How to clean/butcher turtle?

gillnet

New member
Turtles showing up here and sunnin etc... Thinkin of puttin the hoop nets out but I've never cleaned/butchered turtles. Always sold turtles and walked away with the $. Now I'd like to try some and put some up for the fall/winter. thanks,gn
 
I leave mine in a tank of clean water for a few days, lets them clean out. Then I dip the dead turtle in to boiling water until the shell is soft. Then I bone it out and cook it in a stew(bone in), or fry it and eat it plain, or my favorite cook it in jambalaya. Just my two cents.
 
Ive heard of the keeping them in a tank for awhile. I have never done it so cant tell you if it works or not.

We would shoot the big snappers in the head and emediatly cut it off and hang it from the tail and let it bleed out. then cut aroud the shell on the bottom and skin and remove the legs. Ive never tried snapper tail but im sure it would be fine. The back strap on those things are hard to get to but its the best meat.

You will be amazed how long after the kill they are still moving around. I had one snapper heart beating for at least 3 hours after the kill and it kept beating, we had to go to work so we had to toss the beating heart back into the lake so who knows how long it went for.
 
We use to pen them for a week minimum and feed them lettuce, celery, and other vegetable scraps as well to clean them out. They typically lost a little weight in the process. We also had a tub of water they could get in and out of that we cleaned on a regular basis to get the mud out of them. We'd shoot them in the head with a 22, then seperate the shells. We'd part out the neck, loins, legs, and tail. We'd scrape down the parts and get the skin off of them then debone it and chunk it into oven bags and bake them with veggies like an oven potroast. I haven't helped do a snapper since I was a kid. I sure don't miss all the scraping even though they were good eating
glare.gif
.
 
So does the letting them sit help with the flavor or the cleaning?

I've only cleaned snapping turtles and one leather back, they all taisted great and there wasn't any more of a mess than any other animal i've cleaned.
 
We used to catch snappers on a line or by hand.
Kept them in a tub of clean water for a day or two.

We had a spike in a post at eye level. we would bring the snapper to the spike. When he grabbed it we turned him over to expose his underside. His hooked bottom jaw kept him locked to the spike.
With a sharp knife we cut his throat and bled him out. Then we unhinged his shell like a book. Skinned the legs, neck and tail. The jaw hook held him on the spike so we could work.

Wash in saltwater. We usually made a stew but sometimes parboiled and fried. Delicious and if you didn't know better i doubt you could guess what it was or that it had come from a pond.
 
Back
Top