Game on

[amused1]

So, a friend of mine gave me some packages of ground venison. It's humane kill, injured deer put down as they were too hurt to heal. He's a member of the local humane society and food banks won't take game so he processes it. Recipe ideas? Chili and tomato sauce I can do, anything else you can think of?

[rvwnsd]

So, a friend of mine gave me some packages of ground venison. It's humane kill, injured deer put down as they were too hurt to heal. He's a member of the local humane society and food banks won't take game so he processes it. Recipe ideas? Chili and tomato sauce I can do, anything else you can think of?

I would add it to meat loaf.

[bigvalboy]

So, a friend of mine gave me some packages of ground venison. It's humane kill, injured deer put down as they were too hurt to heal. He's a member of the local humane society and food banks won't take game so he processes it. Recipe ideas? Chili and tomato sauce I can do, anything else you can think of?

 

Good luck....Dad was a hunter, so growing up I had venison every imaginable way, and to this day I have never found any recipe that could get rid of that gamy taste. (Mom, God rest her soul, tried everything). I've even tried it a few times at restaurants to see if perhaps Mom had missed something...she hadn't. I've come to believe that it is just an acquired taste. You either love it or hate it...Personally, I can get it down, but that's about it.

[MsGuy]

Have to agree with bigvalboy. All my life people have been telling me venison tastes ok if you just cook it fight, just try the way they cook it &, yuck, still tastes nasty.

 

Only thing that really helps is grinding the stuff up and mixing it 50/50 with ground beef. Then it only tastes off, not truly nasty.

 

I suppose you could try a 3/4 beef mixture but at some point along that path it all becomes kind of pointless.

[mike carey]

If you don't much like the taste, then as @bigvalboy and @MsGuy said there's not much you can do but if it's just that it's too strong, blending it with beef will do the trick. If you make a meat loaf (either by itself or with beef or veal) you could try adding some fruit that complements the meat, such as red currants. Maybe cranberries would work too. I remember making a meat loaf (can't remember what meat I used, but it wasn't venison) with cranberries and pistachios and that worked quite well.

[body2body]

I gave this a quick google search and there were many recipes for venison Chili. The spices and aromatics might go a long way in masking the gamy taste. I have no experience cooking venison and only ate it once years ago at a dinner in Paris where slices of venison were served with a port wine sauce flavored with juniper berries ( again strong flavors ).

I was hesitant to recommend Chili after the recent marathon Chili thread.

[amused1]

Msguy, great avatar.

 

I quite like venison and cook it about once a month. I'm sort of bored with chili and meat sauce so the meatloaf idea has me thinking. Thanks for the suggestions all.

 

If you have stewing meat from venison, I find a good overnight soak in a full bodied red wine marinade tenderizes it and minimizes the gamey flavor.

 

Any other suggestions are welcome.

[mike carey]

I quite like venison and cook it about once a month. I'm sort of bored with chili and meat sauce so the meatloaf idea has me thinking. Thanks for the suggestions all.

I would reverse the thinking you have applied to this (or you implied you did). I take the starting point as being what dish do I want to make rather than what will I use this type of meat for this time. So if it was time to make my next batch of meat sauce I would see what meat I had from which I could make it, rather than 'It's venison time again what will I make'. I regularly make my version of a bolognese sauce (for spaghetti, making lasagne or just having on toast). If I had some venison, I would use it for that, just as I might use a pack of turkey mince that I'd bought and frozen last time it was cheap.

 

This discussion and the recent one about turkey chili have convinced me that I need to try using some of the kangaroo mince that I walk past in the supermarket all the time, and see how that goes.

[flguy]

The venison that came from northern Michigan always tasted like pine needles so complete animal went into summer sausage and was great.

[+ Rickee]

Very thin slices of venison quick-seared in butter and a little soy sauce is delicious. If you're using ground venison for burgers etc., you need to add fat (it's way to lean otherwise). Adding pork and/or beef fat (or ground pork/ground beef) greatly improves the taste.

A cooking tip I learned years ago: adding some soy sauce to the pan gives a wonderful rich flavor as the sugars in the soy sauce carmelize before the sugars in the meat, poultry or fish do. Related to this: rub anchovy paste on grilled pork before you grill it -- the anchovy paste (surprisingly) has absolutely NO taste and will carmelize well before the pork does, and so you don't have to cook the snot out of the pork to get that rich grilled taste. This is all based on the principles of the Maillard Reaction -- a chef's best friend!

 

http://modernistcuisine.com/2013/03/the-maillard-reaction/

[+ sync]

One of my aunts used to incorporate bacon strips into her roasting of venison, which got raves from some family members. I was young at the time, and the thought of consuming Bambi was too much for me.

[mike carey]

Rickee, exactly the sort of thing I was trying to achieve tonight, caramelising onions, trying to brown chopped roma tomatoes before folding both of them with fried squid through some linguine. The only thing I forgot to do is dry fry cracked pepper in the pan before cooking the other ingredients. It all worked out, btw.

[amused1]

After that chili thread I ended up making chili with the ground venison. I added some ground pork to increase the fat content. Texans would be appalled by the number of veggies I put in it. Haha.

[+ Charlie]

I once had a wonderful reindeer soup in Finland, but I don't know the recipe.

[klifhangar]

Lime juice tends to take the gamey taste down. I sauté it with onions and garlic, add a lot of lime juice and then cumin and use it in nachos, tacos and burritos.