cooking deer meat

Need help here - perused the recipe index for helpful recipes - many thanks to the person(s) who organised it all into sections.
Settled for a stew version for a slow cooker. . . 36 hours later set on low, the fork still bounced off the meat cubes.  Can anyone tell me where I went wrong?  It was edible, but still very chewy.    Better minced?   Thinner slices rather than cubes? Add wine to soften any sinew?   Put it out for the crows?     [The crows  (ravens actually)  needed air traffic control when they found the carcass, so that was interesting!]     Still heaps left in the freezer, so any suggestions gratefully received.  Cheers Guys.

For maximum tenderness, I suggest eating deer rare, or medium rare.

No matter how it is cooked, I can't eat deer meat unless ALL of the sinew has been removed. I'm not especially skilled at it so in my case, it results in a lot of waste during preparation. If I start with forty pounds of meat I might end up with fifteen pounds by time I'm done cleaning it. I would rather waste it at that point though than go to the trouble of cooking it and then spitting it out at the dinner table. I think that if all that stuff is removed then deer meat is just as tender and tastes at least as good as beef when cooked in similar ways. If it isn't removed, then no matter how it's cooked, it's just gross.

I rarely kill a deer myself but am often gifted it by neighbors and family who unfortunately hunt for trophies rather than food.   A one-year-old doe tastes much better than an old buck and the meat is much more tender.  

I suppose that you wouldn't know what part of the deer your meat came from?

If you had issues with making the meat into stew, I wonder if it might be a better candidate for becoming grind. I'd recommend working in some pork backfat if you do that due to how lean venison usually is.

Who processed the deer and what cut of meat are you trying to cook?

36 hours of slow cooking and you feel it is still tough sounds like an old deer, the meat was from a leg muscle or the meat was not processed properly and no recipe will help ....

I doubt the crow would even touch that meat, maybe vultures would.

And Mark brought up a good point, was the silver skin or sinew still attached?

We steak the backstraps and tenderloins and cook them in a cast iron skillet after the kill.

We then process the rest of the deer into small enough pieces to fit through our grinder and grind the entire thing. Besides hamburgers, we substitute the deer meat for any recipe that calls for ground beef and do not have any issues with how lean the meat is. If we need to do hamburgers, I mix it 50/50 with some sausage and then patty it up.

We vac seal in 3# portions.

It has really made life easier for us since we don't have to have certain recipes for certain cuts or dig through the freezer to find that particular cut.

I know this does not help you right now but maybe next time you process one, grind it all.

The good game butchers here mix a lot of mutton fat with venison when they make sausages. I was part of a team a couple of weeks ago that cooked over 1000 venison snags over successive biochar burns at the Mystery Creek Fieldays, and if it had not been for the added fat those bangers would not have been nearly as appealing.

Thanks for all the replies -
@ Anne Miller & Timothy Norton - hind legs and backstraps  we did the harvesting.  Age indeterminate. All the silverskin removed as we were cutting into smaller pieces.
The crows were particularly excited to pick over the carcass.  Arrival of a wedge-tailed eagle didn't faze them in the slightest.
I have decided to mince (grind) the rest as I get it unfrozen.  Buying up big on sausages too for improvements suggested above.

the other way i have eaten deer that was non-ideal (buck, hit by a car) was jerked for a few days (i don't remember what the mix was, but I think it involved beer and some sort of tenderizing powder) and then slow cooked or smoked. it was fabulous, but involved a whole week and major production. i was also a young person doing heavy physical labor at a forest camp, so i probably would have happily eaten a stewed pair of boots if placed in front of me....

I'm curious to know, were there any tomatoes in the recipe?   I was adding them to beef stew for a time and noticed they made the beef tough.

If you still have good cuts of venison left, maybe try cutting some into 1/4" to 3/8" medallions, season to taste and pan fry them (about a minute or so, each side), rare or medium-rare, as Joseph mentioned.  That's my personal favorite.

Jerky is actually my favorite way to eat venison. After cleaning I slice it about 1/4 inch thick, not really in strips but little slabs. I don't care how big it is as long as it evenly is 1/4" thick and nicely flat. I make a marinade of tomato juice, not too much, fresh chopped garlic and rosemary and a light touch of balsamic vinegar or lemon juice and of course salt.  That is thoroughly mixed and refrigerated for at least twenty-four hours, two or three days is fine.  Then early in the morning on preferably a sunny day with low humidity I build a fire of oak, hickory or black locust, whatever I have on hand. When the fire dies to mostly coals, I put my rack two to three feet, depending on how hot the fire still is, above and leave it ten hours or more, adding smaller pieces of wood as necessary to keep the heat and smoke going. It's very important to dry it rather than cooking it, if it actually cooks it isn't nearly as good.

The folks who give me the meat make theirs without proper cleaning, using some store-bought jerky seasoning. One of them even slices it on a meat slicer into paper thin strips and dry it in the oven or dehydrator. It ends up what I call meat chips with sinew and silver skin included, it's gross.

Because of my lack of skill with the knife and wastefulness in cleaning there is never very much of mine, but those guys practically fight over it.  They happily gift me with fifty pounds of meat on the chance of getting back a couple ounces of jerky.  

I was in the same boat as you. I tried different methods. My favorite was. First soak in water with salt and lemon juice for about an hour.

Then drain and wash the meat. You can technically cook it now, all the blood and toxins are pulled out at this point.

Then I took that meat and soaked it in some milk and mustard for a few days. After, I fried them up with some salt pepper and a little bit of vinegar. , some I battered, similar to country fried steak. When marinate you don't have to use mustard, try different things I guess, that's all I had lol mustard and some raw milk. Experiment. The main thing is soak the meat in water lemon juice and salt. That will pull the nasty stuff out.

Doing it this way makes the meat texture similar to lamb.

Brilliant - more ideas.  @ Pete Podurgiel - yes, tomato, but I used tomato paste.   Also I shall reserve some to try jerky,  I might have to learn patience