Great Venison Cooking

This article on preparing, venison is post-butchering. I will assume that your hunter (possibly with the aid of a local processing center) have taken care of getting the meat in a cookable state. Click here for tutorials on field dressing and butchering.

Frozen Meat: When time permits, thaw the meat in the refrigerator. Never thaw venison, or any meat for that matter, at room temperature. It is much safer to keep the meat chilled before you use it. If you need to thaw it quickly, use the microwave (at the lowest possible defrost temp so it doesn’t start cooking), or put it in a bowl in the sink and run cold water over it (not hot; that will start cooking it).

Grinding Meat: We suggest grinding the meat as you eat it, rather than grinding then freezing as the ground meat can be more prone to freezer burn. Grinding slightly frozen meat is ideal; it will move through the grinder much. After grinding, cook it within a day or two.

Trimming: Always, always trim off as much fat, silverskin or connective tissue (fascia) as possible. This can be a bit of a pain, but it is necessary to reduce any gamey taste. Our rule is if we can trim the fascia, it goes in the grinder for sausages (which camouflage the taste better). What is the fascia? It’s an uninterrupted, three-dimensional web of tissue that extends from head to toe, from front to back, from interior to exterior. It is very thin and filmy. You can generally put the tip of the knife under it and pull it back off the meat.

Marinating: Put the meat in the refrigerator when marinating to keep it safe. Marinating is great for purely flavoring the meat, but it serves a practical purpose too. If you know you have a gamey piece of meat (for example, it came from a mature buck), marinating can get rid of some of that gamey taste. Rinsing and marinating in vinegar for a few hours is especially effective. Don’t marinade longer than 24 hours because the meat will get mushy.

Salting: Don’t salt the meat to tenderize because it removes juices and inhibits browning. (The exception is for a salt roast, where you’re using the rock salt to create a steamer, which keeps the juices in). I typically use sea salt, which I find has a smoother flavor than iodized salt and doesn’t tend to dry out the meat.

Click here to read an article on how to cook different cuts of venison.