Hold it in this hand. Put meat in. Use my plunger. It actually works really smoothly to push plugs of meat down into the casing. The only thing is I have to make sure I squeeze it nice and tight. It's one of the nice things about this fibrous casing is it has... It's pre-pricked so the air pockets really don't exist. It has plenty of venting for the air. Fairly forgiving. I've only ripped one and it was near the top so it wasn't a big deal. So I'm getting about a pound. A pound and two ounces in each of these or so. A little over a pound. Some of that's water. Some of that will dehydrate away. Or smoke away, I imagine. Which helps keep it preserved. So I imagine these will end up being about a pound each. I don't know if the video is clear enough but if you look closely you can see white specks appearing on the sides. And that's liquid pushing out through the vents. I'm going to leave my side about just a couple inches. Give it a tighten down and squeeze. Tighten it down a little more. Now it's ready to be tied. Now once they're stuffed I take and hang them from a little loop here. So I hang this. Sorry my string just broke. Of course right when I decided to put it on video. So I hang it from this string. I take another loop. Leave myself a couple inches of tail. And then I wrap. And this tamps down. And compresses. Luckily these fibrous casings which are made out of plant material are very forgiving. Especially for a first time sausage stuffer like myself. Now just do a square knot. And then I loop the loop end one more time. Just to give it a little extra pull. So it's not going to pull out. And then I release it. So now I have my stuff sausage. It's got the pre-made loop on this end. And my made loop on this end. And now it goes into the hydration chamber. And now I'm hanging them in this. Well it's my dehydrator but I've got a pan of water down here. Over a pilot light. So that keeps it at a nice 80-85 degrees in here. And with the water pan it humidifies the whole area. So these are the ones I made last night. And now I'm hanging in the back here. The new ones from today. And I do transfer. Like this is what I made yesterday. Now this is not necessarily the best way. The best way is to have hooks on the top. But since this isn't really a made for making sausage. I'm just making do. So the sausages have been fermenting for about 36 hours. Meaning the good bacteria should have defeated all of the bad bacteria. So right now I'm just prepping them to go into... Yes, yes, yes. Prepping them to go into the smoker. But I got the smoker going outside with some apple wood. From an apple tree that came down. And I'll get these things strung up. And pop them out over the fire. Now here in the smoker. At about 90 degrees. I've got all the sausages hanging. Over some apple wood. And ice water to keep them nice and humid and cool. Nothing fancy. Well, thanks for watching. Obviously things look a little different now. You can see how much bigger he is. And now there's this one. And we have been really derelict in getting our videos out. And this is kind of part of the reason. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Is that fish often pulled? No, no, no, no, no, no. So this is part of the reason, these two. They've been keeping me really busy as you can see. No, no, no, no, no. Anyway, so one of the things I wanted to mention. Thanks for watching. It was a year, over a year ago since I got this video together. I'm just getting it up and edited now. Okay, okay, good, okay. And as you can see, it's really hard to do stuff around here with these guys. And so they're going in today. I'll be able to get a lot more work done. This is great, but that also means we need to professionalize what we're doing a little more. And that means your support. And if you've been watching Foodmageddon and you're already at this point, I hope you've gotten a few hours' enjoyment out of it. Dad's gonna knock down. So as you may or may not know, this is an actual non-profit. This isn't a hobby for me. This is actually my job. And a lot of our money comes from grants and things like that. But we are starting to really push and open up to have the community that watches and enjoys our content support us. So we have started a Patreon page, patreon.com slash lowtechinstitute. And that goes for supporting the staff hours it takes to make videos and podcasts and put out all this stuff that, you know, the vast majority of people that interact with us see. And so if you are in a position where you can become part of the community that's supporting us, we'd ask you to check out our Patreon page. That's patreon.com slash lowtechinstitute, all one word. And we have, you know, three bucks a month. Even three bucks a month is a huge help for us. It helps get our staff freed up so that we can make more videos. The staff, yeah. Get the staff freed up so we can make more videos. Make more podcasts. Get more content out there for you to see and enjoy. So again, if you're in a spot to help us out, please consider joining the community that's supporting us. And otherwise, continue to enjoy all of our videos and stuff online. Please share us if you like us. Subscribe. And I hope to have a lot more videos out this summer and through the coming period. The more, the more support we get, the more time our staff has to do this sort of thing. So thank you so much. We really appreciate you watching. And we will be wrapping up food again in the next episode. We'll talk about how well we did, where we didn't do so well, what we would improve, and the lessons we learned in a year of trying to grow all our own food. Can you say goodbye? Bye. This was... Oh, do you want to close it? Here, you can press the red button on the back. On the back... No, not on the screen. On the back of the camera. This is a red light. A red... Here. You can press this button here. And turn it on.