How to field dress different animals.

Vader

My other car is a Death Star
Brass Subscriber
#1
I would venture to guess that some of you have harvested a deer. But have you harvested dove or quail? Maybe you can filet a trout...what about other fish? I want to fill up this thread with field dressing and best practice for transporting harvested game for grilling....off the grid.
How do you move an elk to base camp if you are just one person? Some of us can offer experience, great stories and possibly inspire others to get out and hunt/fish for food.
 

Donfini2

Slayer of hops and barley, lifelong hill William
#6
Quail, dove, are easy, the head just twist and give a sharp pull. I use scissors to cut the feet and wings, cut the breast bone in half and the innards will slide out easily. I have also just grabbed the front thru the neck hole and pulled down to rip it all loose. Then peel the skin with the feathers on it off. It will look like a small chicken at the store at that point.
If you jug fish there’s a pile of bait too.
 

O:gweh

Domari Nolo
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#7
Often times, I only save the breast meat of wild birds. Turkeys and geese especially. The rest just is not that good. Hell, goose breast from the whole season all go into one bag and gets turned into pepper stick. It saves a lot of field dress time. Just rip out some breast feathers, then pull back the skin and the breast fillet out easy peasy. Pigeon and grouse i do the same but just use my fingers. No knife necessary.
 
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O:gweh

Domari Nolo
Forum Merchant
#8
Another thing I have been doing the last few years is putting deer quarters in a large cooler. ( i don't remember for sure, but I think it was @Mels who told me this little trick over at SB.

Put cookie type racks in the bottom of the cooler. Place the fresh deer quarters on the racks and cover with several bags of ice. Pull the plug to drain the water/blood. Add ice as necessary for a week to 10days. Skun and hung deer turn black and I always cut that off wasting meat. Deer in the cooler don't get the air and stay nice and fresh. They bleed out pretty well when left alone. The meat breaks down and is way more tender.

When I chunk up for grind, I put it all into a cooler full of ice water with lots of salt. The salt draws out LOTS of blood therefore making an outstanding finished product, I change out the salt water several times over a few days. The only part that is a PITA is I lay all the wet meat out and let it dry before grinding.
 

Mel's Cookin'

Word based person lost in a video world!
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#9
Another thing I have been doing the last few years is putting deer quarters in a large cooler. ( i don't remember for sure, but I think it was @Mels who told me this little trick over at SB.

Put cookie type racks in the bottom of the cooler. Place the fresh deer quarters on the racks and cover with several bags of ice. Pull the plug to drain the water/blood. Add ice as necessary for a week to 10days. Skun and hung deer turn black and I always cut that off wasting meat. Deer in the cooler don't get the air and stay nice and fresh. They bleed out pretty well when left alone. The meat breaks down and is way more tender.

When I chunk up for grind, I put it all into a cooler full of ice water with lots of salt. The salt draws out LOTS of blood therefore making an outstanding finished product, I change out the salt water several times over a few days. The only part that is a PITA is I lay all the wet meat out and let it dry before grinding.
That's the way I've always done them. One if you hang meat here you can go ahead and count that one wasted because it won't stay cold long enough but the cooler/ice way keeps the meat usable instead of forming that pellicle of waste even over hanging in a meat locker.

Glad it works for you too. :)
 

Mel's Cookin'

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#10
Here's a video that shows how to filet a flatfish - flounder, sole, halibut. Flounder are the ones I'm most familiar with so that's what I'm going to use to talk about.

Flounder are born looking like regular fish, when they are a few days old, however, they start swimming like they are leaning over, and that gets more and more pronounced. As the "leaning swimming" starts the eye on the now lower part of the fish starts to move and by the time the fish is just a very few weeks old, it swims flat and both eyes are on the top side of the fish. The mobile eye becomes more symetrically located as time goes by. The bottom side of the fish turns white and the skin on that side of the fish is much thinner than the top side. You can catch flounder hook fishing, we use baby mullet here for bait, but you can also gig flounder. They lay on the bottom of the water and in clear water you can gig them. If you gig them in the head area, you'll be happier because it won't mangle the meat that way.

To clean a flounder, you need a flexible filet knife. When you watch the video you'll see him and he'll mention that you run the blade of the knife on the bones, that's so you don't lose any more meat than absolutely necessary. The flexible knife helps mightily with that.

You will get 4 filets from a flounder. You start at the center line (as shown in the video) and start on the white side of the fish. The two filets from the white side will be smaller, that is the thinner side of the fish, but there is still good meat there so don't waste it. The belly filet is smaller than the other filet, due to the length of the part of the fish you are cutting. The same filet lengths hold true on the dark (top) side of the fish but the filets will always be thicker, sometimes twice as thick, on the top side of the fish.


After you watch the video, here are a couple of tips.

One thing he does not show in his video is after you have your four filets, lay the filet meat side up. Looking at the outside edge of the filet, you will see an area that has what almost looks like spines going up from the filet to the edge. Trim that area off. You don't want to cook it and have to fight with it being in your way when you try to eat the fish.

To skin the filets, lay them flat, with the meat side up, start at the tail and slowly (you'll get faster with this as fish go by) cut the meat off the skin. The flexibility of the knife comes in handy here also. Some people can hold that skin down at the tail and do the whole filet. About halfway through, I have to reposition my hand to the center of the fish. I loosely roll the no-longer-attached skin as I move and it gives me a handle to hold on to as I finish that filet.
 

Mel's Cookin'

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#11
The same method that you use for flounder, is how you clean stingray too. Some people don't realize stingray is edible, but it's pretty tasty, should be fried, but it's definitely tasty. The only difference is you do not use the center body of a stingray, you start your filet (there'll be 4, top and bottom of each wing) out just past where it turns into wing, not up near the center body. There will be some red meat on a stingray filet, it's fine to eat, you don't have to trim it off. Do skin the filets after you get them cut.

Here's a picture to show you can see how easy it is to see the body from the wing where the edible meat is.

 

Mel's Cookin'

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#15
Southern Trash Fish... This is a freshwater fish. The chain pickerel, which locally is called a jack fish (not to be confused with jack cravalle which is a saltwater fish), this fish in some areas is also called a southern pike, although it is a pickerel, not a pike.

jackfish.JPG

It's a bony fish. For most of my life I never knew anyone who kept them, they cussed them because they're aggressive if you get into them when you're fishing, but no one kept them, just cut them and threw them back. We were wrong all those years. The meat on a jackfish is a firm, very not-fishy tasting, sort of a flavor cross between a flounder and blue crab meat. It is a little work, but well worth it.

There are a couple of ways to prepare a jack fish. If it is a small fish, you can scale it, head it, gut it, and then wash it off, of course. Then you "stob" it. <<Technical term I learned from the guy that taught me how to clean them. this fish will be in one piece and will have the skin on. To "stob" the fish, you go down each side of the fish make cuts about 1 to 1 1/2 inch apart from the top toward the belly of the fish about halfway to the spine. I've made one of the most crude drawings to show what I mean... no one EVER looked at me and said, "now, she can draw!" and there's a reason they didn't say that...
stobbing.jpg
The blue marks indicate the stobbing, they aren't all equal or straight and they won't be when you prep the fish either. The goal is to expose as much of the meat to the hot oil as possible when you fry it. (Remember this is for smaller jackfish, 12 inches or under.)

Now, use your favorite breading, bread it and fry it in hot oil, fry these crispy on the outside, need to be a deepish golden brown. The little bones will become edible because of the preparation method and you'll just eat the fish to the backbone.

That method doesn't work for larger jack fish.

For a larger jackfish, make two standard filets, one on each side of the fish. Then there is a strip of Y-bones that you cut a piece off each side, and one more smaller strip of bones you'll want to cut out. I've watched several videos and this one has the clearest demo of how to cut around those bones.


You might wonder why you'd go to the trouble to work around the bones in a jackfish. It's because it is one of the finest tasting freshwater fish around. It is really worth the effort. Besides, sometimes when you go fishing, especially in the little side cuts in some of the rivers, you can get a boat full of jackfish when nothing else is biting. Don't go home skunked. Go home with some meat that will be so good it'll make you howl.
 

Mattsn

Well-known member
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#17
One thing I have been trying to get better at is filleting fish, man I just am not as good at that. Give me a deer, no problem. Birds, easy. Coyotes and small game, no problem.

But practice makes perfect, right?
Not sure what kind of knife you use for fileting but it makes a big difference. Very sharp and and flexible. If I use a stiff blade It is difficult to control the cut