Cooking with Venison

I promised, oh back before Christmas, that I would address how to cook with venison if folks were interested.

Well judging from the comments and emails, folks were interested! So here we go.

One of the important things to know, when you are preparing venison, is where the cut of meat came from. I found this very helpful chart of the different types of cuts and methods for cooking each at the Broken Arrow Ranch website. The types of cuts are roughly divided into “working” muscles and “non-working” muscles. In venison the non-working muscles are very tender, and should be cooked quickly. Overcooking is death to these cuts. Working muscles on the other hand are very tough-those deer spend a lot of time running and leaping through the woods, unlike your typical sedentary cow. Those cuts should be cooked “low and slow” preferably with moisture. This is where a cooking in a crock pot or braising in a nice dutch oven would be best.

The Broken Arrow Ranch chart is helpfully color coded to let you know which cuts are tender, and which are “working”. I find that having the diagram of the actual animal is useful, because various folks can use different names for the same cut. For example we have a roast that our guy called the “knuckle” roast. We aren’t exactly sure where that came from! Yankee Bill believes it may be from the rump. . .

But back to cooking. Another issue with venison is the “wild” or “gamey” taste. This can be affected by their diet-which you have no control over unless you are buying grain and grass fed domesticated venison (which is expensive, so I’m sure you aren’t) and it can be affected by how the hunter dresses out (ie guts and cleans) the deer. Many folks are not used to this wild type of flavor, because our domesticated meat sources have had it bred out of them. Lamb is the domesticated meat that is closest to a wild flavor-and many folks don’t eat that much anymore either!

Personally I like the wild flavor, so I have never tried to get rid of it. For those of you who are interested in either mitigating or masking it I have found several suggestions-none of which I can vouch for personally. The meat can be soaked in vinegar, milk or buttermilk. It apparently can be masked well in tomato based dishes.

Honestly I don’t mess with any of that. I just use it anywhere I use beef.

The ground venison gets mixed with about 1/3 or ¼ pork (for the fat content-remember it is LEAN) and then made into sausage, hamburgers, meatloaf, shepards pie, spaghetti sauce, hamburger gravy, meatballs, chili, tacos . . well, you get the idea.

The tenderloin (a non working cut) is very small-we get one meal of that quickly sauted with butter and placed with onions on buttered english muffins (a venison tradition with Yankee Bill’s family). The rest of the loin was cut into steaks and butterflied. That will be cut into strips and thrown in curries and stirfries, pan fried and served with brown gravy, made into pepper steaks, and I’m sure a hundred other recipes I am not thinking of right now.

The two roasts we got will be cooked in the crockpot-probably with my typical, impossible to mess up recipe of cream of mushroom soup (or alternative) and onion soup mix (or bullion and minced onion).

For those of you, like my dear friend (get it?) Lisa, who must have a recipe, their are entire sites dedicated to wild game. There is the Doemaster cookbook, The Martin County Wild Game Recipes (scroll down for 42 Venison recipes-oh and to chuckle at the other types of game shown-rattlesnake anyone?) and of course a section in my favorite recipe resource-Recipezaar.

Now what if you don’t have a hunter in your household? Don’t despair-ask around! Although many of us like the taste of vension, there are folks out there who love to hunt, but they (or their families) don’t like to eat much venison. Hunters usually have it pounded into their heads early on that you should make use of what you shoot, so those types frequently will have their kill butchered, stick it in the freezer, and then pray that some venison lover will come along that they can unload it on before they kill another one next fall.

It may be a long shot, but you never know. I always let it be know to friends etc that I will take any unwanted fish or game. I have scored a couple of salmon and some venison (last year) that way.