It's Venison Season!

It's the time of year to start dreaming of the meals you'll be making with all that fresh venison in your freezer. You spent the money on license and tags, you spent your time hunting and were gloriously successful, you spent more time and effort cutting and wrapping... now it's time to relax and savor the fruits of your labor :)

A lot of people won't bother with cutting roasts, just making steaks or hamburger instead, because they just don't quite know how to cook a venison roast to their liking. Let me throw in an idea for your hamburger while I'm here, a nice change from the usual mixtures of meat people use for their ground venison... Rather than using beef or pork to add the flavor and fat to the ground venison, try using 1/3 bacon instead. A 2 lb. package of bacon ends and pieces ground up with 5 lbs. of venison will provide all the fat needed to hold it all together and will give a fantastic flavor to the burgers :)

But back to venison roasts. I think of venison as being a "pure" meat. Unlike beef, it's not marbled with layers of fat, and hasn't been fed a ton of unknown antibiotics and growth hormones. This lack of marbling, however, can be a detriment in the roasts. While the fat and other connective tissues give the meat the "gamey" taste that causes many people to dislike venison, which is why we trim it off when we butcher, these two things also help provide the tenderness found in beef and pork.

Venison roasts do best when roasted with moist heat. While a beef roast is great to just stick in a pan and bake for awhile, your venison roast will be dry and tough using this method. There's no fat in it to help create the moisture needed for tenderness, so you'll have to add water to the pan. While I love a dry-roasted beef chuck, about all a dry-roasted venison roast is good for, in my opinion, is to grind into a sandwich meat. Pretty good that way, with mayo, relish, onions, etc. My preferred method of cooking a venison roast is in the slow cooker. The following recipe can be adapted to oven use if you don't have a slow cooker, simply by maintaining a temp of about 225 and ensuring your roasting pan has a good lid, and checking on it a bit more often.

You'll need:

A slow cooker
Some butcher string
A venison roast

1 onion
1 apple
1-2 cups Craisins or 1-2 cups dried blueberries
1-2 stalks celery, or 1 tsp. celery seed, or 2 tbs. celery flakes
1 can mushroom stems & pieces
2 garlic cloves, minced
1/2 tsp. crushed red pepper flakes
1/3 C. cherry wine

Dice the onion, apple, celery and mushrooms into small pieces. Plump the Craisins in some warm water, just enough to cover. Saute all these and the spices in a bit of olive oil. Save the Craisin water.

While these things are cooking, lay the roast out. Make a cut down the middle, to about an inch from going all the way through. Spread it out like a butterfly, and make several 1" deep horizontal slits in each side. When the saute is complete, spread the ingredients into the roast and fill the slits. Tie all this back together with the butcher string, and place into the slow cooker. Gather up all the filling that spilled out and put it over the top of the roast. Now go back to your sautee pan, heat it up again and put in the cherry wine and 1/3 cup of the reserved Craisin water. Bring this to a boil, scraping up all the pan stickings in the process, and drizzle it over the roast. Start out the slow cooker temp on high, then after an hour or so turn it down to low. If the liquid steams off, just add a bit of water, you'll want to check on it now and then so it doesn't dry out. If you have the roast in the cooker by 10am, you'll be sitting down to the finest gourmet melt-in-your-mouth venison dinner by 6pm. Since I'm a bit on the lazy side, I generally just put in a few carrots, potatoes and some cabbage around 4pm or so and do a one-dish pot roast meal. This would be great with some garlic mashed potatoes and some home-canned green beans on the side, though, maybe with some buttermilk biscuits too :)

Recipe adapts well to pork or beef roasts also. Use your imagination and let me know :)