Bison and Home Butchering

This past week during an interview for root words I started getting a storm of messages coming in over my phone and it turns out that my brother Pete got a deer late one afternoon just before the snow storm came in. My father and I loaded up the car and a plastic sled and headed out To help drag. The whole ordeal took us three hours left is all good and tired. This weekend the family convened to do at home butchering of this harvested deer and I thought it would be nice to present a short snapshot of our amateur process, With a little professional context from my conversation at farmers market with Hunter Hubbard of Mountainview Bison in North Clarendon, Vermont.

Today, most folks probably haven’t had the experience of processing their own meat from an animal they’ve raised or harvested, even if they’ve been a meat eater their entire lives.  In many ways it can be like taking on a large gardening project, it can be a bit daunting to get into, a lot of hard work, and very rewarding and educational.  

As I mentioned in episode 13: Hunting, A Family Tradition, my father and uncle learned to process deer from their father, and from Uncle Lindy the family butcher.  Pete and I have stirred up this tried and true family tradition and knowledge a bit by incorporating some stuff we learned on the internet.  There are YouTube how-to’s on everything, and we can’t resist cosplaying our Italian heritage with the search for a delectable Osso Buco cut.   

We may have fallen short of the perfect Osso Buco, but we did make some more family memories, and we will make some great family dinners.  

This episode was produced by Stephen Abatiell.

Special thanks to Hunter Hubbard from Mountain View Bison, my father Peter, my brother Pete, uncle Mike, and farmer Scott for letting us use his barn to process Pete’s deer.  

To learn more about Mountain View Bison, look them up on FaceBook.  

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