Title: "Gamey" Tasting Game, How To Fix- Part 4
Categories: Game Venison Info
Yield: 1 Servings

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If you must make sausage, make it well. Venison can actually make a very good sausage product that showcases rather than disguises its unique flavor. Much depends on whether you do the sausage "black" or "white" style, ie, do you bleed and rinse the meat thoroughly first for a more delicate product, or do you make a civet with the reserved blood mixed with vinegar? The former will produce a mild, delicate product which takes well to a bit of sage, basil and shallot in the mix. The latter takes to onions and garlic or perhaps fennel or caraway. The middle ground is to use fresh venison that is neither washed and beaten free of blood or civetted, and much depends on the individual carcass - age, sex, diet, condition, etc.

A lot of hunters ignorant of fine venison cuisine turn the works into deerburgers or hash or sausage, trying to disguise its taste rather than showcase it with fine cooking. I suppose if you shoot a rutting buck deer and then don't gut it out before it sours, burgers or sausage or dogfood is a reasonable destination for such a wasted kill. But geez Louise, if you have a mountain of fine gourmet steaks and roasts and chops in front of you and you make mush out of them or allow them to spoil, you have just effectively pissed money away into the snow. Also it's bad karmic brownie points, y'know? Eat what you kill. Don't waste good food, or the life of an animal, senselessly. The Goddess is watching you. ;P

It is all very well I suppose to want to kill the biggest boy deer with the biggest antlers if you wish to prove your fitness to rule the herd and to mate with the does. I guess it's a phallic kind of guy thing. ;P Since I'm not a guy, I'll just take good venison where I can get it and never mind the big rack of antlers, a sure indication to me of a less than prime meat animal.

Rare roasted venison, fragrant with bay leaves and garlic on a bed of wild rice with pecans, is serious cuisine. Deer neck braised Moroccan style with lemons and honey and olives, is delicious over cumin-scented couscous. Venison shanks osso bucco, steam-braised for hours in your oven, will fill the house with its tantalizing perfume until the neighbors sniff their noses into your yard and cry, "What's for dinner?"

In a rougher setting, wrap chunks of lean hind leg in bacon and shishkebab them over the fire with a little cracked black pepper, or throw a slab of deer ribs on the fire and baste at the last minute with the best sauce your granny ever gave you a recipe for.

If you must make sausage, make it well. Don't disguise the taste of the meat; enhance it with the freshest herbs and the finest ingredients. The conventional wisdom is that deer fat is rancid; sometimes this is so and more often in my experience it isn't. Fry a small piece and judge for yourself for each carcass. If there isn't enough of it, add some fresh pork fat of the best quality, and possibly some veal meat, which does not overpower the venison as pork can do.

Whatever you do, enjoy the rightful reward of the hunt - the taste of venison in all its glory, not disguised but showcased and enhanced by careful handling of the meat and respectful cooking.

Bon appetit,

Tanith Tyrr (camp butcher and chef for a fair share; California SF Bay area)

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