My dad gave us a sous vide setup for Christmas and I’m never looking back. Absolutely bonkers results coming outta this — beef short ribs, salmon, steak, pork loin, chicken, lamb, pork shoulder, eggs, tri tip, pork rib roast and so much more. I haven’t had the chance to use it for wild game but I’ve heard absolutely fantastic things. The ability to add fat (olive oil, duck fat, whathaveyou) in with the meat and cook it low and slow for dozens of hours is apparently a game changer. Certainly works for beef short ribs, brisket, etc!

 

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55 COMMENTS

  1. I have looked at the idea of sous vide. Does sound practical to a point . Do they sell bags big enough for a whole hog or are they just possum size? 😜

    • The wife got one as a present. Ended up re-gifting it. Nothing beats a basic old fashioned roaster. And a Crock pot. 😃

      • “If possum doesn’t comment im gonna be sad.”

        Give him time, the Possum’s sleeping…

        (Best just go get him up now!) 😉

    • Actually I was thinking if the bags big enough for a possum, a human head could probably fit in it too.

  3. I love animals.

    Right next to the steamed asparagus, herb-roasted red potatoes and other tasty things… 🙂

    • Geoff,

      I heard about a similar play on almost the same words:

      The story was that some tree-huggers were complaining about suburban sprawl and how that was taking away natural/green space for animals. In response, some cheeky person paid for a billboard in that area which said, “There is plenty of room for all of God’s creatures, right next to the mashed potatoes!”

      I have no idea if that was true or just a joke that someone invented.

      • I *think* it was initially a Sarah Palin joke, but I have a dim recollection of a billboard somewhere…

      • Similar measage was on a number of billboards around MN years ago. Pictured white tails with inscription “There is always room for all of God’s creatures. Next to the mashed potatoes and gravy. “

    • Try Sauteed Asparagus Use real butter with garlic in it (Sams Club ) and also for the Leanness, Same additive, Garlic Butter, MMMmmm Mmm Good stuff works with beef and mutton as well. and a dollop on the Mashed ‘Tater’s makes them better too.

      • Nope to Asparagus. On every Asparagus patch world wide, there’s a Beagle that pees on it🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

        PS: one of those memories as a kid that I’ve never gotten over.

        • @A O
          They really dont have coitus you know. They just spray the water full of seamen and hope a horny ensign finds a carp.

        • Simple cure for that, Bust a cap in the beagle and get back to eating what you grow…. personally I have a fence between the garden and the Dogs, howsomever The dogs that get into the sheep pasture, simply get shot and tossed on the edge of the road….

  4. It is a lot more expensive and dangerous to hunt them with our automobiles while they get out onto our highways.

    • If you could only put headlights on your bullets and slow them down to 55 M.P.H. Then the Bastards could run in front of them Too.

      • Yeah Darkman? if you slowed a bullet down to 55 then that thing would get hit in the Back end by a Grain truck, or a cotton hauler leaving the field going the speed limit, headlights or Not, heck for that matter even a healthy John Deere, might run over it.

    • Boy Howdy is that Ever the Truth, wife popped a four pointer with a one year old car coming out of a curve at seventy five MPH ( yep the speed limit ), I heard that one coming too , sounded just like when daughter did the same coming home from a job…. Oh look a deer, and another one, what do I do ? Thump….as I am saying BRAKES !!!! Daughter did the repairs after hers, I bought the parts, wife…. well hers was a bit more complicated with a NEW car and lots of carbon fiber components/computers/shutters/electric fans, and of course paint and hood, $8250 dollars ( gotta love Allstate ) the only reason it wasn’t Totalled ? the airbags didn’t deploy

  5. Venison is a pretty lean meat in general, so some added fat helps it cook up and not dry out. A dollop of lard on each patty is my go-to for doing deer burgers.

    Also, those “precious creatures” are gonna get eaten. If not by me, then by mountain lions, wolves, coyotes, buzzards, what-have-ya. The deer I eat are the lucky ones. They got a ballistic-tip .308 to the vitals. All over in under a minute. Deer bagged by predators, on the other hand, are often still alive when the feeding starts.

    • “leave the gut pile“

      Yep, you will just love your new neighbors, the coyote family.

      Watch out toddlers, you may have some fun loving playmates soon…

  10. I’ve had deer, elk, wild boar, black bear, mountain goat and ram over the years.

    Spit-roasted boar and stewed bear meat were the best, elk and deer (in that order) were mighty good (mmm…*backstraps*….)

    Mountain goat was tasty, but really tough. Ram, unsurprisingly, tasted strongly of mutton, and I gave my portion to a lucky (and hungry) border collie.

    Never been lucky enough to eat a game bird or wild rabbit yet. I’ve had farm-raised rabbit, which is good, but probably nothing like the wild critters.

    • I’ve had rabbit, freshly harvested thanks to a .22LR. Tastes like sweetened chicken.

    • The Rookie, next time you are bagging a variety ( or can swap with friends ) Try two pounds of bear meat, two pounds of Deer, three pounds of Feral-Hog Or javelina made into sausage, with the appropriate spices, That makes Johnsonville look Bland And sad….

    • Pheasant tastes just like dark meat chicken when roasted regular. I’ve never tried different recipes. I’d strip the carcass and use the shreds to make soup.

      Elk’s my favorite, if it’s cooked (low & slow for my pallet). Anything Swiss Steaked I turn my nose up too. My mother used to Swiss Steak all the Big Game my Dad and I brought home, and to this day the smell of it turns my stomach.

  12. I grew up in a hunting family and am all for it, just strongly advocate for quick humane kills.

    There is no reason, ever, to let any animal suffer. We can hunt and eat game, and cull and harvest livestock, but there is no reason we cannot treat them with decency. To me, game and cattle are more than commodities. They’re living things and deserve our respect, even if the end result is food harvesting. Free range, grass fed cattle always taste better than the processed grain-fed corral cows, anyway (leaner and less gristle).

    To that point, I’m a strong advocate for base of the skull/brain-stem/CNS shots. Problem with this is most people think minute-of-pie-plate is good enough. If you don’t sink the shot, grotesque disfigurement and suffering for that animal is likely. People should take their marksmanship very seriously. If you can’t keep it inside 1.5″ @ 100 yards with a moderate breeze, don’t get off the couch.

    A real rifleman’s trophy isn’t the size of the animal, but how humanely it was killed.

    Also, my favorite marinade for venison in a slow-cooker uses extra virgin olive oil, Worcestershire sauce, Soy sauce, Liquid smoke, garlic powder, onion powder, salt and cracked black pepper. That’s how I eat those precious creatures.

  13. I never understood the zoolanderesque “they are too good looking to eat” argument. So ugly animals are ok? We all know that a woman with vegetation in her hair is unlikely to eat a muskrat . . . or any animal for that matter. Some plants are really good looking and people eat those too. There is something very egalitarian about eating everything from animal models to ugly swamp beasts. It all ends up as feces anyway.

    As far as the enviro angle goes, meat is terribly inefficient but hunting is not as hard on the planet as factory farms . . . or farms in general. Bug meat is plentiful and much more efficient (and less destructive) but I cannot see Ms. “Tally High” fry’n up some grasshoppers.

    * Legit, I would pay 100 USD to see this woman harvest some alien looking creature from the ocean. 150 for a potato bug.

    • I did FFA land judging competitions in high school, and a basic takeaway was that we don’t use prime farmland to graze livestock. The possible classes a tract of land could be were:
      1-4: Farmland
      5: Wetland
      6-8: Pastureland
      9: Wilderness

      If we didn’t use 6-8 land for grazing, it’d have no other use, which makes a lot of “efficiency” arguments moot.

      • drednicholson,
        we farm our farmland, but around here there is ample wilderness scattered in, and pastureland is about the same , cotton, corn, millet, wheat, and Coastal all grow well, and mesquite weeds will grow anywhere, Coastal is getting big around here and due to subdivided land plots, most farm land is getting too small to farm, you cannot even turn around an J.D.8270r in a ten acre field, Or the latest Combine or Stripper, so many of us lease adjacent land and pull the fences, claw the Mesquite and get on with life

  14. How could I eat that beautiful animal? Stewed, fried, roasted, braised, ground into sausage, smoked, etc. A bit of seasoning and a little salt. After the pretty little deer tries to come through the windshield, our little eco freak might think the critter looks more like a steak than a Disney character. A line from a book I read once went something like.” Shooting a deer in your garden ain’t huntin’. It’s revenge.”

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