Stand over a deer on a cold morning and the question is never how to cure wild game. It is which of these pieces is worth the trouble. A carcass gives you maybe a dozen distinct muscles, and most guides to curing skip that part entirely because they assume you bought the meat already trimmed and labeled. You didn't. You shot it, and now you have to choose.
Here is the short answer, and people arrived at it separately on four continents. From a deer, the world's drying traditions take two things: the hind leg and the loin. From a wild boar they take almost everything — the belly, the jowl, the neck, the back fat, the leg. Two animals out of the same woods in the same week, and they end up on completely different hooks.
The reason is fat — how much the animal carries, and what kind. Once you understand that, you can look at any carcass — whitetail, mule deer, elk, moose, red deer, roe, chamois, boar — and know what to cure whole, what to grind, and what to eat this week.
Why curing wild game comes down to so few cuts
Four protected products — Bresaola della Valtellina in Lombardy, Cecina de León in Castile, Bündnerfleisch in Graubünden, Carne Salada in Trentino — were written into law separately, by people who were not talking to each other. Read the four specifications side by side and they name the same handful of muscles out of the hind leg. Every one of them orders the fat, tendon and fascia off before the meat goes near salt.
It is not a European habit. The word jerky is not even English: it came through Spanish charqui from Quechua ch'arki, dried flesh, and what it named was llama and alpaca dried in the Andes long before anyone brought cattle over. When food scientists went to the charqui producers around Puno and Cusco and wrote down what they actually do, the answer was the leg, deboned, fat and connective tissue removed. Biltong says the same thing in its own name — Afrikaans for a strip off the buttock.
The reason is anatomy, not culture. The round carries the largest, leanest, straightest-grained muscles on a big animal — and once they are separated along their seams, each one is a solid piece with nowhere inside it for the air to miss. Everybody who ever tried to dry meat found the same place, because there is only one.
Worth knowing where that rule stops. It holds for whole muscle, from a big animal, cured and dried to keep. It stops the moment you grind, and it stops where drying is a cheap way to feed people rather than a way to make something good — Brazilian charque is cut from chuck and shank, the muscles nobody wants fresh, which is exactly backwards from bresaola.
Which cut becomes what: deer, elk and moose
Five pieces are worth curing whole. Everything else on a cervid has a better job.
The four muscles of the haunch
Break the hind leg along its seams and you get four distinct muscles. These four are European dried beef — the specifications name them one by one.
- Topside — top round, in America — inside of the thigh, the biggest single muscle on the animal. The Italians call it fesa and it is the backbone of bresaola; the Spanish call it tapa and it is one of the five pieces of Cecina de León. It is also the first cut a South African reaches for to make biltong. Start here if you want something to slice for a table.
- Silverside — bottom round — outside of the thigh, coarser in the grain and more forgiving than the topside. In Graubünden it is one of the four muscles that becomes Bündnerfleisch.
- Eye of round — a small cylinder that comes away almost whole, magatello in Italian. The classic bresaola cut, and the single easiest piece of charcuterie on the animal.
- Knuckle — sirloin tip, at the front of the thigh. Three muscles pretending to be one; separate them or accept an uneven result.
Cure any of those and you are making the game version of something that already exists and has a name. Bresaola di cervo is a real commercial product in the Valtellina. Cecina de venado and cecina de ciervo are made in Toledo and Guadalajara, from the same tradition that gave beef its cecina. Hirschschinken is sold across the German-speaking Alps, alongside prosciutto di capriolo from roe deer in Trentino. In Norway, speking av hjortelår — curing a deer haunch — is done by exactly the same method as fenalår, the lamb leg, and the sources say so in as many words. In Sweden it is a lufttorkad älgstek, an air-dried moose roast. In Scotland, Great Glen Charcuterie has built a whole range on wild venison.
The bone-in versions are older and harder: the violino di camoscio of Ticino, chamois leg cured with the bone left in as a handle, mostly made by hunters rather than shops; the mocetta of the Aosta valley, historically ibex, now chamois or goat. They are beautiful and they are unpredictable, because a bone-in leg is four muscles of four thicknesses drying at four speeds around a joint the air never reaches. The traditions that took the leg apart first are the ones that ended up in shops.
The backstrap
The long muscle running either side of the spine is the other half of the answer: lean, uniform, small in diameter, and it dries fast and evenly enough to forgive a first attempt. Cured whole it is the game version of lonzino in Italy, lomo embuchado in Spain and Lachsschinken in Germany — one muscle, three countries, three names, one method.
A warning if you cook from foreign recipes: half of Europe uses similar words for the backstrap and the tenderloin, and English-language sources confuse them constantly. Spanish lomo is the long muscle along the spine, not the little fillet inside the cavity. Check the picture, not the word.
Jerky and biltong: the same muscles, cut differently
Everything above assumes you want a whole muscle to slice. Strip-dried meat is the same anatomy with the rulebook taken out — and it comes off exactly the same cuts.
British stalkers cut venison biltong off the haunch. Wild game jerky in America comes off the top and bottom round, sliced instead of cut. South Africans making biltong name fillet, sirloin, topside and silverside and shrug about the rest. Nobody arrives at those cuts by tradition; they arrive because that is where the long, clean grain strands are.
Elk, moose, rabbit and duck all work. Boar works and is worth doing. If you want the method rather than the theory, our biltong guide covers a box-free version that suits a game carcass well.
What the rest of the animal is for
- The two tenderloins — the small straps inside the cavity. Best meat on the animal, worst possible candidates for drying. Eat them that week.
- The neck. Swedish hunting press is unusually direct: everything is usable except the neck, which goes too hard when dried. German butchery filed it under braising a long time ago, for the sinew. Two traditions, one verdict.
- The shoulder. Fragmented by tendon, and it never cohered as a roast in the first place. Spanish game producers pickle the roe shoulder rather than dry it. The honest exception: Norwegian hunting writers will cure a shoulder deliberately, on the grounds that connective tissue which ruins a roast survives a cure perfectly well. If you have shot several animals and can afford to lose one, try it.
- Shank, hock and foreleg. Pot only. Every country, no debate.
- Ribs, trim and everything off the seams. The grinder. This is where most of a carcass actually ends up.
Which cut becomes what: wild boar
Everything a boar has, the tradition cures. Everything a deer lacks, it cannot.
That sounds like a slogan until you go looking. A boar is a pig — it carries a fatty belly, a marbled neck, a fat cheek and usable back fat — so Europe made all of them into something, and every one of those products has a name you already know.
- Belly → pancetta. Pancetta di cinghiale is sold commercially in Umbria, in the Norcia tradition, and it is a common home project on Italian hunting forums. In Germany and Austria the same cut is smoked into Wildschweinspeck.
- Jowl → guanciale. Guanciale di cinghiale is made by butchers in Puglia and Tuscany. Note that a boar has this and a deer simply does not.
- Neck → capocollo. Capocollo di cinghiale, or coppa di cinghiale, out of Umbria and Tuscany. The marbling is the point — the neck is chosen because it is fatty, which is the exact inverse of the haunch logic.
- Leg → prosciutto. Prosciutto di cinghiale in Tuscany, sometimes with the trotter left on; jamón de jabalí in the Spanish sierras, a seasonal thing you mostly meet in mountain restaurants; noix de jambon de sanglier from French game charcutiers.
- Loin → lonzino, or dried whole. Same cut, same method as the venison backstrap, but with the fat cover a cervid loin never has.
- Back fat → the ingredient everything else needs. Wildschwein-Rückenspeck is sold as a product in its own right. Read the fat section before you count on it.
- Shoulder and trim → salame di cinghiale, which is the most widespread game salume in Italy.
Two traps worth carrying into a shop. "Speck" is the least trustworthy word in charcuterie — Speck Alto Adige is a deboned ham, Tiroler Speck can legally be five different cuts, and ordinary German Speck is back fat. And speck di cinghiale and speck di cervo are both made from the thigh, not the belly: they borrowed the name, not the anatomy. Separately, Corsica's protected prisuttu, lonzu and coppa are not boar at all — they are Nustrale domestic pig finished on chestnuts and acorns, whatever the postcard says.
Now go looking for the deer equivalents of any of that. There is no culatello di cervo. No guanciale di cervo. No deer pancetta, no deer lardo, no deer coppa — anywhere in Europe, in any language, at any price. Not because nobody thought of it, but because a red deer does not carry a fatty cheek, a marbled neck or a belly worth the name. Culatello in particular depends on the fat-marbled rump of a heavy domestic pig that has never run anywhere in its life.
If you have taken a boar and want to start with the belly, our piece on pancetta is the method, and it works on wild belly the same way it works on domestic.
Getting it home, and taking it apart
All of the above assumes the meat arrived in good condition and that you took the leg apart properly. Neither is automatic.
The best haunch in the world is worthless if it sat warm in a truck bed with flies on it, and no amount of salt fixes meat that was mishandled in the first hour.
- Get the hide off and the heat out. Cooling is the whole job in the field. Everything else is detail.
- Use a game bag, not a plastic sack. It has to breathe.
- Hang it where the air moves. Still air is how you get a sour shoulder.
- Keep the flies off without smothering it. A breathable fly net does both. Most people assume any netting traps air against the meat; a breathable one does the opposite — blowflies stay off a warm carcass and the surface still dries.
Then, at the table: work the quarters off first, and break the hind leg down into individual muscles rather than treating it as one lump. The muscles come apart along the seams with your fingers; the knife is mostly for the silverskin. Trim harder than feels reasonable — a sheet of silverskin is a waterproof layer in the middle of something you are trying to dry, and every one of those four protected specifications demands it gone.
How you know when it's done
Weight. Not days, not a calendar, not the look of it. You are removing water, and the only number that tells you how much water has gone is the number on the scale.
That is the whole argument for hanging it on a Meatdryer hook — it weighs the meat where it hangs and watches the temperature and humidity around it while it does, so the target belongs to the piece in front of you rather than to somebody else's guess. It is the same measurement behind dry aging, pointed at a different result. Tie the muscle straight with butchers twine before it goes up. A muscle that hangs crooked dries crooked.
Fat: the rule that changes with the animal
You will read everywhere that curing means trimming every scrap of fat off. That is a rule about lean animals dried whole, and it is true for a deer. It is emphatically not true for a boar, and confusing the two is how people end up throwing away the best part.
On a deer, be careful with the fat
Deer fat behaves differently from pork fat, and the difference shows up most in things you eat cold. Its melting point sits well above the temperature of your mouth, so in a cold slice or a dry salami it never quite melts — it coats, chalky and faintly tallowy. Warm, it is another matter entirely, which is exactly why the one tradition built on the animal's own fat, the Sámi gurpi, is fried at serving rather than eaten cold.
So the rule is narrower than "trim everything off". Keep deer fat out of anything that will be eaten cold and dry. Hank Shaw, who has written more sensible words about game charcuterie than anyone in English, is blunt about it for dry-cured salami, and he is right. A fat cap on a haunch you are going to roast is a different question, and a good one.
There is a second reason to trim a haunch hard before it goes on the hook, and it has nothing to do with taste. Fat and silverskin block water from leaving evenly, so the exposed parts case-harden while the sheltered parts stay wet. That is why all four of those protected specifications demand the fat, tendon and fascia gone before the salt.
On a boar, fat is the product
Pork fat is a completely different material — softer, lower-melting, and it eats beautifully cold. That is the whole reason a boar's fatty cuts became products in their own right rather than problems to solve. Pancetta is the fat. Guanciale is mostly fat. Capocollo is chosen for the marbling in the neck, which is the exact inverse of the haunch logic. Lardo and Wildschwein-Rückenspeck are the fat and nothing else.
So on a boar, don't trim to the lean. Trim to the shape, keep the fat cap on a leg, and let the belly be a belly.
The one place boar fat is unreliable is the grinder. German hunter-charcutiers who have tried building a salami on boar fat alone are discouraging, and the reason is worth understanding: boar fat is not reliably bad, it is unpredictably bad, depending entirely on what the animal had been eating. That is worse than bad when you are committing thirty kilos to a batch. Keep the boar for the lean and buy the back fat.
And on biltong, it depends how long it has to last
South Africans argue about this. A fat cap on biltong eats very well and plenty of people prefer it. But fat does not dehydrate, so a fatty batch has a short life — if it has to keep in a cupboard for months, trim it; if it is going to be eaten within the week, suit yourself. The University of Georgia's home-preservation guidance takes the conservative line for anything you are storing: trim and discard all fat from meat.
When you do add fat back, add somebody else's
For anything ground from a cervid, you need fat from a pig:
- Back fat first. Firm, dices cleanly, behaves itself.
- Shoulder fat second.
- Belly third, and only if you accept that it carries enough lean to shift the flavor.
Shaw's reason for pork over beef is the one to remember: add beef fat to a venison sausage and it tastes like beef; add pork fat and it tastes like venison. The traditions say the same in their own words — German recipes for wild boar salami specify pork back fat with no rind, and Spanish game producers name the pork cut right on the label.
The oldest solution of all
On the northern plains, lean meat was dried until it was brittle, pounded almost to powder, and only then had rendered fat worked back through it — pemmican, from a Cree word built on the word for fat rather than the word for meat. Morocco arrived at the same idea independently: khlii is dried first, then stored submerged in fat, where it keeps for a year or more.
Why that works is the thing most writing on this gets backwards. The fat you add back is not the fat you took off. Rendered fat is a different material from the fat woven through a muscle, it goes on after the water is already gone, and it works as a seal rather than as a passenger. Two fats, two jobs, and the order matters.
Salami or Sausage: where the rest of the animal goes
The neck, the shoulder, the shanks, the ribs and every scrap off the seams end up here, and this is where most of a carcass actually goes. Every hunting country has its own version and its own word for it — Wildwurst in Germany, älgkorv in Sweden, salame di cinghiale in Italy. Same idea everywhere: the offcuts, somebody else's fat, a natural casing.
One correction worth making because it gets repeated — Swedish spickekorv is not a game tradition. It is pork and pork back fat, and always has been.
Salami is not "whatever's left"
This is the part most people get wrong, and the protected specifications are unusually clear about it. The best-defined salami in Europe is specified as tightly as any whole muscle — it is just specified by a list of primals and a ratio rather than by a single named cut. Saucisson de l'Ardèche names the four cuts that may go in and forbids everything else. Salame Piacentino explicitly excludes head trim. Chorizo de Cantimpalos forbids adding strips of subcutaneous bacon. Soppressata di Calabria is shoulder, leg, tenderloin and lardo, and nothing besides.
The lesson for a hunter is simple: a good salami is chosen meat, not swept-up meat. Take the lean off the shoulder and the clean trim off the seams. Leave out the sinew-heavy scraps, the bloodshot meat around the wound channel, and anything you would not be happy to put in a pan. What you get back is a sausage that tastes of the animal rather than of everything that happened to it.
A fresh sausage and a dry salami are two different projects
A fresh sausage is dinner. A dry salami is a hanging project, exactly like the whole muscles above, and it is judged the same way — by weight, not by a date on a calendar. It wants a cool, stable place with air moving through it, a natural casing so it can breathe, and the patience to let it lose water slowly instead of crusting hard on the outside while the middle stays wet. If you are already weighing a haunch on a Meatdryer hook, a salami is the same problem in a smaller package.
And you can make one without pork if you want to. Great Glen Charcuterie in Scotland sells a venison chorizo with no pork in it at all — leaner and firmer than a blended one by definition, harder to get right, and worth trying once you have made an easy one first.
One more thing worth knowing before you buy a comparison: a shop-bought "game" salami is very often mostly pork. That is the fat rule showing up on a label rather than anything dishonest — and it is the plainest reason the one you grind yourself is a different product. You decide the ratio.
Brine and smoke
Brining before drying is standard practice in Sweden for moose and worth knowing wherever you are; it seasons more evenly through a thick muscle than surface salt manages. How to choose between dry salt and brine is covered properly in our guide to curing before drying. And cold smoking is a way of drying, not a separate thing: the smoke adds flavor and some surface protection while the meat carries on losing water. Hot smoking cooks it. They are not interchangeable, and neither are the words for them.
Seasons, testing, and what we won't guess at
There is almost nowhere with a single national season. The United States sets them state by state and Canada province by province. Italy writes a framework and then Trentino moves its own dates. France sets it département by département, by arrêté préfectoral. Sweden opens moose in the north before the rest of the country, Spain issues one orden de vedas per autonomous community, Germany one per Land. Check your own region's calendar every year, and do not trust an article — including this one — to tell you a date.
Curing is the one part of this where being approximately right is not good enough, and it is also where the internet is most confidently wrong. We publish salt amounts, Target Weights and timings inside the recipes in the Meatdryer app, where each one belongs to a specific cut and a specific method and has been tested. We do not publish them loose in an article, and you should be suspicious of anyone who does — a number that fits a boar leg does not fit a roe loin.
Two things to raise with somebody who knows your region. Wild boar and bear are the species where testing matters, and most countries have rules about it for hunters that are not the same rules — ask your national hunting or food authority rather than a forum. And if a piece smells sour, feels slimy, or has grown something that isn't a clean white bloom, it goes in the bin. That is not a rule you should need a number for.
Start with the eye of round — or, if it's a boar, a pancetta
Don't begin with a whole bone-in leg and six months of hope.
If you shot a deer, elk or moose: take the eye of round off one haunch, the small cylinder that comes away almost whole. Trim every scrap of silverskin, cure it, tie it, hang it, and weigh it until the number says it is ready. One muscle, one grain, nearly impossible to get wrong — and what comes off the hook is a bresaola you made from an animal you took yourself.
If you shot a wild boar: take the belly and make a pancetta. It asks less of you than a leg, it is the one cut a deer will never give you, and it is the piece that turns a boar from a difficult animal into the most useful one in the woods.
Either way you will have made the thing that people on four continents, with no way of telling each other, all worked out how to make from the same animal.
What you need
Everything for taking a haunch from the hook to the board.
- Meatdryer Hook – Uses recipes, temperature, humidity and weight to tell you exactly when your meat is ready.
- Butchers Twine – Ties a muscle straight so it hangs straight and dries evenly.
- Protective Fly Net – Breathable cover that keeps insects off a hanging haunch without slowing the airflow.
- Accessory Hook – Hangs the second, third and fourth muscle from the same leg alongside the first.
