00:00:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide to the fundamentals of better deer hunting, presented by first Light, creating proven versatile hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind. First Light, Go Farther, Stay Longer, and now your host Tony Peterson.
00:00:20
Speaker 2: Hey, everyone, welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundation’s podcast, which is brought to you by first Light. I’m your host, Tony Peterson. In today’s episode is all about venison and why it’s such a reward for a successful hunt as long as you know what you’re doing with it. There are a ton of hacky jokes, you know, in TV sitcoms and other shows about teenagers and their voracious appetites. Now, when I think about that, I always just kind of think of this in reference to boys, because well, that’s what I am. But it turns out teenage girls like my twin daughters, eat a lot too, and it was their never ending demand for snacks. That’s on the whole idea for this podcast. I think we don’t give venison enough credit for what it really is. And I’m not being facetious when I say this. I value it way more than Antler’s these days. A full freezer is a huge win for me in my family, and it’s something that can shape your entire year, which is what I’m going to talk about right now. In the old Peterson household, if I don’t make a meal, we generally find ourselves ordering from somewhere heading to a restaurant. There isn’t a lot of meal planning going on with my bride, if you get my drift. She did take the girls on a costco run the other night to get snacks for their school lunches, and you know, just for general grazing throughout the day. They unloaded the usual stuff like cheese, it’s and the kind of snacks and whatever that we think of his food now. But if you could go back to maybe the days of the Pilgrims, their heads would explode. I don’t know why, but I think about this a lot like if you could give I don’t know, Cleopatra a pack of gushers or some roam in a bottle of mountain dew, heads would totally explode. Any huski. As the girls unloaded the groceries, I noticed a package of snacksticks. This is a highly unusual thing for my wife to buy, so I asked one of my daughters, and she said her sister wanted it. I thought, huh, that’s an odd request, especially since they are jalapeno flavored snacksticks, and it wouldn’t surprise me if my daughter is sent back their water at a restaurant because it was just a little too spicy. Well, it turns out that my doctorate holding wife didn’t read the label and bought them by accident, which means I’m working my way through this bag of snacksticks because they were expensive like all groceries these days, and I’m just not about to waste them. But to be honest, I hate them, I really do. They are a package like they should be high quality grass fed beef, but the meat is just, you know, kind of gross and flavorless and a little waxy and well, nothing like the meat that I usually eat. Maybe I’m just a snob these days, But other than a burger or a steak at a restaurant once in a while while you know, or lunch meat for sandwiches on the road trip somewhere to hunt something, we really only eat wild game in my house, with a heavy, heavy emphasis on venison. It’s honestly what I prefer these days. And you probably understand that if you’re listening to this, but maybe you don’t. And if you don’t, I’d guess that it’s most likely because I don’t know. You don’t butcher your own deer have a real strong grasp on how to make it as good as possible. To learn that. It’s a great idea to understand what venison isn’t, which is beef. Venison is lower in calories, lower in fat, higher in protein than beef. It also contains omega three and omega six fatty acids, a whole ton of vitamins and minerals, and is essentially a super food. It really is. It’s insanely nutrient dense and really good for you. But it’s not beef. And that’s where a lot of people get this thing wrong, because the expectations are different. A simple way to understand this is is that beef fat is kind of sweet, and venison fat is definitely not. It’s gross, really gross, and a little of it can do a lot of damage to meat that should be really good otherwise. But this is one of the many reasons why I butcher all of my own animals and make all of my own burder. I don’t want deer fat on my steaks, and I don’t really want a bunch of deer fat mixed into my burder. Now, some folks don’t seem to mind, but I do, and I look at it like a little extra work on the front end for a welcome payoff every time I fry up some steaks or make some tacos afterwards. Now a lot of people might think I’m too picky with that stuff, but I don’t care. I’ve had a hell of a lot of deer meat and other wild game from other people, and it has only hardened my stance on this one. In fact, I think the easiest way to turn someone off of venison, which is the opposite of my goal when I feed it to people, is to not be mindful of fat or silver skin or anything that isn’t muscle. If I’m being honest now, I’m not trying to throw shade at deer processors because they provide a much needed service for a whole lot of folks. But there isn’t anyone out there who cares more about my venicon than I do. I like to know what happens to my deer every step of the way, and off shoring any part of that to someone else is just not that appealing. Now, if you’ve never butchered a deer, I get it. It can be intimidating, but it’s a skill worth learning for so many reasons. Plus, it’s not really that hard, and the mistakes you make often don’t do anything other than force you to eat smaller pieces of vedicon or throw more of it into the grinder. You don’t lose it from butchering mistakes you just make. I don’t know smaller pieces generally, And speaking of smaller pieces, a lot of people I meet who don’t seem to value deer meat a whole lot are often very limited in how they prepare it. Look, before you check out completely here, let me say this. I am not your typical media or personality. I don’t care about super fancy recipes or wowing you with my culinary skills. I’m not into flare. Let’s just leave at that. I like good and simple in my life and with my venison. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have a lot of different ways to prepare dear meat. Because if I didn’t, we get sick of it in a hurry, and we don’t now, aside from spaghetti, sauce and tacos in the usual suspects for ground venison, most of us think of deer meat as deer steaks, and why not. Who doesn’t love a backstrap just grilled to perfection. Freaks and weirdos maybe the rest of us, no question, But deer steaks are pretty easy to screw up, and the easiest way to do it is to cook them too much. I know this isn’t a revelation, it’s well known, but it’s still an issue. In fact, when I was growing up, I didn’t know that deer meat could be prepared any other way than well done. Now I wish I was joking, but I’m not. My mother has one mode of cooking, and it’s one where she’s terrified that we were all going to get parasites or some other illness from undercooked meat, and so everything that comes out of her kitchen comes out fully and truly scorched to oblivion. As a kid, I just thought that’s how your steaks were, And while we ate them fairly often, there wasn’t a single time where I was like, well, this is the best meat I’ve ever had. It was just deer meat, and we ate it now. Over time, I started working at some restaurants to put myself through school and realized that the household I grew up in got the whole steak thing about as wrong as you could. And to put a little bit finer point on that, those crispy critter steaks were also not seasoned or marinated ever, so it was all just gnomming on hockey pucks until I learned that you could eat them pretty much from raw all the way up to wherever your personal preference lands. For me, that’s generally medium rare, but it also depends on how hungry I am or how impatient I am at times, which usually only comes into play on a hunting trip where there’s a fire rolling in camp and we were all running on a serious calorie deficit from the daytime activities. We might go pretty rare in that situation. Now, one of the things we did when I was young that made my mom’s incinerator strategy easier was that we caught our steaks really thin when we butchered our deer. I don’t know why this happened, but I know My dad was a self taught bow hunter and a self taught deer processor, which might not mean much in today’s world, but before YouTube tutorials in the Internet, you really didn’t have as many ways to learn how to do basic tasks the right way. This is another thing I like about butchering my own deer. I can package steaks according to their thickness because I like them medium rare. My wife and one daughter are medium steak eaters, and my one daughter will gag if there is any hint of redness or blood in her deer steaks. So each package for my family will have steaks of varying thicknesses, which allows me to cook them all more or less at the same speed at the same time, but end up with different levels of dumbness. Which is a word. Even if it sounds like I made it up because I thought so, I looked it up and it actually is a word. This is also one of the reasons I’ve gone to cooking whole muscle groups more and more. If you take the backstrap, for example, the natural shape of it, you know, with its beefiest section close to the rump that tapers down as it stretches towards the neck, allows for them to cook at the same time, but to different levels of you guessed it done this now? I used to bake and wrap them for the grill, but now I season them with loweryes, garlic, salt and let them cook. It’s so simple and so damn good. But overcooking isn’t the only way you can screw up traditional deer sticks. Let’s say you get home and work and realize you’re hungry, but don’t I have too many options. You head to the old garage and grab a package of deer sticks from the freezer, but they are well frozen. There are ways to speed up the thaw, and all of them will result in deer meat that’s just a little tougher than it needs to be. Letting a package of venison thaw naturally in the sink or in the fridge is just the best way to do it. Now. If you do throw a slab of butter in the frying panic, try to cook them while they are somewhat frozen. You’ll have deer meat you can eat. It just won’t be as good as it would be if you didn’t do that. Planning the thought also allows you the chance to marinate if you choose. Now, I used to do this a lot for a lot of steaks, and I still do sometimes, but not as much as I used to. Hell, when I was growing up, we drowned our steaks in ketchup, but you can probably guess why we did that, given what I’ve already told you about the whole thing. Now, my favorite marinade these days is just Famous Dave’s Devil Spit barbecue sauce. It has a really nice kick to it, but that gets tempered down once it’s cooked, to the point where even my daughters like it, which is incredible because if three molecules of that sauce hit their tongues raw, their pasty heads would explode. It’s really hard to go wrong with marinating deer steaks, and it’s a great way to change the flavor profile enough to make each meal a little bit different, even if they mostly aren’t that different. And all that’s simple and great, but deer are made up of a lot more than just backstraps. They also have all kinds of smaller muscle groups that don’t lend themselves to steak. This is where a lot of folks like to reach for the bowl to throw their grind scraps in, but not me. I like ground venison, but not as much as I like venison that isn’t ground. So I do a lot of packages of meat that I either label as stir fry or stew meat.
00:11:15
Speaker 1: You know.
00:11:16
Speaker 2: This amounts to either longish skinny strips of meat or just chunks of meat. I love these packages because I can always buy some asparagus and peppers and maybe an onion or some portobello mushrooms and make a simple sturfry, you know, with veggies and some meat. It only takes some rice and maybe some tariaki sauce and you have something totally different from a traditional deer steak meal. And if not that, some noodles or some raviolis and a little heavy whipping cream and some fresh parmesan and you have a pasta which is not only really simple, but damn good. Lately, I’ve started using these packages of smaller chunks of meat to make venison sliders, which my whole family loves. You just saute them up with some garlic salt, add some mushrooms and onions and some Hawaiian rolls and that’s about it. Again, that’s venison as a base, but nothing like a typical meal of deer steaks. Now here’s what I’ve really learned about how to make deer meat a reliable and enjoyable part of a lot of your yearly meals. You got a plan for it. I pull packages of venison out of the freezer and start thawing them at the beginning of pretty much every week, often with a package of pheasants or something else just thrown in there because we have it. And when I grocery shop, I think about what makes a meal of venison better and try to have that on hand because it’ll make me cook deer meat more. It’s a cheap trick, but it works. Let’s say, if you love mushrooms for your steaks, well, buy some, and you’re far more likely to make exactly that, especially if you have a thought and marinate a package of steaks and your fridge just ready to go. And this is going to sound dumb too, but it might make sense when I explain it. The more you learn to cook with venison, the more you’ll cook with venison. When I was growing up, it wasn’t all that exciting to pull a package of deer steaks from the freezer. We knew what we were getting, and it wasn’t something you’d cheer for. It was something you’d eat, because that’s what we ate. Learning to make meals that you want to eat and that are also relatively inexpensive and quick to prepare is a huge deal in modern life where we’re all super busy. It’s also just something that, even though this might sound like bullshit, just sort of completes the whole process when you’re cooking meals like that and you enjoy them. There’s so much focus on big antlers these days and all that goes along with tagging a mega giant buck. But feeding yourself and your family or your friends with meat that came from an animal you scoutered and shot and tracked and field dressed and butchered and prepared in a delicious way. It’s no small thing. It’s important and something I think about a lot, but I don’t really know why. I look at this sort of like how everyone these days likes to say, how that is a species. We’re just heading for a real downfall. Society is on a shaky foundation, and eventually we’ll be back to warring in pure survival. I often think about what would happen if our food supply chain suddenly didn’t deliver insane amounts of readily packaged food to the developed world. There wouldn’t be a whole lot of emphasis on shooting two hundred inch bucks or letting up and comers pass. If that shit happened, we’d look at deer in a whole new light. We have the luxury of not doing that right now, but it’s an interesting thing to think about because our priorities would shift real fast. Look, I hope that doesn’t happen, but that doesn’t mean we can’t value the meat aspect a whole hell of a lot. In fact, that was one of the big reasons I was interested in coming on over here to meat Eater when I did, because that was, you know, just at the stage of my career where I was just done with the trophy hunting messaging and you know, antlers above all else, and I wanted to try to paint this hunting thing in a different light. Don’t get me wrong, I love big antlers, and I am very interested in mature bucks for many reasons, but I also really like all deer and have never, not once regrets shooting a scrap or buck or a dough once it was broken down into bite sized chunks and cooling off on my plate at the dinner table with my family, or maybe in a tent somewhere with a good buddy or two, while the coyotes howled in the distance and the stars showed up like they only can when you’re very far away from light pollution. I think this is a good thing to think about and to try to get better at in the off season. You know, while there are hunting seasons open in some places still, you know, some of our southern brothers and sisters are still really getting after it. For a lot of us, this is the beginning of a long stretch before we can climb into a tree again. And yeah, they’re scouting to keep you connected at Chad Antler’s and shooting your bow in the summer and running trail cameras in all kinds of things that can be done to keep yourself tethered to the deer. There’s also the reality of all that nutritious and delicious benison to work through before the whole thing starts over again. So get creative, cook up some good stuff, and come back next week, because I’m going to keep talking about America’s number one best favorite game Animal. That’s it for this week. I’m Tony Peterson and this has been the Wire to Hunt Foundations podcast. Thank you so much for all your support. You know, we had a great hear here at meat Eater in twenty twenty five. We got a whole bunch of really cool plans this year, but none of it matters without you guys, so thank you for all your support. If you’re bored out of your mind right now, which a lot of us are this time of year, and you need some entertainment, or you just want to elevate your game a little bit you don’t know how, head on over to the medeater dot com. We drop new content literally every single day, hunting films, tons of podcasts. If you haven’t checked out Jordan Siller’s Blood Trails, check that out. That dude does such a good job with that. Podcast, articles, recipes, you name it. The medeater dot com go check it out.
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