After some 14 years of a mainly meatless diet I have found my way back to the joys of omnivorous life.Unfortunately I learned how to cook after i became herbivorous so I do not know alot about making meat taste good.Recipes please
Depends on the meat and your tastes. Chicken will absorb almost any flavor you want it to. Fish is best with citrus flavors, maybe some pepper. For instance you could take a fillet wrap it in tin foil with lemon pepper spice (or lemon juice and pepper) and bake it for…oh…20 minutes at 450 should about do it.
Steaks, in my opinion, are best over an open flame. But then again I think all meats taste better cooked over an open flame, hot dogs even become edible. Marinades can be very useful. You can use store bought, or make your own with water, spices (garlic, onions, pepper, salt, etc), and maybe some vinegar. You can use a barbecue sauce, your best technique it put it on while cooking it over the fire. This makes sure the taste is infused into the meat, then add some on top when it comes out. Or you can rub garlic, dried onion, and stuff on the meat and cook it to the desired degree. Trick of the trade: touch your thumb to each finger and feel the base of your thumb (you know, that fatty lump next to your palm). This is approximately the feel of steak rare, medium, and well done. The softer the feel the rarer the steak. I like mine bloody, but if you were a herbivore for a while you should probably cook it to medium at least. There might be some psychological reflexes left. Digestive pyrotechnics are even less fun when you’re the chef.
Chicken cut up into small pieces cooks faster in a frying pan, otherwise you’re better off baking or grilling. Those small pieces can be seasoned with all kinds of things. Rosemary, thyme, and such are particularly good. Peppered chicken can be tasty if done well. You can also cook it in honey or maple syrup for a sweeter dish. Add some extra at the very end to emphasize the taste on the tongue.
If in doubt, take your thyme. Slow cooking is better than fast in most cases. And as a spice it can be used successfully on most foods. Watch adding salt, pepper, and hot spices. These can easily overwhelm a dish, somewhat defeating the purpose of making the meat taste good.
Watch for cross contamination, and make sure you always cook your burgers and pork all the way through. Failure to do this can, and eventually will, result in food poisoning. What this means: if you cut up the chicken and then use the same knife to cut up carrots for a salad you will not leave the bathroom that night.
But, have fun! You’ll learn your tastes pretty quickly, its a art not a science.
Recommended kinds of meats:
Fillet Minion - there is no finer cut of meat, its also the most expensive.
Chicken Breast - best strongly flavored as it has little of its own.
Dark meat - pepper it, make it crunchy (you can do this by breading it if you’d like, broiling with the fat on, or removing the fat and coating it with egg…try to think too hard about the last one).
Salmon is delicious anyway you prepare it, or even raw. Wild caught only, and eat it sparingly, we’re running out.
Tilapia as a fish is cheap and tasty without being tuna.
Leg of lamb is excellent, as are other similar cuts on other animals. Mint is particularly favored. I once butterflied the leg and stuff it with fresh peppermint leaves from the garden.
You can get buffalo now. I think its better than cow, and certainly less fatty. You have to pay for it though.
Oh, I could keep going. But really, just remember stew meats are not good grilled, you get what you paid for, and just see what’s on sale. Bulk works fine, because frozen meat can last quite a while…although some of the nutrition is lost.
- Benjamin Shender
Thanks for the ideas. I just got a grill and I agree it all tastes better cooked over a fire.Any marinade recipes out there.
Here’s one for chicken breast meat:
approx. 1/3 cup of lime juice
1 bunch chopped scallions
1 T. olive oil
1 T. sugar (I recommend an unprocessed sweetener like agave nectar or honey)
salt and pepper
Pour just enough marinade over the chicken to cover it. (If you have any marinade left over after you pour it over the chicken, you can also serve it on the side as a sauce.) Let it marinate for 15-20 minutes, then cook, either in a skillet or on the grill.
A lot of people who aren’t used to it complain that deer meat is dry. Because it is so lean, (no fat marbling through the meat like good beef) it can turn out dry if you try to cook it the same way you cook beef.
I was taught with deer meat to always sear the outside before cooking, to keep more juices inside. So I get a frying pan with some oil in it smokin’ hot and completely sear the outside of the piece of meat, then proceed to cook it. Even things like neck roast gets seared first then put in the oven and cooked slowly. Same with deer steaks.
I’m with Hypnopompia as far as preferring my steaks bloody, especially deer, moose or elk, and also with cooking slow.
For organ meat especially liver and kidneys I soak them in cold salt water, (pretty heavy on the salt) overnight before cooking and it takes care of some of the strong flavor they can have. Heart, I cook slow. We usually have the heart and kidneys the day after I kill a deer.
Wild turkey can be awesome, or like eating a rubber boot.
I made the mistake of quartering one and cooking it too fast once. I ended up taking it and pressure cooking it for taco meat after trying to eat that rubbery tough meat that I had cooked too fast.
I cook them whole like a thanksgiving turkey but I cook them all day at about 250, and they come out great.
Here’s how I do my jerky. First I use the good meat. A lot of people use the sinewy stuff left over after they cut the steaks and roasts. I often dedicate a deer to making jerky and I use the backstraps and hind quarters.
Slice it as thin as you can get it. Then soak it in 50/50 soy sauce and water over night. Soy sauce is too salty to use straight, which is why I dillute it with water. I add garlic and chili powder or whatever strikes my fancy at the time. Next day I smoke it in my smoke house with alder wood. It goes pretty fast if it’s sliced thin. If you don’t have a smoking set up you can dry it in an oven on low heat, but the smoked stuff is killer.
Recipe I just made for pork that always goes over well:
Slice, and marinade your pork in soy sauce, rice vinegar, honey, crushed ginger and garlic, and a few shakes of fish sauce. I prefer not to go too strong on the soy sauce. Make enough marinade to cover, then let soak for a day or two (minimum overnight). Shortly before dinnertime, throw it all into a pot or pan (I prefer cast iron) and boils slowly at first until the meat is fully cooked, the continue cooking until you reduce the marinade to a thick sauce. Bon apetit.
It would probably work with most meats, with slight variations.
Oh yea, forgot to add; this time when I did that recipe, I threw in at least half a cup of pork blood that had accumulated in the package, figuring it would add some nutrition. Boiled down, nobody noticed, which is good because I think only my mom and I would have been cool with it.
OMG. Pig’s blood.
I am craving some blood sausage right now.
When I was growing up, my family used to eat “blutwurst” with breakfast every once in a while, as a special treat.
Yea, blood is extremely nutritious, but most people in American culture shy away from it (except in their burgers). My mom, however, grew up in a French-Canadian family, so blood sausage was common enough.
Remember people, blood is our friend! Save it, put it in sauces! Next time you bleed your next kill, try saving some of it.
Also, I was just reading in a Filipino cookbook that chicken blood is usually available at Asian markets.
But make sure it is properly cooked and/or otherwise handled. Blood can carry a number of unpleasant diseases.
hey green-
I am in a similar boat. I’ve never been a full vegetarian myself, but I learned to cook in vegetarian circumstances. Now that I don’t have those restrictions on my kitchen I am experimenting with meat more. I’ve started getting a whole lamb or a 1/2 cow at a time directly from the farmer. It comes butchered and frozen, which is a nice way for someone like me to ease into using a whole animal. It is fun to pull a package out of the freezer, look at the name of the cut written on it and then read up on the best way to cook that kind of cut. It’s helping me figure out what bits are tender/tough and quite a few other things about dealing with meat.
Besides the internet I usually refer to my Fannie Farmer and Joy of Cooking.
I do want to get to the point of being able to do the killing and butchering myself, but I need to do this baby-step style.
That’s awesome Wanderer. Do you ever look up where on the animal each cut of meat comes from? That will help you get to know a little bit more about where your food comes from too.
I think it’s great that you are supporting the local producers by getting your meat that way.
Here are a couple of venison recipes (I mentioned one in another thread, and here it is in full).
They are paleo-diet friendly but not necesssarily locavore (unless you have a very elaborate garden).
The second recipe will be in the next post, to make it quicker/easier to distinguish the two recipes.
French Style Marinade for Venison
Ingredients:
salt
two 3/4" venison round steaks
1.5 T French dressing spice mix**
3/4 cup oil (olive preferred, or 1/2 veg, 1/2 olive)
2/3 cup vinegar
small handful of chopped fresh sage
2-3 fresh rosemary sprigs
1/4 c. purple onion cut into large chunks
2 cloves minced garlic
1 tsp Worcestershire sauce
2 tsp dried thyme (or fresh equiv.)
1 tsp dried marjoram (or fresh equiv.)
2 bay leaves
lemon pepper seasoning
ground mustard
black pepper (all spices to taste)
1 T. honey
**The mix I have is from Market Spice in Pike Place Market. Its ingredients are paprika, mustard, powdered garlic, and pepper. Here’s an approximate recipe for what I am talking about: http://www.cookingforcompany.com/Salad_Dressing.html (Find the Basic French Oil Salad Dressing, use only the dry ingredients, and leave out the sugar.)
Instructions:
Sprinkle about 2 T. salt into a large pot and add 2-3 inches of water; mix well. Add steaks and pierce multiple times with a fork. Let steaks soak for a few hours before preparing the marinade. (The salt water will extract blood from the venison, improving the taste.)
Add the remaining ingredients to a medium sized bowl and whisk/mix together.
Remove steaks from salt water, drain, and trim off fat (important: the fat is neither tasty nor healthful). Place one steak in the bottom of a large bowl and cover with half the marinade. Add the other steak and the rest of the marinade.
Cover bowl with saran wrap and refrigerate overnight. Do not marinate steaks more than 24 hours, or they will become mushy and too flavorful.
Remove venison from marinade and cook on stove over medium-high heat, 6-7 minutes per side. Cook just until the temperature in the middle of the steak is 160 degrees Fahrenheit. Venison should be cooked medium-rare or medium, neither rare (for health concerns) nor well-done (well-done venison is dry and tough). It should be a little bit pink in the middle.
While the venison is cooking, you can add vegetables to the skillet, such as chopped carrots, onions, mushrooms, parsnips, brussels sprouts, etc. You might want to experiment with cooking wine–I highly recommend adding some old Merlot.
Venison is also good when served with wild rice and tart fruit.
Venison with Sauerkraut
Ingredients:
salt
venison steaks (round or loin) for 2 people
2 c. sauerkraut
spices to taste: paprika, mustard, black pepper (heavy on the paprika)
1-2 cloves minced garlic
1/4 purple onion, chopped coarsely
1-2 tsp grated ginger root (or powdered ginger to taste)
handful of greens (bok choy, kale, seaweed, etc)
2 T. olive or coconut oil
Instructions:
Trim the fat off the steaks, pierce with a fork several times, and submerge them in salted water for approximately 6-8 hours. (This step will draw out blood and remove some of the gamey taste.)
Heat oil and sauerkraut in a large frying pan over medium heat. Add other ingredients and stir well. Remove steaks from water and cook in pan with the sauerkraut mixture, approx. 15 minutes, covered, turning frequently until slightly pink in the center (soon after the blood stops leaking to the tops of loin steaks, a bit later than this benchmark for round steaks).
Remember, “it’s a suggestion, not a recipe”! The insane level of detail is just my telling of the story of how I cooked it, using the language of recipes. 
We had a ceremony here for my niece who has come to live with us. I cooked a couple of salmon and a deer neck roast for the feast.
It’s been a few months since I had a neck roast. Man it was good! A lot of people cut a whole bunch of the neck off with the head when they cut up a deer and throw it away. I save the neck and cook it like a roast.
First I get a big skillet with some oil in it real hot and sear the outside of the roast on all sides. Then put it in a roasting pan with about an inch of water in the bottom. I add garlic, salt, pepper, basil, and lomatium triturnatum leaves. Sometimes cut up potatos and carrots. Cover it, then cook in the oven at about 250 for three or four hours.
It comes out tender and juicy. And you can make gravy out of the liquid.
That sounds awsome! Slightly off topic but do you know where I could find a patch of Lo. triturantum to collect seeds from. I’d love to get some growing around my place
Well there’s lots of all the lomatiums in south central BC.
We had the heart and kidneys from the deer that I shot on friday for dinner last night. mm mmm mmm.
I soak the organ meat like heart and kidneys over night in cold salt water to draw the blood out and reduce some of the strong taste (especially for the kidneys). I boiled the heart just to where it was still red in the middle then sliced and fried it all together with onions, garlic, celery and carrots.
I usually have liver for my first meal after I get a deer. I soak it in salt water too. Then I slice it and fry it, but only till its pink in the middle. Even if you don’t like liver, fresh deer liver cooked like that is really good. My ten year old likes it.
Unfortunately my shot was a little to the rear and the bullet went through the liver so I left it in the woods.