I am grinding my meat myself for the first time and am curious on people different preferences on which muscles they use for the ground venison. I have a bunch of front quarter calf muscles but thought against grinding this muscle due to the natural toughness and am leaning toward grinding more packs labeled "steaks". What's your take on this?
I like to use the flap meat from the lower ribs, the rib meat between the bones, front shoulders, neck meat and any non roast/steak meat from the back legs. However, when I do my ground meat for jerky I add some pork sausage to it to add some additional flavors.
anarchyhunter, Be careful with that jerky it isn't a very good idea to add pork to an uncooked product. Now if you are raising the internal temp above 150 it will be safe, but still it will need to be refrigerated. Plus pork has too much fat for Jerky, dehydrating fatty meats always seem to have grease build up. We make our grind out of anything after we pull our steaks and roasts, and we use those cuts for canned venison with our AuJus base for flavor. We typically keep about 25# of straight ground venison trimmed lean as can be for ground and formed jerky and grind the rest of the venison with a 50% venison, 25% ground pork, and 25% bacon ends and pieces all mixed and ground together for our burger meat. We carry 3 really good Jerky recipes each will do 25# but you can always break it down to smaller batches. Check it out www.FriscoSpices.com if you call in your order tell Ben that Mike said 10% off for everyone on Bowhunting.com 800 762 6689
