Wild Game Feed

I spent the entire day on Friday cooking for my second annual Wild Game Feed at my church, the Vineyard here in Duluth, MN. Now I know some of you reading this are thinking that wild game is a definite downer in terms of culinary delight but I have spent a great deal of time figuring out how to make Venison and Elk, Pheasant, Bear and Moose taste very good.

I had some wonderful help to make this dinner come off well and I want to thank my friends Bob James, Joshua Herbert and Charlie Plys for making it work well and providing a good experience for about 150 men.

Bob, Joshua and I spent some quality time together creating some cool dishes for the boys to eat. Bob and I had about 30 lbs. of donated ground Elk to deal with so I decided to make meat loaf out of it. We added a dozen eggs, a full box of crushed saltines, a bunch of fresh parsley, finely chopped, 3 finely chopped onions, a cup of chopped Cashews, a few cups of grated Parmesan Reggiano, some Worcestershire sauce, some Frank's Hot sauce and a little salt and pepper. We formed the mix into free-form loaves on sheet pans lined with foil and wrapped half of them with bacon strips, leaving the rest plain. I put a probe in the center of one of the loaves and set it to 160 degrees in a Blodgett convection oven ( marvelous machine) and about 1 hour later we had some very nice meatloaf. In the meantime we had a little extra mix leftover so we made some patties and fried them in a saute pan to test the product and it was truly good stuff!

The same donor of meat also provided about 15 lbs of Elk Steak so I decided to make Elk Bourguignon from half of it and braise the other half in a combination of beef stock, Young's Double Chocolate Stout, Thyme, Rosemary and Crushed Red Pepper flakes, a little Worcestershire sauce and some onions and carrots.

The Bourguignon goes as follows:
10 slices thick cut bacon
2 T. Olive oil
5 lbs Elk steaks cut into 2" pieces
2 carrots, sliced
3 sweet onions, sliced
2 teaspoons salt
1/2 teaspoon pepper
4 Tablespoons flour
1 bottle Red Wine
3-4 cups beef stock
2 Tablespoons tomato paste
3 cloves smashed garlic
1 teaspoon fresh Thyme leaves
2 crumbled Bay leaves
Preheat the oven to 450 degrees
Saute the bacon in the oil over medium heat for 2-3 minutes until lightly browned.
Remove to a side dish. Dry the Elk with paper towels so it will brown well. Saute a few pieces at a time in a large, oven proof dutch oven (or two, spitting the ingredients between the two) over high heat until well browned on all sides. Add it to the bacon. In the same fat, brown the slice vegetables, then pour out the remaining fat, if any. Return the Elk and bacon to the casserole and toss with the salt and pepper. Sprinkle on the flour and toss again to coat the meat. Set the casserole in the oven, uncovered, for 4 minutes. toss the meat again and back into the oven for another 4 minutes. Remove the casserole and bring the oven temp down to 325 degrees. Stir in the wine and stock so that the meat is just covered. Add the tomato paste, garlic and herbs and bring to a simmer on the stove. remove from the stove and cover, placing in the oven for 2 1/2 to 3 hours. The meat is done when a fork pierces it easily and it begins to fall apart. Serve over mashed potatoes or egg noodles.
The next dish we made was a Wild Rice Pilaf:
1 lb Wild Rice
1/2 lb long grain white rice
3-4 strips of bacon cooked crisp and crumbled
1/2 cup Craisins
1 cup diced sweet onion, sweated in a saute pan
Cook the wild Rice and white rice in chicken stock according to their respective instructions and then combine all the ingredients in a bowl or in one of the pots used. Season with salt and pepper as needed and serve with any main dish above.
Good eating,
Tim

Underground Dining

It has been what seems like an eternity since I have posted here and I attribute much of that to recovering from this "attempt-at-flying" accident I had this August. It has taken forever to get to feeling normal and I didn't feel like eating for a long time and cooking was really a lot of work. I has been just over 3 months and I am finally feeling like I'm coming back to a sense of normalcy.
During that time I have told you about some ice creams that I have tried and that has been fun. I sat my kids down during one of the holiday celebrations and we talked about some ice cream flavors they might like to see. Here are a few of them:
Candied Almond
Bananas Foster
Pumpkin Pie
Dark Chocolate Cherry
Amaretto
Egg Nog
Cardamom
Chocolate/Cayenne
Dark Chocolate/Caramel/Sea Salt
Malted Milk
Toasted Coconut
Malibu Rum
Browned Butter
Those are some of the ideas my kids came up with and I like all of them. It will take a while to work my way through all of these along with the normal fun of cooking for daily life but it will be a great adventure in any case.
Another adventure that is coming up in the next couple of weeks is an annual wild game feed at my church, the Vineyard Church here in Duluth. I did my first one ( and their first one) last year about this time and it was an absolute blast!
Many, many folks donated game and brought their own dishes to be shared and it was a total success. We fed about 100 to 120 people with plenty for everyone.
Last year we cooked Elk Sliders, Walleye Cakes, Baked Walleye fillets, Venison Bourguignon,
Wild Rice Pilaf, Roast Wild Turkey and a host of other fun things. It happens this year on the 17th of December and if you might think of coming you are officially invited.
Another adventure that has been rolling around in my head is something I mentioned here some time ago and haven't yet pursued. My friends Lisa, Anita and I have been kicking around the idea of an "underground dining" experience where we would invite 10 to 15 people for a 5 course meal including wine and charge 25 or 30 dollars a head for the evening.
I recently watched a show on the cooking channel called The 4 Coursemen that did just this. There was a group of 5 people that collaborated on a dinner in a house in Georgia somewhere and did just what we have been talking about. It was fascinating! I am getting more and more pumped to do this. My friend Lisa has a large enough dining area to accommodate 10 or 12, I think, and she is interested in this concept as well. We need to get together and work out the details and find our 10 to 12 people to invite that might be willing to part with enough money to make it happen and we would all enjoy some killer food together. We will be getting together in January for a brunch event that involves our normal gourmet group and I am sure we'll talk about it then, if not before.
Enough of my food ramblings for now,
Good eating!
Tim

Confit continued and Brewing day!

The confit experiment I wrote about in my last post came out well, I think. The venison came out of the oil after two hours at 300 degrees and was thoroughly cooked and fairly tender. I was fairly conservative with the spices and salt so it was not terribly flavorful, but then again it was an experiment to test the cooking technique. I have looked up some recipes for duck confit to see a comparison of technique and find it is done on the stove top in a dutch oven over low heat for about the same time (2 hours) and then left in the fat for storage. That corresponds with Hal McGee's description of the ancient use of the system for storing cooked meats. the duck will keep for months in the fat layer and just needs to be reheated in an oven or in a particular dish which it is being used.
I sliced my cold venison confit very thinly and warmed it in a beef jus that I had saved in the freezer which had some pureed roasted onions in it. I then made some mashed baby red potatoes to serve it over and fried some leftover walleye cheeks from the wild game dinner which hadn't been cooked yet; kind of a surf-and-turf deal. The walleye was dredged in very well seasoned flour, dipped in beaten egg, then in Panko bread crumbs and fried in a combination of butter and vegetable oil. the walleye was excellent and the venison was much improved by combining it with the beef jus. Overall I think it was a success.
I think I'll try the same system using the dutch oven and much more seasoning next time as it will be much easier to do on the stove top. By the way, I had covered the baking dish in the first attempt with plastic wrap and then foil. I found in opening it up at the end of cooking that the plastic wrap was a wasted step as it disintegrated under the foil. That combination works well with meat in a braising liquid in the oven to keep moisture in but apparently the oil was too hot or somehow degraded the plastic wrap to nothing. It was a good lesson learned.
On another front, my friend Steve Rudh and I brewed our first batch of beer yesterday. We chose an Irish Red Ale as our first project. It was a fun evening of reading instructions, sanitizing brewing equipment and boiling the wort. The whole process took about 3 1/2 hours from start to finish and was not difficult at all. I had been studying the possibility of brewing for a while and on Teresa's and my culinary adventure trip a couple of weeks ago we went to Northern Brewer (www.northernbrewer.com )store on Grand Ave. in St. Paul and purchased the basic brewing equipment, the Red Ale kit and some liquid yeast. The folks at the store were very helpful in going over the whole process with us and getting us the right equipment to start out. They also told me to call anytime during the process of brewing with questions and they would be glad to answer and be of help.
I am happy to report that as of this morning the airlock on the fermentation bucket is bubbling away which means that we have fermentation going on. that should last for about two weeks or so and then we'll test with the hygrometer to see if the specific gravity is stable ( that means it's done fermenting). At that point we transfer to the bottling bucket and make about 48 bottles of a hopefully lovely Red Ale. It has to sit in the bottles for about two more weeks to produce the carbonation and then we refrigerate and sample! I am excited about this! I'll tell you all about it when the day arrives.
Tim

Venison Confit

As I am writing tonight I'm trying a new type of cooking technique for me. I saw it on an episode of Iron Chef America on Food Network the other night. One of the chefs was cooking some venison in oil to make a confit. He put coffee in his but I am going basic with this experiment to see how the method works. While watching this I immediately became intrigued with the process so I went to my go-to book for information, Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking. He writes that the method was originally used as a way to preserve cooked meats by burying them in a thick, airtight layer of fat. It is best known these days for the French confit of goose and duck legs cooked in their own fat. I've never tasted either of them but it sounds wonderful. If it is anything like Fois Gras I am in!
I started tonight with a package of Venison chops and seasoned them with Kosher salt, black pepper, fennel seed and cumin seed, then covered them in vegetable oil to just cover the meat in a baking dish. I covered the dish with plastic wrap and then with foil ( yes, the plastic wrap is safe in the oven as long as it is under a layer of aluminum foil). I placed the dish in a 300 degree oven and it is now baking for the next two hours. I will report the results in the next post and I am hoping for good things; we'll see.
As an update, please see Venison Confit Success, a later post on this same site and you will find the full recipe that turned out fabulously!
Tim

Gone Wild

Last night I had the privilege of cooking for about 100 men at the Vineyard church in Duluth, MN for their Gone Wild game dinner. It was a blast. I enjoyed using the commercial kitchen there as I don't ever get a chance to use a flat top grill, some serious burner BTU'S or a double set of Blodgett convection ovens. Also, the vent hood is amazing. We did about 35 to 40 large Walleye fillets which we cut into 2-3 pcs and set them on sheet pans with a pat of butter on each, a generous amount of Old Bay seasoning and some lemon juice. We set the ovens at 375 and cooked them for 11 minutes; awesome! The Old Bay has a nice kick to it and, of course, we did plenty of sampling as we cooked each of these dishes.
My friend Charlie Plys was the coordinator for the event and we had some great help in the kitchen: Bob James, Joshua Herbert, Dee Charles, Charlie P, Andy (don't know last name) and Sammy Aiken as well as a young lad named Matt who is aspiring to be a chef. Matt helped us greatly by assembling Elk Burgers and delivering them to the serving tables and also helping scrub pots and pans, up to his elbows in soap suds putting in his time in the trenches.
Back to the Elk Burgers; someone donated 10 lbs of ground Elk and frankly, I was concerned it might be gamy but it was excellent. I formed the meat into balls, about 1/4 lb each and set them on pans and as we cooked them we would set them on the flat top and press them down to a thin patty. Here is where the flat top shines at making good burgers. Elk is very lean so we oiled the grill for each batch and seasoned the burgers with my smoked salt and pepper. The flat top gave them a killer crust on each side and the smoked salt and pepper was just right. They smelled great on the grill and as we sampled, they tasted not only not gamy but excellent; nothing to worry about!
Bob James brought a load of Crappie fillets and Dee helped fry them along with my Walleye Cakes and they were excellent ( we sampled these as well). Bob uses seasoned Italian bread crumbs and egg wash as a coating and it was very nice, not hiding the flavor of the Crappie.
many other guys brought some good soups and stews and Joshua Herbert had me sample his Guinness Chili. It was very good. the seasoning was just right for my taste; not too hot but hot enough to feel it, a good amount of salt and a nice texture and mouth feel. I am generally not a chili fan but that was a good one.
There was plenty of food for everyone and we had lots of leftovers. I hope we will do this event on an annual basis because I thought it was very successful in terms of numbers of people who attended and quality of food people brought. Definitely good eats!
Tim