This should have been obvious to me but it wasn't. Thank you. I'm hoping my husband catches a deer soon so I can get me some deer fat! The cornfield around his property is still up though, so the deer haven't wandered over to his stand yet. Hopefully the corn came down this week.
Right. To me, the fat is where most of the gameyness resides. If you've got corn near it might not be too bad, but if he's hunting a moss, bark, and acorn deer rendering the fat inside would be horribly smelly. This is a good use for that turkey frying rig, IMO.
If you process yourself, you'll get a lot more fat. There's a lot of it there, it's just not as convenient to pull off in bigger chunks like on a pig. Above and beyond typical meat trimmings, if you're really intent on getting the most fat possible, think making stock from the inedible parts and skimming off the fat. Organs - the brain is mostly fat and the kidney usually have the suet. Bones - deer ribs aren't usually worth messing with for human food, but they're certainly worth chopping up and rendering, along with all the long bones cracked for marrow. The skin will also yield a fair amount of fat, but it's the hardest/messiest to get because you'll have to boil the skin with the hair still on it. You can't use the typical lye method to of de-hairing because it will make soap of the very fat you're trying to get!
If you do this, your dogs are going to love you!
ETA: Don't feed the brains or spinal cords to your dogs. Even cooked are risky because prions survive cooking temperature. Odds are very high that your Wildlife Dept will be checking for signs of Chronic Wasting Disease at the check in station, but there's no reason to take chances, IMO.
Is it worse than beef fat? I got some advice on here that made rendering beef fat MUCH less unpleasant.
Yes. It will be very much more gamey. In my experience, most of the flavor/smell that people are talking about when they say they don't like deer comes from the fat. Now imagine concentrating that.
