How To Break Down the Front Shoulder of a Deer

Hi, I'm Chris with Afflicted Broadheads, and today we're gonna show you how to break down the front shoulder of a white-tailed deer. Stay tuned. Okay, so for today's video, we're just going to break down this front shoulder. I'm gonna kinda go through some of the easy way to remove the meat from the bone. A couple of essential tools for you are definitely a nice sharp knife. I like a stiff blade knife like the Outdoor Edge, replaceable blade, just because it's just super sharp, super easy. Something goes wrong with the blade, just put a new one on. I also like the Havalon Filet Knife. Any filet knife will work. Again, I just like this for the ease of use, super sharp, and at any time, you can just pop on a new blade if you need it. I do use a lot of just regular, old-fashioned, if you will, bladed knives, but for this demonstration, we're gonna be using the Havalon and the Outdoor Edge. So the first thing I like to do is, while this front shoulder is completely whole like this, I like to go over it and remove any of the parts that aren't going to be edible. So the muscle fascia, otherwise called silver skin, and any of the fat here that's left on it. The silver skin we remove just because it's really tough. Nobody wants to chew on that. And the fat, because it has its own flavor, it's not one that I'm particularly fond of, so we make sure we go through and remove all that. So while it is still on the bone, we're gonna trim it up as best we can. You can see this fascia, it's really thin membrane here. You can see my finger and my knife blade underneath it. It's just nice to get rid of as much of that as you can because it is so tough. Okay, so the first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna go ahead and take off this lower leg bone that has this hawk right here. Most of the people don't know what to do with this hawk, but if you just take in the joint right here, cut straight down in, and then right here, you can see where this bone comes up all the way into here. We're just gonna cut around that. We're gonna free up this whole muscle right here. Now, as we flip this over, we're gonna come in right along the bone. Just follow it around and take that off. Now, a lot of guys are going to, unfortunately, throw this cut away. I really like this cut. It's good for specific recipes, especially recipes where you're gonna be cooking the meat for a long time, but we do a lot of canning of venison, and I really like this for canning because even if you don't trim out all the tendon, it just becomes very soft and delicious and tender, and through the pressure canning process that there's no reason to throw it away. We're gonna go ahead and just take all that off. Now, as we look at this big hunk of muscle, most guys, like I said, they're not gonna deal with this. They might grind it, and if we take a cross-section look here, you can see that each one of these muscle bundles is surrounded by these sheaths, and so on this outer edge, you have the epithelium, and the inside, you have mycelium, and then in the inside, you have the pericelium, and those are all the different fascia that holds all these muscle groups together nice and tight and gives them their shape and form and keeps them together in their little bundles, but if you look in here, you can see all these different little bundles, really tough, so again, the grinder or pressure canning really turns these into a great cut, so we're gonna save those, so we're gonna trim them up and set them aside for later. We're gonna go ahead and get rid of this lower leg bone. You do that by cutting right above the bend here, cutting down, if you ever wanna know where the bone is going to separate the easiest, just give it some bends, you can kinda see the joint presents itself here, just cut into the side, remove those attaching ligaments and tendons. Now, we're gonna go ahead and save all of these long bones because we're gonna be doing some bone broth and some stuff for some soups and stews later on, so if you'd like to see that, just drop us in the comments that you'd like to see us make some bone broth and we can teach you how to do that in a future video. So what I'd like to do now is I'd like to go ahead and remove the meat from the scapula. Now, if you can picture, this is the scapula here. It's completely flat on the side that rides up against the rib cage of the deer and on the outside, it has this scapular ridge right here. This is what you definitely wanna avoid with a broadhead because it's really tough, but this is how it sits, just like this in here, and so this is the opposite shoulder so it's upside down, but all we're gonna do is we're gonna take our fillet knife in here, we're gonna come in along the scapular ridge, we're gonna go ahead and fillet those pieces of meat right off and remove the scapula. You can see the ridge is right here. We just start at the top, just like we're filleting a fish, come right on down, this is where your fillet knife comes in really handy, and we're gonna follow that right around the bone, just like that. We're gonna do the same thing on the other side. We come down, let your knife follow the bone, just like that. Now you can flip it over, finish your cut. There's not a whole lot of meat here, but the meat that is here is quite good. You wanna get all that off there that you can. We'll be trimming the fat and some other pieces off that here in just a minute. Now as we get down to the base of the scapula, there's another ball joint in here for the front leg, right there. Just gonna cut that socket right off. There, and you're left with a nice, clean scapula. Still a little bit of meat on here. If this is something you want to boil down to get some stock from, it's a good idea to hang on to that piece as well. Now there's only one more bone left to remove in this front shoulder. That's this big leg bone right here. So we just come in right along the bone. We're gonna follow it again, just right along the edge of it, and just cut the meat off. Now a lot of you guys, when you're looking at shoulder shots, especially with archery equipment, and you hit them in this spot, I don't care what broadhead you're using, I don't care what arrow you're using, this is a really tough spot to get through. And so this is where a lot of guys lose their animal is having hit this really tough spot. And I'll show you here in just a second. You can see how big this ball is, it's huge. This meat here is attached to even more bone. And so as the scapula articulates on here like this, this whole region right here between this big ball joint and this scapula ridge is just a really tough spot. Now it can be penetrated, of course, and it has. But again, great spot to avoid on a whitetail. As this rides like this, that vital V area is right in here, it's a great spot to aim for and trying to totally avoid this joint area. So now as we separate out our pieces of lower leg, we're just cutting off the different muscle groups here. There's a lot of cleanup involved in the front shoulder, but that's okay. I like to come in here and you can just see that there's a lot of fat and stuff. There's a lot of damaged meat in here from the broadhead going through. We're just gonna go ahead and cut those areas out, making sure we take as much of the fat as we can as we go. These nice long pieces come out really simple. And then we can get in here and separate the rest of these muscle groups out. So what we're left with when we're done is the lower hocks. This piece that we filleted off the scapula, this whole front shoulder on one side and the whole base of the front shoulder scapula on the other. Now these are great cuts here to trim for stew meat. They're great for the grinder. They're really tasty, a lot of usefulness up here. So you wanna make sure that you just take a little bit of time to process these front shoulders and get all the meat off of them, and you'll be good to go. Give us a thumbs up. If you have any questions, drop them in the comments. Give us a follow as well. Thanks.