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. 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 and know what to cure whole, what to grind for salami, and what to eat this week. It is the same craft from there on — curing and dry aging wild game at home comes down to salting a piece right and knowing when it has dried enough.
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.
That convergence is not a European habit, and the drying traditions that matter here are older than any of those four. Jerky is a case in point: the word came into English through Spanish charqui, from Quechua ch'arki, and what it named was llama and alpaca dried in the Andes long before cattle arrived. 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, with the fat and connective tissue taken off. 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, from roe to moose
For this purpose the whole deer family behaves as one animal. Roe, red, fallow, sika, moose, white-tailed and mule deer and elk are all lean, and the same two pieces are worth the trouble on every one of them — only the size changes. Which deer that means depends on where you hunt: roe is the commonest quarry in Germany and among the top few in Sweden, Britain, Spain and Italy; red and fallow run through most of Europe and Britain; moose is Sweden and Alaska; white-tailed deer and elk are North American.
Five pieces are worth curing whole. Everything else has a better job.
The four muscles of the round
The hindquarter is a collective, not a cut. Americans say hindquarter, or just the ham; British stalkers call the whole hind leg the haunch. Either way it is four large muscles plus the rump and the shank, and they come apart along their seams with your fingers — the knife is mostly for the silverskin. Take them apart, and each one dries at its own honest rate. Leave them together and you have four thicknesses drying at four speeds around a joint the air never reaches.
- Top round — topside in Britain, inside of the thigh. The biggest single muscle on the animal, and what most of the world's dried beef is made from. 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.
- Bottom round — silverside in Britain, outside of the thigh. Coarser in the grain, more forgiving than the top round. In Graubünden it is one of the four muscles that becomes Bündnerfleisch.
- Eye of round — a small cylinder that comes away almost whole, girello in Italian, rulle in Swedish. British stalkers call it the salmon cut, the eye muscle inside the silverside — ask for eye of silverside and you will only be shown beef. The classic bresaola cut, and the single easiest piece of charcuterie on the animal.
- Sirloin tip — the knuckle to a butcher, 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 has a name — and somebody is already selling it.
- Italy → bresaola di cervo, out of the Valtellina.
- Spain → cecina de ciervo, from Toledo and Guadalajara, on the tradition that gave beef its cecina.
- Germany and the Alps → Hirschschinken; roe becomes Rehschinken.
- France → saucisson de chevreuil.
- Sweden → lufttorkat älgkött from moose, lufttorkat hjortkött from red and fallow.
- Britain → air-dried venison, venison bresaola, venison biltong.
Roe is worth singling out, because it is the deer most European hunters actually have: Germany, France and Britain cure it, while Sweden, Spain and Italy eat it fresh.
The loin, and the two tenderloins
The long muscle running either side of the spine is the other half of the answer. It is the loin — the backstrap to most hunters, and with both sides still joined by the bone it is the saddle. 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.
How many pieces it makes depends on the animal. On a moose the back is big enough that the trade divides it into several named blocks. On a roe or a fallow deer the whole strip comes off as one piece and stays that way.
The tenderloins — the fillets, in Britain — are not part of it. They are the two small straps that hang underneath the spine, inside the body cavity, and on a roe deer the pair of them together weigh a few hundred grams. Different muscle, opposite side of the backbone, removed in a separate operation — and the best eating on the animal. They are also the worst possible candidates for drying. Eat them that week.
Jerky and biltong
Everything above assumes you want a whole muscle to slice. Strip-dried meat is a different job, and it is worth being accurate about what it is.
Jerky is a drying method, not a cut. It is what you do with meat you are not going to eat fresh, and the word covers whole-muscle strips, trim and ground meat alike. Hindquarter roasts are the preferred whole-muscle source because they are large, lean and low in sinew — which is where the association with the round comes from — but trim works, and so does ground. Elk, moose and white-tailed deer all make good jerky, and boar does too.
Fat is the question both methods have to answer, and they answer it differently. Jerky sources barely debate it — Penn State Extension and the National Center for Home Food Preservation both start from lean meat and say trim what fat there is, because fat does not dry with the muscle and it is the first thing to turn. Biltong is the one that argues.
Biltong and fat is an argument, and both sides are South African. The traditional article keeps the fat cap on and is sold that way — fatty biltong and yellow-fat biltong are named styles, and the case for them is that the fat carries flavor and softens the chew. The other position is equally current, and it is what commercial producers do: trim the fat, because fat does not dehydrate and it is what limits how long a batch keeps. It is a taste question if you are eating it this week and a keeping question if you are not. Most of that debate is about beef, incidentally — a wild animal has almost no fat cap to argue over.
What the rest of the animal is for
- 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.
- Shank, hock and foreleg. Pot only. Every country, no debate.
- Trim and everything off the seams. The grinder. This is where most of a carcass actually ends up. Ribs are the exception people forget — deer ribs are worth cooking on the bone if you got them off clean, and a boar's rib rack is a cut in its own right, not scrap.
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. British butchers call it the cheek. Guanciale di cinghiale is made by butchers in Puglia and Tuscany. 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; jambon sec de sanglier from French game charcutiers. Spain is the exception worth knowing: there the boar leg more often becomes chorizo or salchichón, and jamón de jabalí usually means the fresh roasting leg rather than a cured ham.
- Loin → lonzino, or cured whole. Same cut, same method as the venison loin, but with a fat cover a deer never has. In Spain it is the boar's loin that becomes lomo embuchado de jabalí.
- Back fat → the ingredient everything else needs. Sold in its own right as Wildschwein-Rückenspeck. Read the fat section before you count on it.
- Shoulder and trim → salame di cinghiale, 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 bare German Speck means the cured smoked product — raw back fat is Rückenspeck. 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.
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.
Before any of that: from the field to the hook
Everything above assumes the meat arrived in good condition and that it hung before you took a knife to it. Neither is automatic, and this is the part where a season gets lost.
You do not skin an animal in the field. If the chill room is a long way off, gut it where it lies so the heat can start leaving; otherwise even that can wait. Getting it cool, clean and dry matters more than getting it undressed. Use a game bag rather than a plastic sack so air can move, keep the carcass dry, and keep dirt and hair off the meat — contamination arrives in the first hour and no amount of salt fixes it afterwards.
Then it hangs, and that is a job in itself. Days rather than hours, in a cold room with air moving through it, and how long depends on the species and the temperature. That is a whole subject of its own and we have written it properly — see our guide to hanging and aging game, which gives the ranges by species. Do not shorten it because you are impatient to start curing.
Skin on or skin off during the hang is a real choice, and hunters disagree. Most skin the animal first and hang it bare, which is simpler to handle and lets the surface dry. Others deliberately leave the hide on in the chill room, because a bare carcass in moving air can set a hard, dark crust on the outside that has to be cut away later. Both work. If your room runs dry or windy, the hide is worth keeping on.
Only then do you break it down. And when you do, trim harder than feels reasonable — a sheet of silverskin is a waterproof layer in the middle of something you are trying to dry, and all four of those protected specifications demand it gone before the salt.
How you know when it's ready
Drying is water leaving meat, so the honest measure is what the piece weighs against what it weighed going onto the hook. But weight on its own is not the whole answer, and anyone who tells you a single number is selling you a shortcut. The same target weight reached fast in a warm room and slowly in a cold one gives you two different products.
What actually decides it is four things together — target weight, temperature, humidity and time — which is exactly what a Meatdryer hook is for. It weighs the meat where it hangs, watches the conditions around it, matches all four against the recipe you are following, and tells you when that particular piece is ready rather than when the calendar says so. It is the same instrument that counts the aging days during the hang; drying is simply the other job it does.
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 needs more care than it usually gets.
Deer fat — a preference, and a keeping question
Deer fat behaves differently from pork fat, and the difference shows up in things you eat cold. Its melting point sits well above the temperature of your mouth, so in a cold slice it never quite melts — it coats, and people describe it as waxy or tallowy. Plenty of people simply do not want it in an air-dried product for that reason, and plenty of others are untroubled by it. That part is taste, and you are allowed your own.
What is not a matter of taste is keeping. Fat is the first thing to go rancid on a hanging piece, and fat and silverskin together block water from leaving evenly, so the exposed parts case-harden while the sheltered parts stay wet. If a piece has to last months, trim it. If you are slicing it in a fortnight, suit yourself.
Worth knowing that warm is a different question entirely — rendered and eaten hot, deer fat is perfectly good, 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.
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. So on a boar, do not trim to the lean. Trim to the shape, keep the fat cap on a leg, and let the belly be a belly.
Dried salami: 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 makes its own dry-cured game sausage and has its own name for it — salame di cinghiale in Italy, saucisson de sanglier in France, salchichón de ciervo in Spain, Wildsalami in Germany, vildsvinssalami in Sweden. Fresh and smoked game sausage is a different craft, and not what this is about.
Ground game needs fat, and it is usually somebody else's
A dry salami built on lean game alone is a disappointment, so you add fat — and for a cervid that means pork:
- 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.
Hank Shaw gives the reason for pork over beef in one line: 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 boar is the exception, because a boar is a pig. Its own fat can work, and some producers build a salami entirely on boar. Whether it does comes down to the animal: one that has been on acorns or grain carries firm fat that behaves itself in a salami, while a lean, hard-hunted boar may not give you enough to work with. Most Italian producers sidestep the question and build on pork with boar mixed in. If you are not sure about your animal, keep the boar for the lean and buy the back fat.
Salami is not "whatever's left"
The protected specifications are unusually clear about this. 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.
A dry salami is a hanging project like the whole muscles above, and it is judged the same way. 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.
Testing, and what we won't guess at
Wild boar is the species where testing matters, and the reason is specific to what we are doing here. Cured and dried products are never brought up to a cooking temperature — that is the whole point of them — so the safety margin a hot pan would give you does not exist. If you are drying boar, the meat should be tested before it goes anywhere near the hook, not after. In the EU a boar carcass going to sale is tested by law; in the US there is no routine scheme for a hunter's own animal, so you have to go and ask for it. Either way, ask your national hunting or food authority rather than a forum.
Bear is not on that list, and that is not an oversight. It is the same parasite genus as boar — Trichinella — but not the same species, and the difference is the whole point. Bear in northern North America carries T. nativa and a related genotype; European bear carries T. nativa and T. britovi. These survive freezing, which the pork species largely does not. The CDC found live larvae in bear meat that had been frozen for 110 days, and Alaska Fish and Game cites polar bear meat still infective after six years in a freezer.
And testing does not unlock it, which is where bear parts company with boar. Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks is explicit that a negative result "is not a guarantee that the meat does not contain Trichinella", because only a small sample of a large animal is ever examined. Alaska Fish and Game is blunter still: "Curing, salting, drying, smoking, or microwaving does not consistently kill the worms," and hunters "should always assume bear meat is infected." Cooking is the only control any authority endorses. This is not hypothetical — a 2024 outbreak in North Carolina came from bear jerky that had been marinated and dried, and three of the six people who ate it fell ill. The same caution belongs on walrus, seal, cougar, wolf, fox and badger.
On salt, cure and timing: those belong to the recipe, not to an article. Every recipe in the Meatdryer app carries the specific cure for that recipe, and the method is set out properly in our guide to curing before drying. Be suspicious of anyone who gives you one number for everything — a figure that fits a boar leg does not fit a roe loin.
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 a piece of the 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: take a single muscle off one hind leg. The eye of round is the easiest — a small cylinder that comes away almost whole — but the top round or the bottom round will do just as well. Trim every scrap of silverskin, cure it, tie it, hang it, and let the hook tell you when it has got there. 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.
- Accessory Hook – Hangs the second, third and fourth muscle from the same leg alongside the first.
