Sourcing
When I bring a deer back, people picture the loin and the haunch. The two prime cuts, the ones you see on a restaurant menu, the ones that cost the most at a game dealer. Between them they are perhaps a fifth of the animal.
The other four fifths is where the interesting cooking lives. It is also the part of a deer that, in a country that does not eat enough venison, most often ends up as dog food or in the ground. If you have shot an animal, or bought a whole one, or just want to understand what you are eating, here is what we do with all of it.
Loin and fillet: Tender, lean, cooked fast and pink, exactly as in my beginners guide. Seared over embers, rested, sliced. A minute too long and it is wasted.
Haunch: The back leg. Roasted whole over oak for a feast, or broken into its muscles: the topside and silverside for roasting, the thick flank for steaks, the shin for the pot. A whole haunch on the asado cross is the centrepiece of most of our weddings.
That is what everyone knows. Now the rest.
The hardest-working muscle on the animal, full of sinew, and the best thing on it if you give it time. Boned, rolled and cooked low over a small fire for six hours, or diced for a stew with juniper and stout. Pulled venison shoulder in a soft roll is the dish we sell most of at festivals. People who claim not to like venison eat three.
Mostly bone, enormously flavoured. Cut into thick rounds on the bone and braised for three hours, it gives you the best venison stew there is and a stock to go with it. Off the bone, it is the mince for everything below.
The osso buco cut. Sawn across the bone into thick rounds, browned hard, then cooked slowly in red wine until the marrow is soft and the meat gives up. Four hours. Serve with something to mop up the sauce. I would take this over a loin on a cold night.
Thin, tough, often binned. Rolled around a stuffing of the mince, tied and cooked slowly on a spit, it becomes something close to porchetta. Or cured flat with salt, sugar and pepper and smoked gently over fruitwood, it becomes venison bacon, which is exactly as good as that sounds.
Every trimming from every cut, plus the neck and anything that will not roast, goes through the mincer. Venison is lean, so I add pork fat, about one part in five, before it goes into:
This is where I lose some people and keep the ones worth keeping.
Heart: Lean, dense, tastes like the best steak you have had. Trimmed of its pipes, sliced thick, seared over the hottest embers for a minute a side and served pink with salsa verde. It is the first thing I cook when I get a deer home and it costs nothing.
Liver: Sliced thin, floured, cooked fast in a pan on the fire with butter and sage. Thirty seconds a side. The one offal that even sceptics will usually eat, if you do not tell them until afterwards.
Kidneys: Halved, cored, grilled with mustard. Breakfast, with the liver, on the morning after a stalk.
Tongue: Brined for a day, simmered for three hours, peeled and pressed. Sliced cold with pickles. A Victorian dish that deserves a comeback.
A deer is one animal. The idea that two cuts are food and the rest is waste is a supermarket idea, and it would have baffled every generation of cooks before ours. When you have stalked the animal yourself, you do not throw away its heart.
- Cai
Bones: Roasted hard over the fire and then simmered for a day, they make a stock that is the base of every sauce on our menu. Nothing we serve with venison is made without venison stock.
Fat: There is not much on a wild deer and it has a strong flavour, so most is trimmed. What there is goes into the sausages.
Skin: Tanned, if someone wants it. Otherwise it goes back to the stalker. Nothing from a deer should need a bin.
Britain needs to cull around twice as many deer as it currently does. I have written about why. That only works if the meat gets eaten, and it only gets eaten if people learn to cook more than the loin. Every shoulder that becomes a stew, every neck that becomes sausages, every heart that gets seared instead of buried, is a reason to cull the next animal.
If you want to see a whole deer broken down and learn to cook every part, that is what a butchery day with us is. You will go home with a bag of cuts and a different idea of what a deer is.
