Life is hard sometimes, and nowhere near fair. I write this to you from deer camp, which normally isn’t too bad. Not too bad, that is, if you can put up with the deer not cooperating as they should, a diet that may not exactly meet health standards set by the Surgeon General, companions who apparently never learned any social skills, and college football, lots of college football. Let me explain.
The whole thing started innocently enough. Your humble outdoor scribe, purely out of the goodness of his heart, invited a few hunting buddies down to camp for the antlerless deer season. (Remember Case’s Outdoor Theorem No. 23: “No good deed ever goes unpunished.”)
This is traditionally a time to join with friends and family, procure a fat whitetail or two and get some venison for the freezer. I recently had obtained some meat-processing tools and was pretty keen to use them. A meat tenderizer, a meat grinder, a vacuum sealer to put all the choice cuts of meat and burger in and various other accouterments as needed. You can save a lot of money by getting your own deer and processing the meat. I probably spent no more on all of the meat-processing tools than I did on my first car.
Do you like venison? I do. If it is handled correctly and properly prepared, I think it is delicious. The problem is I have always felt that half of the venison taken every year is not cooked very well and a lot of people have a bad experience with it. Some will say it’s too gamey (I never understood exactly what that means), they don’t like the texture of venison or they just plain don’t like deer meat. Again, a lot of this depends on how you take care of the deer after it is dropped on the ground, and then how it is cooked. It is no secret that venison is much lower in fat than beef, so any cooking technique needs to pay close attention to not dry out the meat.
But I digress. Back to camp and the meat-making mission.