Cooking Game Meat | Should I Soak it? | You'll Be SURPRISED!

how do i make my game meat taste great should i soak my game meat in water to dry out the blood how do i get rid of its gamey taste well i'm going to be answering all of those questions whether for deer elk ducks geese whatever stick around i'm joel strickland and this is surviving duck season thanks for watching surviving duck season now normally my channel is devoted to waterfowl hunting type content but on today's video i'm gonna be talking about something that is for all types of game and so if you've landed on this video and you really don't care so much for waterfowl all the things i'm gonna be sharing today are absolutely for deer and other types of game as well now i've been an avid hunter and wild game cook for 30 plus years and in the last 10 years i can add chef to my list of titles now along with being a duck hunting guide in arkansas i'm also the chef at our lodge i prepare lots of game for our guests and many are so surprised that it tastes wonderful i often hear my ducks or deer never taste like that well it's not about being gourmet and fancy it's about preparing the meat the right way before you cook it or even before it goes in the freezer i've hunted big game and waterfowl all around the world and i use the same methods for virtually all types of game meets over the years i've prepared several thousand plates of game meat for hundreds of people using the very methods that i'm gonna be talking about and showing you on this video back when i was a teenager and i shot my first deer i was told that it was important to soak that meat in icy salt water overnight to draw out the blood sound familiar later i was also told to make sure and change that water out every few hours when it gets bloody over the next few years i was told about other things to try vinegar and water and many other concoctions that were necessary to properly prepare meat so it would be edible when i went on my first duck hunt i was told to soak the duck breasts in milk overnight in the refrigerator somebody else told me clean those birds and then put them in a large ziploc bag and fill it up with water then freeze it i've tried it all in the early days of my hunting exploits i really wanted to eat my game meat but nothing i did really made it taste great it seemed like the best way i found was always some sort of battered and fried i mean how do you mess that up if i was honest with myself it was really more of a novelty to eat game meat rather than eating it for the love of its flavor well then when i was in my mid-20s i became friends with a chef i'd always loved cooking and thought i was pretty good too but as they say you don't know what you don't know i asked the chef about cooking ducks and deer and other game and by the end of my first conversation with them about it i was convinced to completely change nearly everything that i've been doing with my game meat and the first step was getting it into the freezer the right way so on today's video i'm going to be sharing with you things that i learned from him that day that changed my life as well as some other things that i've discovered over the last 25 years so much about cooking is based on opinion because it's about what somebody thinks tastes good but there's also a lot of fact in cooking science biology chemistry so i'm going to be talking both in fact and opinion today first question should i soak my gay meat to draw out the blood well my question to you is would you go to the grocery store and buy a 20 steak bring it home and soak it in salt water overnight do you think the butcher's done that for you of course not when people ask me why is my game meat taste so much better than theirs i always ask them first well do you soak your game meat and almost everybody says they do when i tell people that i don't soak my game meat it just it's stunning to them they they say well i've been told all my life that's what i'm supposed to do i don't soak the meat i don't brine it i don't marinate it it is just the meat as it is with some seasoning and it absolutely blows her mind as i went through and started researching this video to see what other people had done on the subject i looked for articles and videos on youtube and blogs and whatever that's been done on the subject of soaking wild game and it was so surprising to me that i found very few people in the hunting and outdoor space giving advice that is fact-based even some of the very well-respected outdoor publications basically the articles are passing down you know folklore and traditions as if it's truth and no explanation of why you just have to get the blood out however when i look at the culinary industry the meat industry you know websites and videos from them and even quite a few universities i was able to find the information that i was looking for so i'm going to share with you my research and i brought back the lab coat dude to help me with some of this once you've dressed out then quartered and deboned your meat there's no blood left in it the red liquid is water and meat proteins that drain from the meat and one of those proteins is myoglobin it gives the meat its red color when you buy a steak at the grocery store and there's a red liquid at the bottom of the styrofoam package it's not blood it's myoglobin when you cook meat the myoglobin denatures and so the more it's cooked the less of the red color is left that's why rare meat is red and moist and well done meat is dry and gray so when you soak meat overnight or even days what you're doing through osmosis is pulling out the moisture of the meat and its healthy red color and replacing with the salt and acids that were in your mixture leaving a very unappetizing looking gray piece of meat that's very dry because it has not much moisture left in it now i know many of you are going to argue with me some of you may even type in all caps in the comments but i'm just letting you know that it's unnecessary to bleed the animal any further after it's been quartered up and deboned because there's no blood left in the meat come on man it's the same thing as blood you're just calling it something different blood is hemoglobin myoglobin is what's in the meat it's different and by leaching it from the meat you're only drying it out and making it more salty does myoglobu taste bad well for my research it's apparent that it does have flavor but the real question is does it make the meat taste bad well if it did then the meat industry would be removing it from butchered livestock if you buy farm-raised bison or venison they definitely don't do that game meat soaked is not very good to me but your taste buds are yours and what you like is what you like so i'm certainly not going to tell you what you should like but i will tell you what my experience is in cooking thousands of meals for other people and what they tell me that they like and i've never had somebody tell me that my meat tasted gamey in fact most people think it's delicious meat from different animals taste different pork beef chicken they all taste different and free-ranged chicken and free-range beef grass-fed beef it all has a different flavor than caged up grain-fed animals a bolder versus a blander flavor opinion i prefer to grill or pan sear most of my wild game meat i rarely marinate it and i never soak or brine when i'm ready to cook the meat i'll pull it out of the freezer thaw it out and then put a liberal amount of kosher salt and cracked black pepper on it as well i often use steak seasonings or rubs this all goes on maybe an hour before i cook and if it's really lean meat and most gay meat is then i'll add a bit of olive oil to the meat or even some rendered bacon fat i'm often asked what kind of steak seasonings or rubs do i like to use well i tell them choose your favorite barbecue rub or your favorite steak season and you should try that but i'll give you a suggestion something that i've been using for a few years it's it's awesome makes a big difference uh this is the prime dry rub made by utts works and this is the utzworks bold dry rub now this is more of a barbecue rub but i still use it on duck and deer it works absolutely phenomenal i mean it's like my choice to use a lot of people don't like to use a barbecue rub because it has sugar in it this one does have sugar in it but i can promise you it really really does very nice on both deer meat elk and ducks and geese the prime does not have any sugar in it so if you're one of those guys that doesn't like to put any sugar on your on your red meat this would be the one to get it's an excellent one as well so that's a couple of choices if you're interested in picking some of them up uh there's a link below you can also go to survivingduckseason.com and pick it up there as well after my meat is seasoned up i'll grill it to medium rare and that's it i do sometimes add a sauce but really that's all i do to most of my game meat so if you've always soaked your game meat i ask you just to try my method a couple of times and see if you don't change your mind as well i have two other things that you can do to enhance or change the flavor if for some reason you don't like what you have one is add a sauce i do this all the time just cook the meat and serve it with the sauce deer and other big game is great with the dijon mustard cream sauce it's super easy and only takes a few minutes to make or try a red wine reduction type sauce waterfowl pheasants and other game birds work really well with berry types of sauces as a quick cheat you can take blackberry cherry or blueberry jelly melt it in a pan add some balsamic vinegar and some cracked black pepper bam you've got a quick and easy sauce and you can go to survivingduckseason.com and find some recipes there ducks and deer don't taste bland but they can taste bad here's lab coat dude for more on that fat in big game meat as well as silver skin and connective tissues hold a lot of undesirable flavors even bone fragments from a meat saw can contaminate the flavor of meat different meats have different flavors textures and degrees of tenderness some of it depends on the type of animal that it is the age of the animal what they've been eating and what they were doing when they were killed the types of wounds also can contribute to its flavor bottom line an old deer a deer being chased gut shot deer these have a higher chance of poor flavor ducks that smell like fish are also more likely to have a poor flavor this is when you might would want to mask the flavor of the meat what do you do if you still don't like the flavor of the meat well try a marinade but don't soak it for days do it in the refrigerator for about three or four hours right before you're gonna cook it now i'm not a big fan in general in marinades for game meat but i know that there's some people that really do like them the key is not to overpower the meat with too much and doing it for too long another suggestion is use the meat in stews gumbo in fajitas or in other dishes that have lots of strong flavors how about tenderizing aren't you supposed to soak meat for that most of the studies i've read find that brining or marinating definitely changes the flavor but does very little for tenderization but if you want to tenderize any meat i'll show you the real way to do it in fact this is one of my secret weapon devices this little twenty dollar jacquard tenderizer it's got a bunch of little blades in it as you can see right here that pierce and tenderize the meat and so all you do is take this and mash it down into the meat just do it a few times on each piece of meat and there will be so much more tender than soaking it in buttermilk or anything else if you're interested in picking up one of those there's link in the description if you want to see a great duck recipe check out this video right here i'm joel strickland god bless and i'll see you on the next video

Channel: Surviving Duck Season

Views: 26,701

Keywords: cooking wild mallard duck, duck hunting, cooking wild duck, hunting and cooking wild duck, cooking duck, duck recipe, wild cooking videos, wild game cooking, grilled duck, grilled wild duck, how to cook wild duck, joel strickland duck hunting, joel strickland, how to cook duck, tips for cooking duck, soaking game meat, soaking deer, soaking ducks, marinating game meat, marinating ducks, brining duck, brining game meat, tenderizing game meat, cooking deer meat

Id: IfAUu_3pmtA

Length: 13min 38sec (818 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 01 2021