Hunting season has returned, and that means it is time to go on a wild game eating binge to clear out the freezer. We still have some of the wild turkey Holly shot last spring, so I thought I would adapt a Japanese recipe for toriniku shio-mushi, or cold steamed chicken with sesame sauce.

I skinned the turkey breast, then steamed it over sake and a little dashi stock for just a few minutes — I wanted the interior still a tad pink. With a wild bird, you can get away with this; honestly, with a high-quality bird you can even eat it raw. But I’m not there yet.

The breast meat is pretty boring subtle without the sauce. OK for slicing onto a sandwich, but pretty ephemeral without a dance partner. Enter the sesame sauce. This sauce totally makes the dish, and the key is to toast the sesame seeds in a dry pan almost to the point of burning. Without that rich, oily, smoky flavor, this would not be nearly as good.

Basically the sauce for one-half a turkey breast is 4 tablespoons of sesame seeds, 4 tablespoons of dashi (or turkey broth or chicken stock), 2 tablespoons of Tamari or dark soy sauce, 1/2 teaspoon of sugar, a touch of salt and up to 1 tablespoon of lemon juice.

Mash the toasted sesame seeds in a mortar until they’re getting pasty, add the salt and sugar, then add the liquids — leaving the lemon juice for last. Add the lemon juice slowly and stop when you get a loose paste.

This recipe is adapted from Shizuo Tsuji’s book Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art, which I am slowly absorbing, although I broke from his recipe in one significant respect: He emphatically says, “No Garnish” for this recipe. But I decided this needed just a few toasted black sesame seeds for contrast.

How was it? Wild turkey is tougher than domestic turkey, and definitely tougher than a regular chicken breast (yech), but it makes up for that in flavor. It is strong enough to hold up to the sesame sauce, and the two meld to become an earthy, powerful flavor.

This is a simple little dish, but it has helped me begin to grapple with my meat-eating choices — no factory meat ever, and very little store-bought meat of any kind — put up against a cuisine such as the Japanese, which relies heavily on intricate presentations and fine (meaning not coarse) ingredients. I call it a good start. What do you think?

Up next: Salmis of Pheasant and Wild Goose.