Cooking Venison

Cooking Venison

David Sparks Ph.D.
David Sparks Ph.D.
I had a question for executive chef and avid hunter, Randy King. I hear so often, particularly from the wives of hunters, that venison is gamey tasting, stringy and tough. "My take on that is that it is just not beef. If you look at it from a different angle entirely and analyze what kind of cut you are dealing with, gaminess typically comes from it being overcooked. Beef medium well, venison medium well, that is where that gamey flavor comes from. There are a couple of things you can do to mitigate that. The first one I recommend is here in the field. If the hunter gets the animal out of the field and cooled quickly, a lot of that gamey taste goes away immediately. After that, the temperature that it is cooked to, well done, is not very good. That is for meat that does not have a lot of internal marbling. Marbling is fat in the muscle. Beef has a lot of it but wild game does not and that is what makes it so good for you. So you never want to cook venison to that well done state. If it is stringy, whatever method you are using to cook it, is probably not the right method. So if you are trying to make a steak out of a shank for a brisket and you are trying to cut and grill a steak, it's not the right cut. You have to look at the method you are using so is it something you throw in the crock pot overnight, put it in, go to bed, get up in the morning and you have a nice pulled venison that is not real chewy. T
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