What I'm Consuming, April: Josh's Venison
As promised, here’s Josh, who kindly joined to explain to us all what you can do with deer you’ve “harvested” yourself.
The coolest thing about venison is how it looks: the unground cuts are a deep blood purple, with no visible fat whatsoever, gleaming like a squishy hunk of quartz. Forest sashimi. This is, I guess, partly because deer spend all their time prancing, sprinting, and jaywalking, and partly due to their lean diet of tender shoots and grasses, a diet that becomes even leaner toward the winter hunting season.
This lifestyle gives wild venison an interesting nutritional profile, with half the fat of beef, and slightly more protein—really amazing protein-to-calorie ratio. My wife is a serious amateur Olympic weightlifter who does basic macro tracking, and she gives it two muscular thumbs up, in five sets of three reps each.
The deer’s lifestyle impacts the taste as well. I think “gaminess” as a concept is snooty bullshit, but even still I would not characterize it as “gamey” at all. It’s more grassy. It’s an herbaceous taste that is not overwhelming, and makes you feel like you’re enjoying the essence of every blade and bud that our dearly departed enjoyed over the course of his brief (but not tragically-short, mind you) life.
Tons of venison are harvested—that’s the verb that the NY Department of Environmental Conservation, aka the hunting DMV, uses: harvested—every year in America, but unfortunately the dominant strain of venison food knowledge focuses on chili, which I refuse to resort to. Maybe this has to do with the degradation of American food ways, or the variety of spices and produce that the typical American hunting family has access to, or an interest in. Maybe I am bad at Googling, or secretly wanted to fuck around first before seeking too much instruction. In any case, many hunters these days see a deer as a walking pile of ground meat, asking their local deer butchery to grind the whole animal up with the exception of the two long backstraps—a cut that is not exactly a tenderloin but analogous to them in beef and pork, which folks like to grill whole.