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Fat is wild game cookery’s ultimate conundrum. It is the arbiter of a meat’s taste, yet stinky or bitter wild game fat can ruin an otherwise fine joint of venison or breast of mallard. What to do?
Keep in mind that fat and flavor in domestic meat are more or less predictable: Most meat animals live relatively sedentary lives eating similar foods (grains, mostly) and are then slaughtered at about the same age. Toss all this out with wild game, and by “wild game” I mean truly wild game — not the farmed products of deer ranches in Texas or of our many pheasant and quail farms.
Most of the animals hunters kill are young and stupid. But sometimes a hare of advanced age or a gnarly old rooster pheasant or a goose born during the Clinton administration will fall to our guns. Maybe I am deer hunting during the rut when the bucks are all flush with testosterone, which, while fun to have in abundance (as I can attest), does not make for good eats. Boys are smelly.
Maybe it was a hard winter, or a lean fall. The animals will be likewise lean. My friend Kevin in Canada has chased emaciated ducks and geese for years and has until recently accused me, scandalously, of telling tall tales when I report about the plump waterfowl here in Northern California. We have shot pintails here with a layer of fat nearly equal to that of a domestic duck.
Flavor in all meat is a combination of age, exercise, species, breed and diet. Every one of these factors are infinitely variable when hunting wild game. But of all the variables, diet — how much and of what – is the most important for the true flavor of a meat.
A good diet means the animal will have fat on it, and fat equals flavor. Period. Meats stripped of all fat taste miraculously alike. Scientists have done blind taste tests on mutton — that strongest-flavored of domestic meats — and prime steak, each with every scrap of fat removed. No one could tell the two apart. On a smaller scale, I used to shoot coots with some regularity, and I skinned and trimmed the fat on all of them. Coot fat is notoriously fishy. But skinned, de-fatted, salted well and seared simply in olive oil, I defy anyone to distinguish coot from venison.
A few general points about wild game fat:
- It is nearly always less saturated than domestic animal fat, largely because wild game fat is mostly built on grass or seeds or bugs, not corn or soybeans. Wild game fat’s unsaturated nature also meas it goes rancid faster.
- There is rarely that much fat on a wild animal, because wild animals work for a living. I have found some wonderful exceptions, however.
- Wild game fat is loaded with vitamin A and E, both of which are fat-soluble. Venison fat tends to be very high in omega-3 fatty acids — if that deer had been eating grass.
Fat is also the home of any weird or odd smell you might find in wild game. The varied diet of a game animal means that any fat-soluble ester or terpene or other flavor molecule that critter has metabolized will end up on your dinner plate.
Take Northern shovellers as one example. Known to California duck hunters as spoonies, spoontang or Smilin’ Mallards, these ducks use their enormous bill to filter mud and water for yummy bits, like zooplankton, algae, snails and plant matter. Shot near salt water, spoonies taste like low tide. Shovellers will, however, eat seeds when they are abundant — and rice (which are seeds) is everywhere in the Sacramento Valley. Spoonies shot there tend to have clean-tasting, white fat that is more saturated than fat from many other ducks. Holly and I shot a few in Tule Lake last week that were clearly eating little aquatic bugs or crustaceans: The birds were enormously fat, but with a bright yellow fat that smells…well, hard to say. It is a touch fishy, but it’s also grassy and a little sweet-smelling. An odd combo, I know. It is also liquid at room temperature; in the trio of fats pictured, the Tule Lake spoony fat is the yellow one in back that is already melting.
Other ducks are less dodgy, fat-wise. The main image for this post is my wild duck fat collection from this year; it is mostly from mallards, pintails and wigeon. But you can see variability even here. The grayish layer at top is from Klamath Basin pintails, which had pure white fat; the gray is because I let it get a bit too hot — the fat now smells like bacon. I consider this a good thing.
Look at the three spoons. The front spoon is from a semi-wild pheasant, which we shot earlier this year. Looks like chicken fat, doesn’t it? It tastes similar, but more complex, a little muskier. Pheasants eat a more varied diet than store-bought chickens, and this is reflected in the fat — and the resulting flavor.
The middle spoon is domestic goose fat. Snowy white, neutral-tasting and pretty darn saturated, although nothing like beef or lamb tallow. Farmers do their best to feed their animals things that make their fat this way. Alfalfa, as it happens, is one good plant to feed cows and sheep to make them clean and nice-tasting. It is also why a whitetail doe I shot in Wyoming last year was so amazingly delicious: She had taken up residence in a farmer’s alfalfa field and had been ravaging it. That deer had a two-inch thick layer of fat on her back, which made for some mighty fine wild game sausages.
This is why it is such a pity that so many wild game manuals tell their readers to trim off all fat from their animals. Doing so robs you of the highlights of wild game cookery, and dumbs down your meat to the status of a mere domestic — and if that’s what you want, go to the store.
Think about the gustatory marvel of an acorn-fed mallard. Or a black bear that had been pillaging avocado groves in Ventura County. Or a spruce grouse, heady with a balsamic tang. This is true terroir, and is not to be missed.
But you need to know what you are doing. This is why I highly recommend a simple test to see what the natural, wild fat on any game animal will taste like. The key is that much of what we perceive as taste is in fact aroma. Cut off a small portion of the fat and render it slowly in a frying pan. Smell it. Is it clean-smelling? Does it smell funky or fishy? Fishy is never good, but funky can actually add something to the flavor of a meat — remember that there will typically be very little fat on a steak or a roast, so that funkiness may well fade into an interesting background note.
Those of us who love to eat wild game revel in the mystery of it all — how will this deer or pig or duck taste when it’s all said and done? Will it be old or young? Fat or lean? Funky or sweet? As a cook, mastering these variables is half the challenge. Once you do, your wild meals will shine far brighter than the game equivalent of a boneless, skinless chicken breast. Give it a go. You may surprise yourself.
Again, an interesting, fascinating, frustrating article. I’m heading out this Wednesday for a duck/goose/pheasant/chukar/dove hunt, yet with my current lack of success, I have no illusions of what I’m bringing back. Therefore, reading your wild fat-rendering article is causing some level of consternation on my part.
Maybe somebody will get a few snipe next week, and let me tag along…
Great essay. Once again, I’m reminded that I really should try to make friends with some hunters.
I now know a lot more about fat – especially game fat, than I did 10 minutes ago.
Another great article! I have to get out and hunt something. I never realised just how different the fats could all be, depending on what the birds ate – but it makes perfect sense.
Diet makes ALL the difference. Just try eating a mallard shot off of salt water once…
Hank – you might want to get the new book “Fat” by McLagan.
You’ll see that goose fat is distinguished by being highly monounsaturated. That makes it taste “clean” and “light” compared to other fats.
Just as mangalitsa (and other pigs) produce more monounsaturated fat than other breeds of pigs, geese produce more monounsaturated fat than ducks or chickens.
Pigs that eat corn have a lot of polyunsaturated fat in their carcasses. That’s worse than being high in monounsaturated fat, because polyunsaturated fats (particularly linolenic acid) rancidify so rapidly. Just as olive oil stays good a long time (and corn oil goes rancid), the fat composition of a pig determines the quality of the cured products it can produce.
Pigs fattened on acorns have more monounsaturated fat in them. They generally taste better. If you don’t have acorns, a feed low in polyunsaturated fat (e.g. barley) would be a good choice.
Antioxidants are also important. Antioxidants wind up in the fat, and help stop it from going rancid. They help the fat to taste better. Pigs that eat forage or fresh hay (or just industrially extracted rosemary oil) taste better.
You might find this interesting: http://fst.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/12/1/57
Great stuff, Heath! Nice to see there are fellow geeks around…I know that goose fat is highly monounsaturated, but it is still significantly more solid at room temperature than much of the wild duck fat I render out; a question of “good fat” vs. “great fat” maybe?
Glad to hear barley produces far that is monounsaturated, because the wild hogs we shoot on the Central Coast tend to be best-tasting when they’ve been raising farmers’ barley fields.
Interesting about rosemary oil — do you just pour it on feed?
Hank – here is another link for you: http://jas.fass.org/cgi/content/abstract/76/4/1045
That shows the evolution over time of fat composition in response to a change (step-function) in a diet’s fat composition.
I’m not an expert on duck or goose fat, so I really don’t know about the differences you’ve observed.
You might want to compare barley-fattened wild hogs to acorn-fattened wild hogs. I suspect you’ll prefer the acorn-fattened ones.
Rosemary oil (and copper sulphate) are the sorts of things that people feed their hogs when they get serious about fat quality. Here’s another study on it: http://fst.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/12/1/57
The idea of those programs is to allow one to replicate the natural conditions that produce the best pork – because there’s too much demand for such pork (given the limited amount of oak savannah).
In general, that’s the point of farming – replicate the natural conditions that produce the best conditions for whatever we are raising. When you factor in things like taste instead of just yield, you start doing things the way the Spanish do. That’s especially true with pigs or chickens (compared to cows), because they are monogastric. Because they “are what they eat”, you have to control what they eat if you want the best tasting meat or eggs.
This is all really cool information. All I can offer is some closeup duck fat porn from this evening’s post.
See, this article is why I consider your blog my favorite food site, Hank. You share so much amazing info!
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Hey Hank!
Liked the article. The deer I grew up eating came from the prairies of Wyoming, and were usually donated to our large family by my dad’s “generous” friends.
They tasted different from the beauty you described. The flavor “notes” as you call them of each generously donated animal reflected less a tranquil life sequestered in some alfalfa plot, and more a scraping and tawney struggle for survival, eating pine cones and sage brush, and ending in a terrified chase.
The final indignity was the marinating ride home on some jeep hood warmed by the over worked engine. By the time some part of it started sizzling in a pan in our family kitchen, each member of our large family suddenly had someplace to go, the smell alone was so bad.
Fast forward 30 Years. I am living in rural South Dakota with my wife and family, when my wife one day mentions that she grew up on wild game, and asked why I had never gone hunting in such a game laden area of the country.
I asked her if she ever actually liked the wild game she had eaten. She looked at me puzzled, like I had asked her if she actually like ice cream. When she assured me that most of the meals of wild game she consumed growing up were excellent, I figured maybe it was my few and awful experiences that were the exception.
Most of the area deer were well fed on alfalfa, corn, and soy beans. The first deer I took was quitely grazing early in the morning not even aware of my presence. Field dressing her, I was surprised to see so much fat inside. An uncle who professionally guided hunts to Canada and the Dakotas told me that once I had field dressed the animal to stuff the cavity with snow to cool down the meat and rinse any residual body stuff from the inside.
After letting it hang in our sometimes near freezing, sometimes below freezing garage for a few weeks, I broke down the carcass into steaks and roasts. I was told the fat and the bone marrow carried most of the gamey taste, and to therefore avoid cutting or breaking bones, and to carefully trim the fat and silver flesh.
Our first meal yielded to each plate several tender slices of sweet and warmly spicy venison roast. I was bumbfounded at how delicious it was, rich in flavor, red, and juicy. I was also suddenly very disappointed that it would be a whole year before I would get to go hunting again for more.
Over the years, I have taught my sons deer hunting, and now that they are grown I usually have more than I can use for the year. They do not trim the fat as carefully as I taught them to, but to my delightful surprise, the meat still tastes excellent. We have served venison to friends over for company. They too are shocked and delighted to find out it is venison. The most common remark is, “This doesn’t taste like wild meat at all!”
For what it’s worth, most of the schools in the Dakotas are closed today on account of wind chill danger, commonly ranging between -25 to -45. And while such weather does bring more than its share of misery to most, it’s much less noticable when you’re pulling walleye through the ice, in a warm and enclosed hut, with the help and company of your beautiful wife and daughter! Savor All God’s Blessings!
Dan: I normally don’t allow such long comments, but yours was so good I wanted other readers to see it whole. Great story, and a great example about what I am talking about. Oh yeah, and I sure wish I could be walleye fishing right now.
Well, I just spent a good part of today breaking down a few ducks and the biggest Canada I’ve ever seen in Missouri. This was my first time breaking down a goose by your method, and I was so pleased with the duck fat I rendered a couple weeks ago, I figured I try out the goose. It had a ton of fat all over the skin, but also a huge amount in the cavity near the rear end, more than all of the skin combined. I noticed when I pulled it out the cavity fat had a much stronger smell than the skin. Initially I was going to throw it all in a pan to render, but decided to do an experiment and keep the skin fat separate from the body cavity fat. I’m really glad I did. The skin fat rendered out a nice clear yellow with a pleasant nutty aroma, a little like peanut oil. The cavity fat smells like guts and poop, and it’s cloudy. I think I’ll probably toss it. Just didn’t see this brought up anywhere, and I thought it was interesting. (Wondering if maybe an unnoticed gut shot caused the cavity fat to get tainted before I broke it down).
what an interesting article along with fascinating comments. thank you so much for this wealth of information. Keep up the good work Hank. From Australia
[...] looking to cook wild game and his explanations of why you shouldn’t immediately discard wild game fat should be read by anyone preparing to butcher a wild animal. I’ll admit I’m very [...]
Hank, is there anything you can do with hooded mergansers? I have a pond at my hunting property in SC that has had a dozen splashing around the last two times down. I hunt the woodies when they show up but don’t want to shoot the mergansers if there’s no way to make them palatable. Thanks, John
Hank:
Having been told countless times that it should be done, I have always trimmed away as much of the fat as possible when processing deer.
This year after reading a little of what you have to say on the subject I decided to fry some deer fat and taste it for myself. It was delicious. But I am worried about how long it will keep. Most of my venison goes into the freezer and some of it doesn’t get used till just before the next deer season. I understand that venison fat goes rancid faster than domestic fats, but will it last a year in the freezer.
Thanks, Mike
Mike: I use a vacuum sealer, so my stuff keeps longer in the freezer than if you use butcher paper. But yep, the fat stays in good shape for a full year.