You know the saying that you eat an elephant one bite at a time, well I found out this past week the processing an entire elk by yourself is about like eating an elephant. After our hunt it took me basically a full week to get from the time the elk hit the ground until I got everything packaged up and in the freezer not counting the 1.5 days the elk meat was in transit on the way home. The good news is that the freezer is mostly full and we should have plenty of meat to get through the year. Meat crisis averted!
Day 1 – the elk went down just before dark on Wednesday, October 25th. That night all that got done was getting the animal gutted, harvesting the organs and tongue and getting the animal up to hang for the night.
Day 2 – I got to skin and quarter a big animal totally by myself for the first time. I managed to get the elk broken down into quarters, cut out the backstraps and tenderloin and carved off the brisket, neck meat, … I deboned the front quarters and broke them down into major muscles but left the rear quarters hanging for another night.
Day 3 – I got the rear quarters deboned and broken down into the major muscles. I also cut up the backstrap into baggie sized pieces and got everything in the cooler. I managed to finish this first step around noon which was good because we had two more elk to process in the afternoon between the four of us.
Day 4-4.5 – elk was in transit
Day 5 – Once the elk arrived I started on packaging up the easy stuff – backstraps, tenderloin, organs, … Alll this ended up in the freezer by Sunday evening.
Day 6 – Monday was all about cutting steaks and roasts and getting them in the freezer along with building up bowls and bags full of grind and stew meat.
Day 7 – Finally I was in grind mode. I cut up all the leftovers and sorted some for stew meat and others for making burger and sausage. I ground 30# of burger that day and got sausage ready to roll with spices and fat. At the end of the day managed to get one 5# batch of Sage-Juniper sausage done
Day 8 – After a morning break of pheasant hunting where we added another rooster to the freezer I got on the last 5# of Elk Chorizo and finished it up.
I’m exhausted and a bit sore. The hunt lasted 3 hours, the aftermath lasted a week. This was only my second big-game animal butchering experience and I learned a lot in the process. To think it was only a few years ago when I attended the Farm Wife Mystery School and Annette taught me how to slaughter and process a rabbit which was the first mammal I’d ever dealt with. Since that time I’ve done a lot of birds but only one deer and now one elk. Luckily an elk is just a really big rabbit anatomy wise and having done the deer last year really helped but I learned a lot doing this elk by myself and I’m sure it would be a bit faster next time around. I also learned to make sausage at the Farm Wife school and hadn’t really done it since so it was fun to make a few different types of sausage with the elk meat leftovers. Thanks also to Hank Shaw and his book Buck, Buck, Moose which has a really good section on butchering and the recipes for the sausages that I made.
There was about 2.5x the amount of meat from this cow as there was from the mule deer I got last year and that really helped to fill things up. Add to that a few pheasants from a March preserve trip, 8 pheasants from October and the 4 from September’s warm up trip, one turkey left from May, a pile of trout and salmon and our freezers are pretty full. On top of that we have a bit of leftover beef and pork from last fall and a dozen or so chickens but most of what is in there is food that I harvested myself which was my goal for this year.