I take all the venison I can get. My gf makes a Venison Burgundy that is exquisite.
I was shopping at the superette next to my apartment building yesterday and found they’re stocking something I’ve never seen before: canned venison. I thought of trying some, but it’s pretty expensive. Can it be any good?
I’ve had fresh venison in the forms of steak and chili meat and liked it very much. I’ve also had venison salami from Wisconsin, which (if I’m not mistaken) has the second largest deer herd in the US (after Pennsylvania).
Let’s eat grandma!
Soylent gran! It’s…old people.
Stranger
I realize now should have written “stew meat,” since I didn’t bother grinding the venison in the chili. (It was beanless, BTW.)
At least in the United States keep in mind that most (maybe all) retail venison sold is not wild hunted, but farmed. There are a few big deer farming operations in the United States, but they tend to be vigorously opposed by the hunting community, so a lot of the relatively small retail supply of venison here is actually farmed overseas and imported in (which is crazy considering how much deer we have in America.)
The thing about venison is the USDA requirements for meat handling apply fully to it just like any other meat. To sell hunted venison it has to be processed in a facility that is USDA inspected, and most commercial butchery operations simply don’t run venison lines. The supply of hunted venison that does end up in the food supply is typically bound for restaurants, as there are a number of higher end restaurants that regularly serve venison dishes.
Where I grew up you could get venison pretty much anytime you wanted it, but it was always through the “grey market”, friends, friends of friends, family etc. I pretty much perpetually had some in my chest freezer for most of my life due to my own hunting activities (which I’ve kind of done less of in the last few years.)
The superette* I referred to is in Moscow, so I assume the venison was raised and slaughtered in the Russian Federation. I went to a much larger supermarket this afternoon, and it had a wide variety of canned meat that included venison (deer), goose, rabbit, veal, and moose. About the only things I didn’t see were boar and reindeer.
I didn’t notice any of these when I was last here in 2019—just canned beef, pork, and mutton. Is this something unique to Russia, or has it been catching on in other countries in the last two years as well?
*Too small to be a supermarket, too large to be a convenience store.
Boar and reindeer would be an issue in Eastern Europe because of Chernobyl. Last I heard wild boar in Germany still have high levels of radioactive contamination, and it only gets worse as you go east. Reindeer are an issue because they eat lichen and apparently lichen soaks up radioisotopes, which it then passes on to the reindeer. Apparently those two are the worst animals for those sorts of things.
Not a problem people in earlier generations had to worry about.
“Rudolph with your nose so bright, won’t you guide my sleigh tonight.”
Around here (southeastern US), canned meats tend to be regarded with suspicion. I have seen canned game or ‘wild’ meats, but these are almost always presented as a sort of novelty. Canned (or pouch-packed) fish, on the other hand, is a pantry staple.