HELP! Need venison recipes!!!

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jswordy

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The guy who hunts my place has been extraordinarily blessed with gunfire this year. I have a freezer full of steaks, backstrap, stew meat and etc. Looking for your fav recipes and marinades. I love it grilled and just tonight made streaks with commercial marinade that turned out pretty good. Help!!! Please...

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I personally wouldn't look for venison specific recipes, I'd focus on cut. Treat steaks like steaks, season or marinade. Anything can become kabobs, Greek, Mediterranean? Play with roasts. I love braised roasts. Wine and beer braised are amazing and you can reach excellence with thyme and rosemary, or really reach out into exciting places with star anise or curries.

I have a couple tried and true's that I would be happy to share if you're interested.
 
Try this slow cooker recipe - it works great with beef stew meat so I'll bet its even better with venison. Yup, its a "dump and go" recipe and is better with canned vegetables than fresh!

Slow Cooker Beef Vegetable Soup
Servings:
6

Ingredients
  • 1 pound cubed beef stew meat
  • 1 cup water
  • 1 (15 ounce) can green beans
  • 1 (15 ounce) can carrots with juice
  • 1 (15 ounce) can diced potatoes with juice
  • 1 (28 ounce) can crushed tomatoes
  • 1 (1.25 ounce) package beef with onion soup mix
  • salt and pepper to taste
Method:
  1. Slightly brown stew meat in frying pan to develop light crust.
  2. Place colander in crockpot and drain liquid from beans, carrots, and potatoes into pot.
  3. Add 1 cup of water
  4. Add beef & onion soup mix and whisk to dissolve.
  5. Stir in tomatoes
  6. Stir in vegetables
  7. Stir in meat
  8. Cook on LOW for at least 6 hours.
  9. Adjust with salt and pepper to taste
 
I personally wouldn't look for venison specific recipes, I'd focus on cut. Treat steaks like steaks, season or marinade. Anything can become kabobs, Greek, Mediterranean? Play with roasts. I love braised roasts. Wine and beer braised are amazing and you can reach excellence with thyme and rosemary, or really reach out into exciting places with star anise or curries.

I have a couple tried and true's that I would be happy to share if you're interested.

Sure, post them up! I am especially interested in various homemade marinades. These were done with 2 hours in Country Bob's Marinade and sprinkled with Penzey's Mitchell Street steak rub while cooking. Mitchell Street is my go-to steak rub.

The one thing I am glad I was warned about is that grilled venison doesn't need much time on the flame or it will get tough. Internal of 120, and that is a low temp by beef standards. The more over that, the tougher they'll be, I understand. That means laying them on, flipping them all over, then starting to remove the ones you first laid down and flipped. About one minute to 1:30 max per side does it on my Weber. Pouring warm melted butter over them and allowing a 10-15 minute rest helps loosen the proteins, I've been told, so I did that, too.
 
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ground venison makes great meatballs

We love it in meatloaf. Used to get it all ground and no other way. Mix it with pork sausage to get the fats needed, add your stuff and man, that is good. That mix combined with oregano, garlic and Parmesan cheese also works for burgers.
 
I never make chili with anything but venison. Just slice & dice the partially thawed meat into 1/4”-1/2” cubes and proceed as normal. It may take a little more simmering to tenderize.

Same for vegetable venison soup.

Thanks. I have loads of packs of stew meat.
 
The problem with venison is that there is hardly any fat at all so you either have to cook it very rare or pound it (literally) into submission and then chicken fry it in order for it to be tender. Growing up we ate it quite often as we had a deer lease and usually got one and sometimes two deer a season. Much of it we made into sausage (both pan and link) but you have to mix it 50/50 with pork butt. Other cuts like backstrap were marinated in milk overnight (takes the gaminess out of it) and then chicken fried steak. Stew meat was used to make chili (Texas style) which was pretty good way to cover the taste as well LOL
 
The advice for chilli and stew is brilliant.

This is my short rib recipe, but it is great for roasts, large chunked meat, shanks, or anything you have.

  • Kosher salt and pepper, to taste
  • 2 pieces bacon, diced
  • 2 tbsp. Avocado oil (whatever you usually use)
  • 1 small onion, fine dice
  • 1 large carrot, fine dice
  • 2 cloves garlic, peeled and finely minced
  • 2 c. red wine. This is where all the glory comes form!
  • 2 c. beef or chicken broth (enough to almost cover meat)
  • 2 sprigs thyme
  • 2 sprigs rosemary
  • corn starch/flour and water

If you have a ceramic coated dutch oven, that would be my choice. Season your meat with salt and pepper. Add bacon to pan and crisp, then remove. Add a few tbsp of oil to the pan and sear meat on high on all sides until well browned. Remove and lower heat to medium high. Add in carrots onion and celery. when slightly browned, add garlic. Stir for another minute and deglaze with wine. When the bottom of the pan is free of all charred bits add meat back and top up with broth till meat is mostly covered, top with a sprig of thyme and rosemary.

Every oven is going to be different, I preheat mine to 300 and find it simmers the sauce at about 280. I put the covered pot in, drop it to 280 and check on it in 15. Once you have an easy simmer. walk away for about 2 hours.

After 2 hours I pull the roast/meat and adjust seasoning. I am usually so aggressive when I season the meat I don't need to adjust. You can thicken the sauce a bit with corn starch or a flour slurry. serve with potatoes, salad, or any vegetable. You could also add mushrooms or whole carrots and potatoes to the pot in the last 45 minutes or so.

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jswordy:

The 2 attached recipes have satisfied my family and hunting buddies for 50 years.
I think you will enjoy them as well.

Best,

Sven
 

Attachments

  • Sven's Venison Roast (Instant Pot Version).pdf
    46.4 KB · Views: 3
  • Sven's Venison Stew (Instant Pot Version) .pdf
    43.1 KB · Views: 2
This is my all time favorite recipe for venison. I dreamt this up a while back and it's never failed to impress. I've also made it with beef roast but oddly enough, it doesn't come out as good as venison. My kids love it as well. Honestly I didn't like venison unless it was a backstrap. This recipe has permanently changed this. I probably make it a couple times a month as long as we have deer in the freezer. It also works well on crappy parts like the front shoulders. It takes a while to trim off all the meat from a shoulder but the effort is worth the result.

2.5 to 3 lbs venison (cut up into small cubes/pieces, approx. 1/2" size)
1 packet dry ranch dressing/seasoning
1 packet dry italian dressing/seasoning
1 can cream of ** soup (I prefer cream of jalapeno but cream of celery or mushroom works well also if people don't like spicy)
1/2 stick of butter
1/8 cup lemon juice (more if desired)
10 Mezzetta medium or hot peperoncini peppers (leave whole with stem on, add more or less depending on how spicy you want it)

combine it all in a crockpot and cook on low for 8 to 10 hrs

Serve meat/sauce on a bed of Zatarain's dirty rice.

I promise that you will not regret making this- enjoy!
 
Also, the key to my recipe is cutting the meat into small pieces. It allows the meat to take on the flavors of the ingredients and also makes sure that it ends up as tender as possible. Good cuts or bad- end result is the same. It probably sounds like I'm bragging but it really is a game changing recipe.

The other thing that I like to do with venison is grind it up with a good amount of bacon and make burgers. The bacon makes it a lot less healthy but it transforms the venison into a very decent burger. Without the bacon, it would be dry, dry, dry.
 
Last time a buddy gave a deer I ground the entire deer, mixing it half-n-half with pork loin. I did about 1/3 ground meat, 1/3 Italian sausage, and 1/3 breakfast sausage. If you start with 50/50 venison/pork, any sausage recipe works.

The best spaghetti sauce is made with v. meatballs and v. sausage!
 
We also make breakfast sausage (grind/mix with trimmed pork butt). Sausage is versatile for everything from breakfast to dinner. Make patties or scramble loose for various recipes.

You can buy a cheap grinder and seasoning mix on Amazon and make your own. I prefer to make everything myself because I know how the deer is being processed and handled. I've seen meat markets that process deer by weight and if you drop off 50lbs of meat, you'll get 50lbs back but it might not be your deer. This scares me because many hunters do a poor job of cleaning their game.
 

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