Bear down for team caddis

[Rieber]

Lots of work but well done. Nice one.

[Jamesonm]

That video is great, I love the shot of him looking directly into the camera!

[Arctic Lake]

Good story Caddis . Have to say that a good story line compiled with some photos is the deal ! Maybe I’m from the “ A picture is worth a thousand words “ crowd , LOL .
If you don’t mind what make and HP is your grinder ?
Arctic Lake

[Jamesonm]

Are you guys adding any kind of spices etc when you vacuum seal, marinades at all? Or is most of the ground bear used for burgers, etc.

Cheers!
James

I like to get as much the fat, silverskin, translucent film as possible, any thin crusted pieces, etc. We're finished trimming and I'd guess 3-5lbs. The grinder gets gummed up with silverskin that was missed which is convenient... kinda filters it out, but we have to clean the grinder every 5lbs or so or it starts to get jammed up. We're about 1/3 of the way through grinding now and vacuuming now. It looks and smells great.

We could probably put in a lot less work into it, but we take a lot of pride and the finished product, I'd pick over free range organic ground beef any day... except one bear back in 2017... sometimes you just end up with a bear that isn't great from the start but other than that one-off we've always had delicious bear and look forward to it every time.

This year is the first year I'm saving the fat and going to try to figure out what to do with it... how to render it and use it for whatever purpose... deep frying, pastry, or worst case scenario boot

[Jamesonm]

I use my wife's kitchen aid with a stainless steel grinder attachment (think she found it on amazon for a $150 or something) -- did my whole deer last year without any issues.

Good story Caddis . Have to say that a good story line compiled with some photos is the deal ! Maybe I’m from the “ A picture is worth a thousand words “ crowd , LOL .
If you don’t mind what make and HP is your grinder ?
Arctic Lake

[caddisguy]

Good story Caddis . Have to say that a good story line compiled with some photos is the deal ! Maybe I’m from the “ A picture is worth a thousand words “ crowd , LOL .
If you don’t mind what make and HP is your grinder ?
Arctic Lake

I'm actually not sure about the HP of the grinder to be honest. I would have to do some digging in that regard. All I know is that it is a "mid grade" one from Cabela's we picked up on sale about 5 or 6 years ago.

So far it has been great. We have used it on 5 or 6 bears. Normally we just trim and clean up the meat, cut it into "ready for grinding chucks" and vacuum pack those until I realised ground meat actually fends of freezer burn for even longer, as it conforms to the bag so that it is even more air tight.

Anyway, we were almost finished grinding yesterday when I believe the blade became dull enough that it's having some trouble keeping up. It seemed to be less efficient and getting jammed up a little, so we had to freeze the last two bags in chunks. I'll order another blade and see if that fixes it... but not bad at all, it ground the most of at least 5 bears.

Sadly I don't think we really got as much meat as I thought. By the time we had done the trimming, removed the fat, etc, vacuumed it all up, I felt like there was only around 40lbs at the most, maybe even less (we don't have any kind of scale in our home because I don't want to know how fat I get LOL) I think the scale of meat on bears can drastically differ... seems like you can shoot a 250lb bear and get almost 50% that in meat, but you shoot a bear that is around 150 lbs and you might only end up with 40-50lbs. That was the second smallest bear I have taken and I observed the ratio difference with the other as well.

I kept some fat trimming from this one, for the first time ever to see what I can do with it. Going to have to look into rendering fat. I know nothing about it.

[caddisguy]

Are you guys adding any kind of spices etc when you vacuum seal, marinades at all? Or is most of the ground bear used for burgers, etc.

Cheers!
James

We make burgers, sloppy joes, tacos, burritos, our famous (to us) "ham-bear-ger helper" among other different pastas. We don't marinade or add spices to anything until it comes out of the vacuum bag, then we can decide what we are in the mood for at the time. Maybe we're making burgers and feel like adding some garlic, jalapeno, etc.

[adriaticum]

Good for you caddis, congrats!

[lakelander]

From the traffic you described, were you travelling along Chilliwack Lake road? It was gong show show there yesterday. Anyways congrats and happy eating!

[Ron.C]

Great bear and awesome story caddis.