Every now and then, maybe once a year, although the last time was pre pandemic, we've got a friend who phones up and says: 'would you like a deer ?'
Now what he means is: 'I've been shooting or someone I know had been shooting and we've got a few carcases nobody else wants, I can bring you one in the next hour.'
We always say yes and that's the next days plans changed to deer processing.
So Thursday night, Phil phones.
Normally we get small roe or muntjak deer around 35lb weight
This time we got a red deer, culled in Scotland that weighed 105lb.
Wow !
So my little 'bought on a whim' knife got a serious baptism of fire yesterday, and I've still got the shoulders and ribs to finish today. But my new bonesaw has just arrived, so I'll have a go at making some racks of ribs.
Knife worked perfectly, kept its edge up through skinning and initial jointing, and resharpened easily when I started cutting the second haunch into roasting joints.
And while the sheer weight of the deer made initially moving it awkward, my dad's idea to hang it from the balcony, made it pretty simple.
Not saying it was easy getting it up there - but certainly made life much much easier once it was up.
And it turns out that boning out much larger haunches is an awful lot easier than smaller ones. Basically you just seperate the individual muscles, they're that large, each one makes a great joint.
And we picked the smallest carcase the chap had.
So, yep - not only is the knife cheap, it's also really bloody good and ideal for game processing.
Oh yeah and the finger hole really helps when things get slippery.
If I still drank beer and had any, I'd even have used the opener notch