Cooking Venison – TSP Rewind – Epi-324

The Survival Podcast

This episode of TSP Rewind revisits a 2016 broadcast focused on the culinary techniques required to prepare venison and other lean game meats

Key takeaways

• Venison is extremely lean, so external fats like peanut oil or bacon must be used to facilitate heat transfer during cooking.
• To prevent ground venison burgers from drying out, it is recommended to mix in one-third ground pork or beef fat.

Main topics

• Venison cooking techniques
• Butchery and meat cuts

Notable quotes

Don't overcook it. Don't blame your shitty prep or cooking or whatever else on it being gamey because gamey is not a flavor.

Conclusion

A practical guide for hunters to maximize their harvest through proper

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Hi folks, Jack Spierko here. Today you are listening to an episode of TSP Rewind. Commercial free versions of past episodes. Podcasts blast from the past. I put these up when I can't do a show due to professional commitments or rare vacations. These podcasts will appear in standard iTunes, Stitcher and other feeds, but will be titled TSP Rewind episodes and numbered accordingly. Well, hi folks and welcome to this Rewind edition. Today we are rewinding back to November 29, 2016. This was originally episode 1906 and it's all about cooking venison and using, well, pretty much all of the deer. We go into some of the things that a lot of people just don't mess around with, like the heart and the liver and other stuff like that in this episode. I'll give you a couple little things here with this intro to this rewind. First of all, I decided to do this one. I was kind of scrolling through different episodes and looking for something that's timely for this time of year. You know, deer season's upon us. Like, most of the country hasn't begun yet, but it's upon us. So a lot of y'all will be going out in the field and harvesting deer this year. And so it just fits well with that. The other thing I wanted to tell you, though, was why there is a rewind today. Initially, I did not plan on having for this trip I'm taking but one rewind. And now it's going to be two. So tomorrow you will not get a rewind. You'll get an expert panel Q &A show for the week, as you typically expect. And there will be a Friday Fusion. which some of y'all skip, but it's there if you want it, regularly scheduled under the new program regime that we have, going back to five days a week. Monday, you'll also be getting a rewind. The reason for this is I made a commitment about a year ago to my wife that I would push what I'm doing and keep doing it, but yet I would make time for more travel. That's something that's very important to her at this point in our lives. We want to travel while we can, while we're still young enough to enjoy it. Speaker 1 (2:09) We are up in Broken Bow as you're listening to this Broken Bow Oklahoma. But we're not actually there yet. We're leaving tomorrow. If you listen to this episode today, it comes out on a Wednesday. My original plan was to do new shows for you guys all the way through Thursday and do a Friday Fusion and only have one for you on Monday. What happened was, one way or another, I must have told Dorothy not to book somebody for me this week. And as I looked at all the things I need to get done this week, including getting ready for the workshop, some of the other projects we have going on, I just didn't have it in me to produce another show with brand new content. as a Just Jack show this week. So you got your show yesterday. You get your rewind today, your expert panel tomorrow. I'll do my best for you. But I think this episode, you know, it's 10 years old now. So a lot of you never heard it, and a lot of you will be hearing it again but learning new things in it that you didn't pick up the last time. And I think it's very timely for right now. And just to be honest. If I redid it, not much would change 10 years later. A deer is still a deer. It's still a lean red meat. You still cook it the same way if you're going to do it right. I might have a few new little tricks up my sleeve, but the overall fundamentals are the same. Don't overcook it. Don't blame your shitty prep or cooking or whatever else on it being gamey because gamey is not a flavor. Gamey is something people make up to cover up flavors and tastes that they either don't like or don't understand. And, you know, the last part of it is use the deer, man. Use everything. There's a lot of people out there today using so... much less of the deer than I grew up learning how to use. I understand why people do it, you know, like peeling deer. So you're not, that just basically means they skin the deer. They take all the meat from the outside and they don't ever even open up the, the, the chest cavity. So the heart and lung are left. Usually you can still reach in from the sides and get the tenderloins out. You don't get really a. a nice butchered cut on that when you do that, but you can. But, I mean, there's so much that gets left when you do that. Bone stock from venison is probably the best bone stock you can get your hands on. A simple bone saw, and you can open those femurs up to let that marrow out. There's just so much that you can do with a deer that we've stopped valuing enough to do it. So if you're going to go out and take an animal's life, then honor it by utilizing it as fully as possible to its potential. With that, let's go ahead and rewind. Again, we're going back to November 29, 2016, originally. Episode 1906 on cooking venison. Speaker 1 (4:59) with Alice getting into the main topic of today's show. I want to start out with just the question that spawned this episode. It says, Hey Jack, I'd like to start by saying thank you for everything you do. It helped me greatly in my venture towards homesteading. My question is, what are some great venison recipes or methods to cook it? Details, I'm coming from a family of no hunters and this is my first year hunting. Well, the two hours of my first morning, I had a deer on the ground. Good job there, man. I had it professionally butchered, as I don't possess those skills yet. Any help in making amazing meals with this meat would be great, as I'm having a blast hunting. I really want to enjoy the food it's providing. These other cuts of meat I received back. Steaks, stew meat, ground meat, sausage. Chops, roasts, backstraps, tenderloins. Thank you, Bobby. Well, Bobby, first of all, congratulations in having success on your first time out hunting deer. Don't get addicted to that. The first year that I ever hunted archery, I shot a deer the second day I was in a tree with a bow, which is a little challenging. And I was pretty cocky about it the next year. I shot a buck with a bow. I also shot it the second to the last day of the season. I hunted every single day. And that winter, I shot another deer in firearm season, which I shot also on the last day of the season. And in those two seasons, I saw one, exactly one deer while hunting in areas with a lot of deer. So it doesn't always work out that way. But good for you, man. I hope it keeps you excited and going back for more. And I hope you're in a place where you're not limited out at one deer because... One deer just ain't enough, as you're about to feel like after we get done with today's show. So that was the question that spawned us. And I thought, you know, with steak, stew meat, ground meat, all I thought, I can't do that in a 10-minute or less answer for a college show. And I thought I would do it for today. But, again, I want to point out today that when I start talking about cooking a venison steak, I'm going to tell you basically how to cook a steak. And I think this is one of the big things. that people fail to understand. It's red meat. So you don't really cook it any differently, except that it's easier to mess it up. And the main reason it's easier to mess it up, I want you to think about it like brewing a beer. If I brought you over to my house and I said, I just made some beer, and you said, well, what do you have? And I said something like, I have a really nice British brown ale. You'd be like, oh, that's cool. That's kind of like a micro-brew type of thing, or an American Pale Ale or an IPA or something like that. And it would get a lot more play from you if you're a beer drinker anyway. Then let's say I said, I made a beer that's really similar to Coors Light or Miller High Life or Coors Regular Beer or something like that. Because, well, it's kind of plain. It doesn't have a lot of depth of flavor and things like that. But as a home brewer, it's actually a lot harder to make a light or standard American lager than it is to make these other beers that people are so enamored with today. Because there's no place to hide. If you have an imperfection in a British Brown Ale, you've got these... Multiple hops going on. You've got this chocolate malt, maybe a little bit of caramel malt. You've got this fruity ale yeast. So there's a lot of places for small imperfections to hide. But if we're just doing a light hopped, light beer that's done at lager yeast, where you don't really have a lot of depth of flavor and difference. If there's a flaw in there, you see it. It's a little bit different with the air. It's not that there's not complexity in there, but what there is is a lot less fat. and fat is forgiving when it comes to cooking meat. Remember that. Fat is forgiving. And what I mean by that is it's a little bit harder to dry out a piece of meat when it's marbled nicely with fat, and it's a little bit easier to dry it out when it's very, very lean. And that's the big difference with venison. It's extremely lean. Even if you go, like we used to shoot deer. in a place called Tumbling Run. And I don't know if the whole place was called Tumbling Run or if we just called it that because the Tumbling Run dairy was there. But there was a lot of public land, and land that was private but nobody really cared if you hunted out at Tumbling Run. And Tumbling Run was like a mixture of woods and farms. Huge cornfields. And these deer would munch, browse, and, you know... berries and all this high-carbohydrate sugar, along with masticules of acorn, plus they would go out at night into the cornfields. And these were the biggest, fattest deer I ever saw in Pennsylvania. I mean, when you skin the deer, there'd be a freaking inch and a half or more of tallow on the back legs, in the back there, and there's quite a bit of a good kind of floating fat. But even those deer with all that fat, What they don't have is intermuscular fat. The fat floats on the outside. You might have a little bit of intramuscular fat where you've got two layers of muscle or some fat between them, but you don't have that marbled fat in the meat like you do with a really good piece of, let's say, black angus. And because of that, and tallow is like a hard fat that we can do some things with that we won't talk about today because it's out of the scope of today's show. But it's not something you want a big hunk of on the side of your steak like you do with a piece of beef fat. It's candle waxy. It's not good stuff. So you don't have that. So that means when we're cooking deer meat, we sometimes want to add a bit of fat here and there. But again, we can only add that fat to the outside. We add fat to the outside of a piece of meat, a little bit of oil or a little bit of grease or something like that. What we're actually doing if we're going to grill that is we're helping transfer the heat into the meat. We're not actually keeping the meat moist other than the cooking technique because the fat can't get in the meat. If I were to take and rub margarine on your forearm, A little bit of it might seep into your skin, but an hour later, unless you wipe it off, you're going to have a big slab of margin on your forearm. It's not going to go in there, and it'll go in skin better than it's going to go into things like muscle. So we can only do so much by adding fat. So what that means is we've got two ways to cook venison in general. There's some other things that we'll talk about today, but in general, we're either going to go fast and hot. or low, slow, and moist. We are very unlikely to cook a piece of venison in a smoker the way that we would cook something like, let's say, a brisket. Too low, too slow, too long, too dry. Doesn't have the fat for it. That's why we like briskets for that, because they have a huge fat cap. Put the fat cap up, self, base, and it's got fat running everywhere through it. Deer doesn't work like that. It's not that you can't smoke deer meat, it's that it's a little bit more challenging. You're usually making jerky or sausage or something like that. With sausage, we can incorporate the fat. Because we grind the meat and we push it together either in patty or link form. So that's how we can break that rule a little bit. So keep that in mind today. Before I get into how to cook, I want to talk a little bit about what Bobby said he had his professionally done. And I want to talk about self-process versus professional processing and some of the things that you might deal with there. When you self-process, you have complete flexibility. Speaker 1 (12:52) And one of the things that does for you, so Bobby said he has chops and backstrap, for instance. Well, that's interesting because that's really, to most deer hunters that self-process, you got backstraps. And a backstrap runs from like where the neck is above the shoulder blade all the way down to what's called the rump roast. So that's all the way along the ribs plus, so you got your ribs, and that's going to be what they're calling chops, and I'll talk about that in a second. And then it runs past where the ribs end all the way down until you hit the pelvis. And when you hit the pelvis there, the backbone kind of line up and everything changes. But from the point of where the neck meets the shoulder all the way to there, you can, when you have a deer hanging up and it's skinned, you can take that out as one giant long strip. Speaker 1 (13:48) And you might want to do that. And when I start talking about cooking, maybe you'll understand. Well, once you do that, you can cut it into chops. So think of the reason they call it chops. You chop, right? But what most processors are going to do is they're going to cut the ribs off. And from that neck point to where the ribs end, maybe they're going to cut that. one vertebrae or two vertebrae thick or they're going to cut the backbone in half and cut them like little pork chops you know one-sided so you're gonna have a butterfly two-side or a single side chop or they're going to bone it just like I said and they're going to cut it into pieces and then they're going to leave the piece Because it is a different cut. The muscle is used a little bit differently. They're going to take the piece from where the ribs are down to the rump, and they're going to leave it in one piece. They're going to call that a backstrap, and they're going to cut the piece from the ribs up to the neck into little steak-looking medallions and call it chops. That's because you feel better because you got two things instead of one. Here's the secret. On a deer, you couldn't tell the difference between one and the other unless there was a bone in it so you could see it. It tastes the same, even though it is the fact that the stuff over the ribs is used a little bit more than the stuff between the ribs and the backbone, and that's a little more tender. You really can't tell. So if you self-process, you can take that whole strip off, and then you can sit there and look at it. It's about three foot long. And you can say, well, I can cut it into two one-foot pieces, or three one-foot pieces, or two. Foot and a half pieces, or I can cut it up into little medallions. Let's say an inch, inch and a half thick. Thicker is better, with deer meat especially. Thicker is better. But why would you cut it up into medallions? Let's say you said, I'm just going to cut it in half, right where the butcher would, right about, you know, and that's about where you get a half and a half, the backstrap to the chop side. And you're going to, now you're going to cut up in a minute. Why? Unless you're going to cook it right now and you want it that way, why wouldn't you just wrap it up in your freezer paper or whatever, put it in your freezer? When you take it out to cook it, if you want to cook it as a whole little mini roast or a little loin, you can do that. If you'd like to cook it now as smaller chops or breakfast steaks, some people call them, well, all you're going to do is cut it into as many slices as you want. So that's just one of the reasons I think that self-processing is better if you have the skill set. And the other thing to tell your butcher is you like thick cuts. Because a lot of what I'm going to tell you today is kind of hard to do with thinner cuts, though there is some cool things you can do with some thin cuts as well. So let's start out with steaks. Now, on a... a cow, your sirloin is one of your main steaks. And that comes from a part of the pelvis area. Part of that's going to be your round and your rump, but there's also that forward piece of it that is a sirloin. I've seen very few butchers cut that piece off and cut it into steaks, though I'm sure it's done. And you can just kind of look up sirloin steak. you know, online and see a diagram of where it comes from. Most of the time that whole piece is either usually as a whole bone-in rump taken as a roast, or they take a bandsaw and cut it in half, and you have two half roasts, or it's boned and it's made into stew meat, or it's made into ground meat. It's one of those things that's done with it. I think it makes a fine roast, and we'll talk about that in a bit. But generally, that's not what you're getting when you get deer steak. You don't usually get deer steak that way. The other place that you get steaks from a cow is going to be what they call your back straps or your chops from a deer, which they're not going to call steaks. So what generally, when you're looking at a deer steak, is a deer steak off a deer if it's done by a butcher or even done by self-processing. It's usually your back leg. Speaker 1 (18:08) It's usually your back leg from the knee up to where the hip socket goes into the pelvis. It makes a nice kind of oval-shaped steak. And they can be done a couple ways. One, your butcher will cut it