Best budget processing setup for white in a home kitchen

[Drenalin]

I cut up a bear this past weekend with a 4-inch Victorinox paring knife. Everything into roasts and stew meat, but it worked. The only other equipment used was a 120-quart cooler, a couple cutting boards, and a couple big bowls. The bear was skinned with a different knife (a serrated Victorinox paring knife). You should have a sharpener of course, but the Vics held their edges for the whole process.

I have a spare fridge in the garage specifically for what @fishslap showed above; for whatever reason though, my wife had filled it with protein shakes and girl scout cookies. So I used the cooler and frozen gallon jugs of water this time.

I say all that to point out you don't "need" a bunch of stuff to get started. But as I ease my wife and daughter into the idea that I'm going to be cutting up animals at home from now on, I'll damn sure add a good grinder and a way to stuff sausages. I wrapped the bear in gallon size plastic sacks, pushed all the air out, and then wrapped in freezer paper. I've had good luck with this with venison and don't imagine I'll add a vac sealer.

 

[WaWox]

Going to be the contrarian here. I have the #12 LEM and I think it's overkill unless you hunt a real ton of meat and your family mostly wants to eat ground -- be it sausages, burgers, snack sticks, or meat sauces.

When I process a whole backtail buck, I get maybe 5-10lbs of ground. Everything else I prefer as stew meat, whole muscle roasts, bone-in roasts, etc. Even when I process a small pig (say 120lbs hanging weight), I only get 20lbs of ground, my family just loves roasts, chops, bacon, cured meats, and pulled pork too much.

Yes, running 20lbs barely trimmed meat thru the LEM in under 5 minutes for two rounds of grinding is super fun. But did I need to spend $600+ to save, say 20-30min versus a much cheaper, worse, slower grinder? I don't think it was worth it. Even a kitchenaid attachment could have done this if I spent another 30min on cutting some silverskin or sinew out.

This calculation changes if your 80lbs of white tail turns into 70lbs of ground plus the backstraps. Especially if you do it not 1x a year like WA state lets me go after bucks but 2, 3, ..., 6x .. out east.

In terms of other materials:
- Victorinox boning knives, get like 1 flex, 2 semi stiff, 1 stiff, in 6", curved. Look at restaurant supply stores like webrestaurantsupply, much cheaper than amazon
- if you like you can get one longer straight knife, like a breaking knife or just reuse a long chef's knife for portioning
- plastic or better stainless steel tubs
- plastic or better nice japanese rubber cutting boards, as large as you can move around and wash in your sink
- if you do like sausages, get a $100-150 sausage stuffer like a vevor from aliexpress. I'd rather spend $400 on the grinder and $100 on the sausage stuffer than $500 on the grinder and no stuffer, even if I had to grind several whole deer.
- cheap garage fridge for aging meat, some metal grates to place the meat on
- vacuum sealer. ideally don't cheap out on this as the cheap ones will break and have parts that are "consumables" (eg the heatstrip has a very finite life span) but there won't be any replacement parts available. so you end up trashing a $50 sealer because a $1 part failed.

EDIT: get a single Naniwa 200 grit stone from Amazon or sharpening supply and learn traditional whetstone sharpening. Your knives will be sharper than factory-sharp in no time.

 

[WaWox]

Oh another thing. Buy a book on butchery techniques to learn the cuts. I like Butchering Poultry, Rabbit, Lamb, Goat, and Pork: The Comprehensive Photographic Guide to Humane Slaughtering and Butchering by Adam Danforth. Goats/sheep are mostly comparable to deer in terms of cuts and what you can turn them into -- some parts are different, of course, e.g., I'd expect a nice whitetail to have bigger necks, maybe larger hindleg roasts. But it's pretty similar for 100-200lbs ruminants across species

Bonus is if you ever decide to buy a whole or half pig, it will tell you what to do for those too, and while you probably already know how to break down a whole chicken, can't hurt to look over that too..