Buck Meat - Tenderizing Venison

One winter my sister's smart ass boyfriend gave my father a big bag of old buck meat.  All I heard the rest of that winter and through the spring was him laughing.  That summer at a cook out we fed him some of that meat with a generous helping of xlax in his in his deer patty.  At first he was snickering, and with a big shit eating grin on his face saying and repeating, "MMMMMM that's some deer meat" not like that old buck meat.  Well my father had a bigger grin saying, "Jake that was that old meat you gave me, with an extra helping of xlax in yours to make it nice and tender".

OK x-lax will not tenderize Buck Meat

What makes buck meat so tough that your jaw will ache after eating it?  It's really a combination of factors:

1.  Age.  The older the tougher.

2.  Nutrition. Deer farms feed their bucks specialized feed, the meat from these bucks are much more tender.  If you are feeding a deer for any extended amount of time, do not feed human food, feed them apples, pumpkin, acorns, corn.

3.  Rut.  (late summer - early fall) during this time the males hormones are elevated and their muscles are growing.  A buck harvest at this time will produce tough meat.

4. How long it took the buck to die.  The longer it takes the tougher the meat will be. If you can stay on the positive side of these four points the better your chances are of harvesting a buck who's meat is decent. 

But what if you got tough buck meat right now - two options.
1.  The first option would be to grind the meat up.  Forget about steaks and backstrap.  If the meat processing industry could make delicious strips of meat from the meat of older animals they would.  But they know this is not a option. So they grind the meat up to make lesser meats such as:  Sausage, hamburger, salami, bologna etc.

2.  If grinding the meat is absolutely not an option for you then I would suggest you look into vacuum tumbling. The tumbler allows a combination of forces: pressure, temperature, liquids (marinades) and mechanical motion to work on tenderizing the meat.  Keep in mind, while vacuum tumbling may be a solution, this method wasn't necessarily invented to tenderize tough meat, it was more invented to make good meat better.

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