One thing Cecil missed is this: deer tastes like SHIT. I’ve tried to eat it five or six times, each time I thought I was eating a hobo’s shoe.
Please don’t tell me it wasn’t prepared right. It was prepared by the same person who shot it an dressed it, and who keeps insisting that I don’t like it because I’ve never had it prepared right. Gordon Fucking Ramsay could cook it for me and it would still taste like shit.
Bottom line: some people just don’t have a taste for wild game. And I’m not alone in this: the human preference for farmed meat over game meat (in some humans anyway) goes back at least 5,000 years: see Genesis 25: 28.
Out of curiosity, how many generations would it take to farm the wild game taste out of a population of deer? 10? 30? 100?
This may be the first time I’ve seen a Café Society “X tastes terrible, your opinions about it are WRONG” post in Comments on Columns. :mad:
I don’t think it would take generations. A lot of “wild game” taste comes down to how the animal fed. A lot of wild forage is strongly flavored and those compounds wind up in the tissue. OTOH, 'round here, even wild deer tend to feed on cornfield residue, and it’s literally corn-fed venison. Very mild, not very “gamey” at all. (In other words, boring.)
BTW, I’m not sure how you think that Biblical passage supports your assertion:
Isaac is the only character whose meat preferences is mentioned, and he voted “venison”. (We’ll go ahead and read between the lines if you want, and state the unstated: it was notable that Isaac preferred game, because everyone else preferred farmed. You didn’t make that argument, but I’ll charitably assume that you meant that inferential argument rather than completely misreading and miscomprehending that passage.)
The “gamey” taste is due to diet and activity. Wild deer eat just about anything they can: grass, acorns, a wide variety of vegetation, some of which are strongly flavored that we use as herbs, and they are constantly moving. If they were raised in a pen and fed corn, the taste would be much more mild.
The Biblical passage is clear: some people (or at least one, anyway) preferred the taste of wild game over farmed meat. Was Isaac alone in his preference? Fuck if I know. Considering however many people lived in that part of the world at the time, who had access to both farmed livestock and wild game, I wouldn’t think so.
My grandfather, who never fired a gun in his life outside of Basic Training (or whatever it’s called in the Navy), would get venison here and there from his work pals every fall, and grind it up into summer sausage. THAT was delicious.
And to me cilantro tastes exactly like floor cleaner but for some reason people seem to adore the shit and put it in everything.
Dude, if you don’t like venison don’t eat it, but don’t assume everyone else feels the same way. Some of us like meat with actual flavor as opposed to the near-ubiquitous sponge-like generic chicken breast (as an example).
Well, personally I hate the crap. Mr. Wrekker hunts an fishes as much as the game laws allow, so I have cooked my share of it for him. In every imaginable way. He would eat game everyday. I don’t get the romantic view of venison, it stinks when you are prepping it. It has absolutely no fat, so it’s dry as hell. To roast it you have to add fat from some source, usually I add fat back or fatty bacon. I suppose you have to have a taste for it. I don’t. I guess i could eat it if i was starving from a apocalypse or something. According to my husband, if they are corn fed you might well be eating lamb.
Some of the best carpaccio I ever had was venison. Served in this restaurant on the pier in Santa Cruz, CA, back in the 80s. Absolutely fabulous.
It most certainly (well, most probably) doesn’t taste like shit. It might not taste like chicken, but then if all you can enjoy are bland meats like chicken and pork, God help you if you try to eat anywhere else in the world, where exotic flavors are taken as par for the course. Well, except for England, where boring is best.
a ton of the “funk” in venison is in the fat. it’s why we don’t use deer fat for ground venison, and trim what we can.
IME venison tastes like lamb but a bit stronger. if your experience is that it tastes like a “hobo’s shoe” then who knows how the animal was taken and treated. could have been gut shot, could have been hung improperly, could have been aged at the wrong temperature.
I ate a bit of the backstrap from the deer I took last month, and “hobo’s shoe” is the last thing I’d use to describe it.
this. I like lamb, goat, venison, etc. because they actually taste like something, Commercial beef, chicken, and pork are so bland as to be worthless. People rave about stuff like Wagyu or Kobe beef because of its “texture.”
Don’t ever visit South Africa. You’ll be introduced to all kinds of delicious animals that you’ll find repugnant! A lot of them do tend to taste a bit like venison. Or beef. Depends on the beast.
Butter smokes too much to roast with, YMMV, but I have cooked venison for 30 years. I do what works for me. I do hate the crap though. Its not exotic around here. Everybody I know cooks it alot. My kids grew up on it and wild turkey, wild hog and rabbits & squirrel. Son-wrekker still begs for my squirrel Mulligan every fall. It is just a matter of your taste.
Venison, lamb, goat, ostrich, buffalo, I don’t care for. Several wild birds I like quail, chukar, I like wild rabbit and squirrel, wild cat meats are delicious. Wild pork I don’t like.
Ostrich? My only complaint against ostrich is price, for meat that is indistinguishable from beef.
ETA: DSYoungEsq, venison carpaccio sounds amazing. I’ve never seen it offered.
I’ve only had venison two or three times, and that was decades ago. My grandmother made venison chops that were delicious. A friend of the family gave us venison roast that was gamy. I don’t mind gamy, and in fact I usually prefer stronger flavours in my foods. Anyway, I’d always thought that gaminess was a function of the care taken when dressing the deer.
Not sure why the optics are bad. The deer get killed, no matter how you, um, slice it.
As for the taste of venison: some good, some bad. I’ve never been all that fond of it. Suburban deer are the worst. They hang around schoolyards and such and they eat all the cigarette butts lying around. They really taste bad.