Cooking Venison

[Cynthia White]

Without inciting a political discussion, I'd like to know how the hunters here cook venison. I've very rarely had it when it didn't have a strong gamey (unpleasant) taste. So how do you cook it? I'm not a hunter, but I know I can get it *cheap*.

[Steve Southwood]

Old school way: Canning NO WILD TASTE.

Cut meat into 3/4 chunks. Use no tallow/ anything with a white color. All you want is pure red meat. Now, brown the meat to cook out all the blood. Get you some jars and place the cooked meat on those jars. Add a touch of salt and pepper, fill jar to top of neck with water. Pressure cook at 15 lbs for 50 minutes. Set on shelf and open and enjoy at later date when you are hungry. Add a little corn starch to make some gravy. Yum, yum.

[Cynthia White]

2 questions, Steve. When you brown it, you don't add any fat? And does it have to be pressure cooked? Can you do it in a canner with the jars in boiling water?

[larry merlau]

ask tom, he knows how to cook it and eat it i cook it like beef, have had it canned and thats good too. the key is to not over cook it,, it get dry fast i use olive oil for frying or grill it.. the first thing to cause bad taste in wild game is the way it was taken care of proir..to the stove or the frezer..

[Steve Southwood]

No fat when you brown it, belief is that is where the game taste comes from. Yes pressure cooked.

[Jonathan Shively]

I read a story once about a man that bestowed the taste of his beef over venison. The hunter stated something like, let it get chased, eventually shot, gutted and drug through the woods, hung and eventually processed and see how your beef tastes then. There is so much merit to the taste coming from the handling of the deer once it is down. Food the deer fed on also contributes greatly to the taste. Deer from the North tasted piney/minty from eating pine trees. Our deer around hear are fat from eating the best corn they can find. We grind ours with pork to make sausage, we cut ours into roasts and use them in the crock pot with veggies, we grill the loins (cut butterfly style) on the grill. We don't grind and make hamburgers per say. We grind a lot and use it in meatloaf, chili, spaghetti and those types of dishes. Venison generally lacks the fat content to hold it in a patty form to eat as a hamburger. With all of that said. as Larry stated, it burns easily due to being so lean. Keep water or oil in the pan to keep it from sticking/burning and no, it doesn't taste like chicken!!!