Yo Ron, Thank you for answering my questions. I cannot wait to try this out! I have a lot of venison on hand now. I have three former coworkers who are trophy hunters who do not care much for venison and they donate their deer to me. The deer are legally harvested and tagged when I receive them. They are field dressed only so I get to skin and butcher them. I reciprocate their generosity with various BBQed meats for their freezers. This year they received one pound each of pulled pork, pulled chicken, smoked (belly) bacon, Canadian bacon, pork (back rib) riblets, venison summer sausage and venison pastrami. Even though they do not care much for venison, they do like the summer sausage and especially the pastrami. I also gave them each a large container of my BBQ rub. One year I gave them each a 4' x 4' table that was 42" tall that was made entirely of oak pallet wood. The legs and frame were made of doubled up runners. These tables are extremely heavy and stout.
As to my system of harvesting the roasts, other than the back strap and tenderloins, the only roasts I keep are from the hindquarters and those are the two long muscles along with the "football" roasts. I remove all the silver skin from the roasts and make sure there is no fat, sinew or cartilage. These are the roasts I use for pastrami. This year I started dismantling the football roasts into separate muscles. If these roasts do not weigh over 12 ounces, I cube them up for grinding. All the meat for grinding has 90% or better of the silver skin and fat removed. I have two other hunting buddies who I get together after all of the various deer seasons are over and we pool our grinding meats for our annual grind. We weigh the amount of venison we have on hand and 12.5% each of pork fat and beef fat to the mix. I like to make burgers and sausage out of the mix so the end product is about 80% lean.
My deer donors have had a very good season so far and I am lucky enough to have a freezer full of venison. A good problem to have since I no longer have the 75 acre farm I used to live on where I hunted. Thanks again for posting the recipe and you will hear back from me on my results!
