When I am fortunate enough to kill a deer with my primitive longbow setup, I am increasingly using more and more of the deer. This last year was challenging, yet I was still able to get a flintlock doe off of public land. I consolidated the fat trimmings from my previous two deer, and now with three deer's worth of fat, I was ready to make some soap.
Since I butcher my own meat, making a separate pile of fat trimmings was easy. I had three piles going of trimmed meat/fat. One pile was for the grinder and consumption, one was where the fatty pieces went, and a third was for bloodshot and less desirable trimmings for my sister's cat. I simply froze or refrigerated these piles in ziplock bags until it was time to process them.
The first step is to render the fat out of the trimmings. This is the easy step. All you need to do is add a few cups of water to a slow cooker, and dump in your fat, and walk away for a few hours. Slow cook for 5-8 hours and then strain out the cracklings and meaty bits in a strainer lined with cheese cloth or an old t-shirt. Put the strained mixture into a pot and allow it to chill. I put the pot in the refrigerator, or you can put it outside if it is winter.
After the tallow disk has solidified, remove it and scrape away all the little bits from the underside with a knife. I will do this process a second time by melting all the tallow, then chilling and scraping again until you have this nice white disk of tallow. When I had a second or third deer, I would just render the entire thing again. The more times you render it the more contaminants you get out, until you have a nice white disk.
I just kept this disk in the refrigerator, but next time I will pour it into canning jars the last render for easier storing and rendering when it is time to make soap. You can either melt the jars in a water bath slowly or put the mason jars in the microwave like I did this time.
The soap making process was fairly easy from internet calculators and instructions and I will not go into details about that process here. I only had to purchase a kitchen scale to weigh out the ingredients, and I mixed everything in a bowl with a whisk. I made my first batch with peppermint essential oil because I wasn't sure how it would smell and that is what I had on hand. I also added a little Cerave moisturizer. I poured the hot mixture into some old candy containers for molds I kept from the trash. The soap came out great and I have been using it daily. Another great use for a part of the deer usually discarded.
There is not much I now leave to the foxes when I am successful.
Here is a list and how I use it:
Heart - Yummy breakfast!
Head - Buck will be a euro mount
Hide - Tanned for buckskin or crafts
Fur on - tanned for rug, wall decor, or dyed or bleached for fly tying.
Tail - Dried and salted for flies (salt and freshwater) sometimes dyed.
Sinew - From back and legs. Dried and kept for bow backing, arrows, repairs, and crafts
Long bones and scapula - Bone Broth
Ribs - Roasted, Eat them! Yum
Meat - Ground, stew, roasts, steaks (canned, processed into bologna or sausage, or frozen)
Fat - Rendered for soap and maybe candles.
Scraps - ground for cat food
What I leave behind:
Guts (offal)
4 lower legs and hoofs (note* I have kept a set of hooves for selfnock re-enforcement before)
Spine and pelvic girdle.
Lower Jaw
Deer can be used in so many ways. When you are lucky enough to get one with traditional bows, it seems like a logical thing to make the most of it.
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