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     Title: Gamey Meat: Here's The Deal 2
Categories: info, venison, duck, goose
  Servings: 1 text file

           Venison 
           Ducks
           Goose  

AGED MEAT IS GAMEY: Now we should talk about aged meat. Simply put,
aged meat is gamey. To most, in a good way. To the uninitiated, it
can be an overwhelming experience.

Let's start with aged beef, because that's what most of us have
experience with... except I am betting that you haven't, because true,
real aged beef is at least three weeks old, and you don't really get
into the kaleidoscopic world of aged beef flavors until you cross a
month.

Really well-aged beef shares a lot, flavorwise, with blue cheese.
It's stinky in an oddly attractive way, and ultra tender. No teeth
needed.

All of this can apply to wild game, too. You can certainly dry age
venison for a month, and it will start to take on some of those
richer, more savory, almost cheesy tones. Venison won't get as
cheesy as beef because it lacks internal fat, but it will change,
profoundly, if properly aged.

Birds are famous for this. A well-aged pheasant is a wondrous thing.
A fresh pheasant is a boring chicken. In fact, the process of
hanging, aging game birds is called faisandage in French, after
their word for pheasant, which is faisan. In English it's called
mortification. This combination of bacterial and enzymatic action on
meat intensifies flavor and aroma and umami.

Done well, it is the pinnacle of wild game flavor. And it is most
definitely gamey meat. In a good way.

BAD GAMEY: OK, now we need to talk about gamey meat in a bad way.
Because it's real.

Most of us have had wild game that is, well... off. Twangy. Sour.
Smelly. Not sexy-musky — rotten, pungent, attack-the-nostrils
stinky. I've most often encountered this with big game, usually some
sort of cervid like a deer or elk, and, very commonly, pronghorn.

This sort of gamey meat is, usually, all about poor hygiene and meat
handling. This is the hallmark of a mistake, or, more likely,
several mistakes.

Allow me to use the much maligned pronghorn as an example.
Historically, pronghorn are hunted in early fall by multiple
hunters. This is a generalization, but I've seen it many, many
times. Let's say there are five of us. Most of us shoot our speed
goat early in the morning, but Poor Guy Five can't seem to buy a
break. He misses one, maybe two, and doesn't connect on his until,
say, 3 o'clock in the afternoon.

Only now do we all start gutting and skinning our animals. Poor Guy
Five's pronghorn will be nice, but everyone else's will be ruined.
Even if we'd all gutted our antelope as we'd shot them, it'd still
be a mess because the skin on a pronghorn holds heat better than
that of a deer, and you are often hunting in 75 F weather.

Similarly, waterfowl are often so fat they retain enough heat that
if you don't chill them down, if you are hunting in warm weather
they can go off in the course of an afternoon.

And with large animals, like moose, if you don't cool them down
ASAP, there's a condition called bone sour that can ruin the whole
animal. But imagine if this was your hunt of a lifetime? You're
going to take that meat anyway. But you better believe it will be
some seriously gamey meat.

Bad bacteria really enjoy temperatures over 60 F, and with red meat,
anything much over 40 F for any length of time means trouble.

There is another big source of bad gaminess in meat: Hormones. This
is almost exclusively with mammals.

Anyone who has shot a big ole' boar hog, or a huge, rutty buck,
knows what I am talking about. The testosterone in these animals
stinks, and taints the meat. Now don't get me wrong, it's still
edible, but there is a noticeable flavor and aroma to a
testosterone-soaked animal. Holly says she knows when I am cooking a
male pig, and her guess is almost never wrong.

  From: Hank Shaw                       
 
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