Meat Processing 2011

On the last weekend in February, we headed down to Nada to process and prepare the meat our family will eat for the year.





The starting totals this year (for four families and one guest):
Deer 249 pounds
Deer Jerky 18 pounds
Wild Pork 104 pounds
Purchased Pork 120 pounds
Total.... 491 pounds of meat!



Usually, we are able to use wild hog for 100% of the hog meat, but this year, they had a hard time trapping wild hogs, so we had to buy pork from a local meat market. It was easier than cleaning a hog, but also not free.

All of that meat went into the four variations of processed meat we make each year:


Jerky, dried sausage (like jerky), summer sausage, kielbasa-stlye sausage and ground meat.

Most of the meat is ground in two industiral sized meat grinders (I usually end up running a grinder for most of Saturday).





We brought home 98 pounds of finished meat this year. 35 pounds ground meat, 50 pounds of sausage (yikes, this sounds like a lot!), 8 pounds of summer sausage, 5 pounds of dried sausage and jerky. My family will eat this for the next 12 months... and with 50 pounds of sausage, that means I need to serve 1 sausage per week!