Thread: Confession time

i like veni, but to be honest a nice 1 year old nanny goat is the food of gods done right

Originally Posted by Delphus

What if I’m the cook haha

come and visit me.....and possibly RELEARN how to cook it...we always learning
one of the biggest changes for me has been my aging buckets so venison sits in fridge for a week..makes it super tender. animal shot and dies instantly is much better than one that took awhile to die through poor shot placement...fawn is better than yealing,yearling bettter than hind and hind better than stag..stag better then beef lol.
fallow is much more mild than red. but young red is DEVINE....
we have good butcher who makes AWESOME sausages n savs for us.....have had nobody at all try them who isnt hooked. its great way to use lesser cuts of venison..

I only take red yearlings for meat now, dont really like the flavour as the animal gets older esp older hinds I find have a bad game taste, the yearlings flavour wise are pretty much same as lean beef for me,dont really like fallow,taste like mutton/venison.

Another possible reason is that often times wild hunt animals fall as shot and can take a while to get too to process out. in comparison a good farm killed animal by someone that knows what they are about will result in an animal dropped instantly, properly bleed removing a lot of toxins from the meat and processed and chilled quickly controlling bacteria etc. Wild animals in comparison may not bleed well, can be delayed in being processed and can be a while to get chilled down and that can be the cause of the typical flavour. I've had feral cattlebeast that I thought was venison...

There is no right or wrong in this. We’re all different and our palettes are as variable as our personalities.

My palette changes over time, from one thing to the other and back again. I ate tons of venison backstraps from 2016-2023, but as of now I’m right off the stuff and eating pretty much only wagyu beef (it helps to be growing it at home). It’s the same for the rest of the family so we mince everything now and cook a 50-50 mix with beef mince. That works well, for us.

Wild pork has been a challenge for me. Sometimes it’s great and sometimes it’s a nonstarter. Goat? Meh. But done right it’s lovely. I was eating quite a bit of kangaroo for awhile. Rabbit & hare, pheasant, fish. Any of those can be lovely or unpalatable to me on a given day, i’ve never really understood exactly what controls how I respond to eating it (or not). When I was a kid my grandpa made us eat fucking pike for chrissake. Bones! Palette preferences tend to come and go, depending on lots of things I suppose.
@Delphus, something I have found to work well with folk that are a bit reluctant towards game meat is to prepare it for Asian style stirfry cooking. That works well and if you like a proper Chinese wok prepared stirfry I don’t think you will struggle with very thin slices of venison. Try it, maybe that’s the magic recipe for you.

Backsteaks left in a big chunk , seared then baked in the oven . Corned back legs , or mince . Mince is the best cut of meat you can get.

Or sausages and salami -if you have access to someone who makes good small goods. Many butchers dont do well with wild game smallgoods .....

Another option I'm really rating at the moment is the white man's hangi - the stainess can with a gas burner underneath it. Low pressure steam cooker basically... 7 hours in this device steaming and the toughest cut of meat will melt in your face.

I normally wrap the cut up in a bowl of tinfoil so it is soaking in it's own juices, herbs spices to taste, oil, soy sauce, salt and maybe a dollop of honey and in it goes. As I said, a revelation. I picked up a mutton roll the other day and ended up with a hand full of butcher's string - the meat 'pulled' itself and dropped back into the tinfoil 'bowl', largest piece was fork sized. Yum.

Mate has a walk in chiller set at 2degrees, a yearling red left in there for 14 to 16 days will come apart with a folk and tastes superb.
Even older deer come out very nice.

I catch more fish than i do shoot deer. I end up giving 95% of my fish away i think because i was brought up on it. The old oh not snapper and schallops for dinner again

Fish for me is kind of the opposite

When I announced I wanted to get a boat, my wife looked at me with a puzzled look and said "but you don't like fish?"

I said "no I don't like bought fish".

That was a long time ago now and my wife wont eat bought fish now either.

The thing is I can only eat 2 or 3 meals of fish before I need a change again.

I'm not great on venison steaks so only take the prime cuts for steaking(basically backsteaks) and the rest is made into biersticks, sausages and mince which works well. Hard to beat homekill beef and lamb/mutton

I love to hunt, so I eat Venison. Won't shoot a red, eat Sika back steaks/mince etc, love all cuts of Fallow.

Tried fallow, both bucks. Not impressed. Shot early rut.
Currently eating sambar hind. Quit good slow cooked.

By far prefer lamb, goat, pork tho.

fallow buck notorious for being bad.... sambar as being tough lol.

My preference has been Fallow hinds/yearlings.

Shot a Red Stag in the bush last year just before the roar, fat as. Backs steaks were absolutely delicious.