I’d love to try it, or get some young tender meat to prepare myself. I’ve taken to cooking steaks sous vide, and can take any cut and make it as tender as desired (too tender is not good either, believe me).
But it does tend to concentrate, or at least preserve, the flavor, so I’d be reluctant to do it with something I didn’t like the flavor of to begin with. I suppose I could cook with butter or oil, if I wanted to dilute the flavor since, contrary to what a lot of people seem to expect, adding other fats apparently pulls fat soluble flavor out of the meat.
Not all goat is the same just like deer. A wether goat is great that is a male that had some of his male parts removed when he was young like a steer is to beef. An ancient buck goat that smells like he spent his life soaking himself in goat urine and is tough as tire tread is hard to eat. Buffalo, elk, moose are all delicious. Deer is not always delicious. After i ate one who ate little more than osage orange in his life i was a reformed deer eater walking away a beef man mostly. The deer we ate a lot in my younger years were grain eaters which were much better. A sage brush deer im told is really bad. The old timer who was my friend said a sage brush deer finished his deer eating. We talked and laughed about it then we ran into town and got a couple of 1 pound double cheeseburgers.
im like you Lucky. give me a nice young tender doe or spikehorn. no matter how you cook the antlers they are tough as hell. if i have a 8 point standing near a fat doe, ill take the doe every time if i have tags for both.
I’ve heard that said here and in WI as well. I don’t necessarily believe that statement. Most of a deer’s diet here is natural browse. In fact, most of a deer’s diet most anywhere they exist is natural browse.
Is there a difference in taste from a 5 year old buck who has eaten natural browse in a northern area compared to a yearling doe who has eaten mainly soybeans and corn in a more southern location? Yep.
Is there a difference in taste from a 5 year old buck who has eaten natural browse in a northern area and a 5 year old buck from a more southern area? Nope.
I ate a number of old bucks from southcentral WI. They were delicious. They’re just as delicious here 6 hours NW.
One of my friends shoots the little yearlings so sometimes i go by and give him a hard time but i know he is right just like you and lucky. He has brothers and friends and his is always the smallest deer and i know why. Went by a few times and helped him butcher their deer and get caught up. His little deer butcher out to about a full grocery sack worth. He loves eating deer thats for sure.
These that eat in the grain fields are really much better flavored. You got to taste the difference. We have whitetail here like you. Deer fat is yellow and unlike most fat it dont taste good at all. Im guessing that yellow in their fat is from something green like leaves they eat in their diet. Another words i dont think they eat mostly grain i do think they mostly browse. That grain everyday does seem to make the meat palatable. Deer takes a long time to cook compared to beef. Beef has a really rich flavor compared to deer. Every place things seem be different than my experience but the closer by someone is the more they know what i mean.
it may be different here on the east coast esp. south of Maine. there isnt much woods which = less browse. the deer down there sleep in people rosebushes and under hedges but get most of their calories from crops or peoples plantings. i shot a 7pt. down in s. P.A about 20 years ago and that guy was just as tender as a spike on browse here. they bed near the food source and dont have to move far so they are soft compared to a browsing deer. but i agree and browsing deer here or southern Maine is the same. maybe a little better in the south as they have acorn mast we dont have here.
shot a 4pt. in N.M in 91’. muley though but similar to black tail. it was good but you could taste the mesquite it browsed on. kept the backstrap and tenderloin and gave the rest to my squad leader who had 3 kids.
Whitetails have next to zero intramuscular fat, that’s why venison has similar fat/cholesterol to chicken. They do have fat/tallow on the outside of their muscles…and yes, that tallow will make the meat almost inedible. All of that tallow gets removed from the deer I process. So does the silverskin. I spend many hours processing a deer, mainly because I want to be able to eat it without thinking about how it was treated.
Yes thats how i always did it. Trimmed all that fat off and got the tendons removed they are like string. My meat grinder got hung up with all those rope like tendons and i would stop a dozen times cleaning them out. Sometimes i’d grind it a few times. Like @steveb4 said the backstraps are the best but there is precious little of them. We call those butterfly steaks. Every young man should live off deer for awhile until he gets goats or cows or elk etc. Later in life. Buffalo are hard to pen.
I’ve had bad mule deer venison. Never shot one myself, so I can’t comment on whether it was a specie specific issue or how it was handled from harvest to table.
Like you said sometimes people shoot them wrong and they run hard that combination is bad. Gut shot deer that runs 3 miles is not what you want to eat all year. Some deer is just bad tasting maybe disease or maybe diet like that osage orange deer i ate. He was old and big just a rutty old buck even coyotes would think twice about eating. That meat was terrible but who knows why.
Sounds like you were grinding meat from the lower part of the front legs. That stuff doesn’t grind, even in commercial grinders. Those cuts either get tossed or cooked at low temps for long times.
The commercial sausage makers I used to have make products for me would tell me to keep that crap out of the mix unless they wanted me to be less than happy with the end product.
if i have a 8 point standing near a fat doe, ill take the doe every time if i have tags for both.