Collection: Curing & Dry Aging Wild Game at Home

A whole animal needs more room than most people first picture, and it needs to be cold. A proper cooling room is the ideal, and not many people have one.

What most hunters use is a garage, a shed or a cellar — somewhere unheated, out of the sun, where air can move around the carcass. Ideally somewhere free of insects and vermin; failing that, use a protective net and hang the carcass high enough to keep pests away.

Without cooling it's seasonal. The space follows the weather, and a mild autumn decides how long you can hang before you have to break the animal down. The hook reads the temperature and humidity where the carcass actually hangs, so you know what the space is doing rather than guessing at it.

Aging is what happens when meat is left hanging in cold, moving air. The meat's own enzymes loosen the fibers while moisture leaves the surface, so it comes out tenderer and tasting more of itself. It's a combination of three things — time, temperature and humidity — and for some pieces weight loss is the fourth, though that's a step further on.

Days on a calendar are how aging has always been counted, and it's still the number on a store-bought label. So the hook counts aging days — the number the trade uses, where 21 days means 21 days at a proper chill temperature. Your shed won't hold that exactly, and meat ages faster when it's warmer, so the hook converts as it goes: in a mild week you reach a true 21 days sooner.

Prefer the raw measure? Degree days — temperature multiplied by time, always in Celsius — are there as an option. The app carries the target for each animal and cut.

This is the fork in the road, and drying is only one of the roads.

Plenty of it is best eaten as it is, once it has aged. The loin, the sirloin and the tenderloin want nothing more than gentle heat — sous vide, or slow and low — and they're the reason people age meat in the first place.

Then there's what you cure. Parts of the hind leg — the top round, the bottom round — make excellent biltong, and that's a good first project. The whole hind leg is the full prosciutto or jamón: not difficult, but a long commitment and probably not where you start.

The rest — shoulder, neck, trim — is for mincing. Sausage, salami, burgers.

Curing is the salt and spice stage, and it decides what the meat can become. Drying is what happens afterwards.

Salt. Coarse, non-iodized, straight onto the meat. How much depends on the cut and the recipe — you can coat it generously and let time decide where it lands, or weigh the meat and weigh the salt so it can't drift past where you aimed. This is the one step where guessing costs you the piece.

The cold rest. Sealed container or vacuum bag, in the fridge, left alone. The cold keeps things safe while the salt travels evenly through the muscle instead of sitting in a crust on the outside.

Rinse, then dress it with spices. Rinse the excess salt off — what you want is already inside. Vinegar over the surface if you like it: it lowers the surface pH, adds a light tang and helps the next layer hold. Pat it properly dry, then a thin film of olive oil so the spices stick, then the spices. Pepper, juniper, fennel, garlic — go easier than instinct says, because the crust concentrates as the meat dries.

Cold smoke, if you want it, goes in before the spices. It adds flavor and nothing else: the meat never gets hot, because what comes off the hook at the end is air-dried and raw.

Then it hangs. Tie it with butchers twine so it hangs straight and dries evenly, and hang it on the hook — or on the accessory hook, for heavier pieces and whole hams. Curing is decided by weight loss rather than by the calendar, so the meat is weighed the whole way down with the temperature and humidity read alongside it. If there are insects about, use the fly net — it's shaped to stand clear of the meat rather than lie against it, so what they meet is the net and never the surface you're drying.