Been given a 4.5 kg frozen leg of wild venison (bone in)

[markjass]

I have been given a 4.5 kg frozen leg of wild venison (bone in). What to do?

Ideas I have

Fermentated semi dry/dried sausages
Bacon
Ham
cured air dried.

Help me

[Butterbean]

If you break down the rounds into their pieces this is great for Pasterma and the sirloin will make some nice jerky slices.

[redzed]

I just scored about 20lbs of venison trimmings and two boneless loins. Will be making a smoked kielbasa with 50% pork, a dry cured salami with 75% pork and a breasola from the loins.

[Butterbean]

Good thing with venison is you can use it just about for anything. The tallow in our deer here is pretty gamey so I trim as much out of it as possible and when fat is added it will take on the taste of whatever animal you take the fat from. Many people make the mistake of not adding enough fat when working with venison. 30% is the bare minimum here. Anything less will be dry.

If the tallow is trimmed properly and the silverskin removed then the flavor or our venison here is pretty interesting which is why I suggested the pasterma and the jerky.

[redzed]

The meat I got is from a couple of young does from Saskatchewan. There was a record setting bumper crop here this year, so much so that the deer are nicely grain fed, and the flavour should be quite mild. But, unfortunately not too many deer around due to the extremely hard winter last year.

[Butterbean]

The whitetail here don't have fat but tallow and this will cause the meat to go bad in the freezer much faster than if its removed before processing. We have a population problem here so I've been culling the does really hard but most have twins or even a few triplets so I don't know how much good I'm doing. Based on my inventory, I need to take 30 this year for management reasons but I've only gotten about 12.