In case anyone is curious, I’m going to go through the latest deer processing order I received from my last deer hunting trip.
This last order was composed of two small whitetail spikes. Their combined bone-in weight after skinning and quartering was 76 lbs. More precisely, thats the weight of the back straps, tenderloins, bone-in shoulders, and bone-in hams after removing any damaged meat from the entry and exit wounds.
While there are some methods to estimate the living weight of deer, my bone-in weight data is insufficient to determine if my deer were average. Given my limited deer hunting experience, I can only estimate their weight based on lifting them into the back of my pickup truck before field dressing them. With that in mind, I estimate the live weight was somewhere around 110-120 lbs each. If I’m right, then each spike was about the size of small adult doe. Combined it’s close to the weight of good size buck.
I had these deer processed into:
- 4 lbs of stew meat
- 7 lbs of marinated fajita meat
- ~2-3 lbs of jerkey (dehydrated from 6 lbs of meat)
- 13 lbs of ground meat with 20% pork fat mixed in
- 26 lbs of sausage
- 13 lbs of chorizo
- 13 lbs of bacon-wrapped chop steaks
- ~10 lbs of bacon-wrapped back strap steaks
- ~1-2 lbs of whole tenderloins
Roughly speaking that’s about 91 lbs of meat in the freezer. Which means a small doe may mean about 45 lbs of meat in the freezer.
In terms of volume, that meat took up about half the space of a 7 cu ft chest freezer.