We've been wanting to try venison for a long time, to see if we liked it. Our family is considering taking up hunting, but we wanted to be sure we would enjoy eating our harvest before we invested the time and money in gear and training.
Talk about free-range, organic, wild meat. It doesn't get any better than this. The animal I ate tonight lived it's life utterly free. He ate his natural diet of berries and leaves and plants, until one day the lights went out. No cramped, confined, un-natural living conditions. No stress or fear, except for perhaps the occasional chase by one of it's natural predators. Just mostly days of grazing in the sun, foraging, roaming free, as God created him to do. Now THAT is something I can really get behind. That is clean, fair, pure, and natural. I much prefer to eat an animal that lived that way.
I started with an internet search to see what there is to know about cooking venison, but didn't come up with much that was very helpful. So I called a girlfriend who's hubby and son hunt a lot and asked her. Then this morning I had a lengthy conversation with the lady who grows a lot of our produce when I was at the farmer's market. Then I got on the phone and called the mom of the hunter who gave us our venison. Between the internet and my conversations with live people, here is some of the advice I gleaned:
1. Venison is very lean, so watch it carefully, lest you overcook it and dry it out.
2. Rinsing the blood out as much as you can will reduce some of the "gamey" flavor.
3. Season it well--the farmer's market lady said to use lots of garlic.
O.k. So first things first, before I got the venison out I buttered my crock pot. Generously. The meat is so lean that a lot of people apparently add butter to it, and I didn't want to have to scrub my crock pot too much, so I greased it up with about a good Tablespoon of butter. Then I washed and chopped up one fresh onion, one yellow bell pepper, and 1/2 jalapeno I bought at the farmer's market this morning. Those went into the crock pot, and then I pressed 3 cloves on garlic on top of that.
I took the thawed venison out of the fridge, rinsed it under running water, and thin sliced it into strips, and then I soaked the strips for just a minute, swishing it, in a bowl of cold water, drain, repeat, repeat, repeat, until the water is clear-(ish). I noticed there was some grit in the bottom of the bowl, so be sure to lift the meat up as you dump out the water so you get rid of that grit. Then I rinsed each piece again under running water and dried on a paper towel. I don't really know if that was proper technique or not, but it's the only way I could figure out how to get the blood washed away. It was probably more rinsing than necessary. The mom of the hunter said that when the meat is processed it is soaked in a vinegar solution, so really I probably just needed to rinse it good under running water.
Then I tossed the meat (about 1 1/2 lbs) with 2 tsp cumin and 2 tsp chili powder and some salt, and 1 T. olive oil to coat. I laid that on a base of veggies I already had cut up and placed in the bottom of the crock, then added a 15 oz. can of Muir Glen organic fire roasted tomatoes with chili's on top of the meat.
Lid on...I cooked it on low for 5 hours, just because that's when I got home from driving for piano lessons this afternoon. I don't know, it may have been done earlier, but at 5 hours it was LOVELY. The venision just pulled apart ever-so-gently...nice and tender, and absolutely delicious. I finished it by stirring in 1 T. taco seasoning and 1 tsp. sea salt.
This is just another version of the same recipe I use in one form or another for making beef fajita's. You can view my blog post all about beef fajitas HERE, and the recipe I used tonight, slightly tweaked, right HERE.
I served it on gluten-free Rudy's brand tortillas, with all the fixin's: cheese, sour cream, avocado.
The bottom line: Sign me up for hunting classes. Next year, I'm in.
I don't really know why people think venison is "game-y", personally, I couldn't even tell the difference between venison and beef. One thing I learned is that venison benefits from long, slow braising. I held some strips out just for a test to see how they would do cooked on the stovetop in a stainless skillet with butter and garlic...not good. Dry and tough. Treat venison like a roast, or stew meat...not like a tender flank steak. Long, slow, moist cooking really seemed to do the trick in terms of breaking down that collagen, and I'm guessing the acid from the tomatoes helped too. And buttering the crock, and the added oil...it all worked really, really well to make this meat pull-apart tender. But just like beef, I suspect TOO long in the crock would just dry it out, and all the flavor would go right into the liquid...like virtually ANY meat that sits too long in the crock pot. Just because it's a crock pot doesn't mean you can forget it, and come back 10 hrs later...it's more forgiving than other cooking methods, but you still gotta keep an eye on things in there.
Thanks to our hunter friend for this special treat. It was a fun day for me to experiment with something totally new.
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