Eating bruised meat

I don't eat it, but it doesn't have to go to waste either.

Cut all that bloodshot meat out and freeze it. Next time you go cat fishing, use it as bait. They love bloody chunks of meat.

I hit a calf with my truck once. The 2 ranchers on either side of the road said it wasn't theirs so I cut it up and froze it. Very little of it was edible. It tasted awful.

I always cut away blood-shot deer meat or soak it for a day in cold salt water.

Tends to dissolve small clots and rinse the blood out.

I think soaking in salt water/brine would prevent the meat from freezing thoroughly should you decide to freeze it after. I'd say thaw and soak it just prior to preparing for consumption.

Actually meat doesn’t contain “blood” per say. The red juices are myoglobin. I googled it. If the bloody meat was cleaned of excess clots, why would it be harmful to eat, and ground into hamburger undetected. Blood as an organ is consumed in many diets. I do like the various versions of Blood Sausage, especially the Portuguese Morcela

Just rattling on

whughett said:

why would it be harmful to eat

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I don't think it would be harmful.
Just not something most folks would find pleasant.

If you're eating "right up to the hole" and worried about the blood meat, you need to be worried about bone and bullet fragments there too. Blood meat does contain blood, due to the blood pouring out of the broken veins and capillaries and flooding that area and then clotting. Anyone that has ever butchered their own deer can tell you how much coagulated blood is in and around the wound channel. That blood also has other body fluids in it too from other damage created by the bullet as it passes thru the wound channel. Could be the bullet passed thru lymph glands on its way to the vitals. Could have gone thru anything on its way thru the deer, and that blood in the wound channel may contain stomach acids, bile, urine, feces, etc, etc. This is why I cut blood meat away. Grinding it up does not make it better. Folks who make blood sausage drain the blood first, so it is not contaminated by those other body fluids. Those big ugly unappetizing clots are not myoglobin, that's the red juice that comes outta the meat when cooked.

Depends. I do not eat right to the edge of the hole regardless of bullet vector, as this area may contain foreign matter and lead bits too fine to detect while chewing. I will grind meat from nearby. This is often covered with coagulated blood that generally works it's way between muscle groups and under membranes. Most can be removed by trimming carefully, a little bit in the ground won't affect food safety or taste. This changes if the bullet passed through any portion of the GI tract, or if the meat was not cooled and butchered rapidly. Any meat with a grey or green look, presence of fine foreign matter or hair driven into the muscle, foul odor or evidence of outgassing bubbles is immediately discarded and any cutlery, hands, work surfaces disinfected after contact.

I guess it depends on what the definition of "bruised" is. I hunt mostly with a 7mm Rem Mag, and when I run into a situation like that it's usually on a shoulder. I process almost all of my own deer. What I generally find with a high velocity impact is that the shoulder is covered with a frothy, bubbly, bloody mess that's almost the consistency of mucus. It's very difficult to clean it all off and get down to anything left that's worth recovering.

If on the other hand I shot it with a slower moving bullet, like my .45-70, I'd have no problem with that same shoulder.

I don’t generally cut up for cooking mangled meat but I have pounded the heck out of a lot of meat before battering and frying. Tastes pretty good, to me.

Well, blood decays faster than the meat.

There's nothing wrong with consuming the blood...if there were, then I'm sure the trace amounts left in the capillaries would amount to something. But it doesn't.

If you dress your critter, taking common care like you should, and properly preserve the meat, this shouldn't be a problem with respect to decay/rot of the blood. Freezing shouldn't be a problem...shelf life in the fridge might be shorter. It probably just becomes an appearance problem.

Dad never taught me "why", I just always assumed it was the fact that you were cleaning bone fragments and shot pellets out of the wound. Sucks to be munching on some home cooked rabbit/squirrel and find a pellet with your teeth.