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Wild cooking!
by Marlene Fritz
RECIPES
It started with a bang and ended in seared, succulent bliss.
When UI Extension Educators Beverly Healy in Ada County and Joey Peutz in Canyon County introduced their new Wild Cooking! workshop to Boise and Caldwell audiences this past September, their aim was unwavering: to arm Idaho’s hunting families with practical, field-to-table food-safety education.
Most hunters, for example, don’t know that dehydrating elk, venison, and other meat for jerky typically falls 20° to 30°F short of killing food-borne disease organisms such as salmonella and E. coli O157:H7. Safe jerky must either be precooked to 160°F or presoaked in a bacteria-thwarting vinegar-based marinade.
Healy and Peutz spiced up their no-nonsense food-safety information with opportunities to actually taste jerkies that had been prepared both ways—and they didn’t stop there. They invited Leah Clark of the Idaho State Department of Agriculture’s Idaho Preferred program and Boise-area chef Rachel Knickrehm to fry up some rainbow trout fajitas, elk chasseur, and elk sausage (with blue cheese and caramelized apples and onions).
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made jerky gets approving nod from wild cooking workshop participant.
Chef Rachel Knickrehm from Eagle's Wild West Bakery prepares elk hasseur. Photo
by Pam Benham
With a freezer full of bear, elk, salmon
Lulla Northrup said her sons and husband—all hunters—would be in for a treat when she got home. One of 49 participants at the workshops, Northrup’s freezer was already full of bear, elk, antelope, and salmon. “I’m here to figure out what to do with it all,” she said. By workshop’s end, she had recipes aplenty for cooking her family’s wild game. “They’re going to love ’em,” she said. “They know I’m here, so they’re expecting great things.”
Jim Bailey’s neighbors were in for a treat, too. Not a hunter himself, Bailey came to the workshop to learn how to make jerky out of the game his Eagle neighbors bring him. Distrustful of Internet recipes from questionable sources, Bailey said, “I didn’t want to make jerky until I came here. I figured that, by going through extension, I would learn the safest way.”
Triple threat: heat, bacteria, moisture
Because safe game-cooking begins in the field, Healy and Peutz asked hunter education instructor Jim Allen to address their Boise workshop and Don Sturtevant to speak with their Caldwell audience. Allen, a retired Marine Corps lieutenant colonel, equated the three threats of heat, bacteria, and moisture to an “enemy situation.”
He dismissed the macho notion that “real men don’t wear gloves” and explained how to clean and cool big and small game and upland birds. For example:
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Never rupture the rumen or intestines; they’re full of bacteria.
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To keep flies away, treat meat with black pepper after dressing it.
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Whisk game birds straight into a cooler as soon as you’ve removed their wings and slid off their hides.
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At camp, hang cleaned big-game meat in a shady, breezy site inside cotton bags and over water pans; the bags draw cooling moisture over the game’s surface.
Not only does handling meat carefully show respect for the animal that was killed, but it’s a “life-and-death matter” for hunters and their families, Allen said. “Would you buy a fresh chicken at the store, throw it in your trunk, drive around with it all day, and then feed it to your family?”
(Hint: According to Peutz, five bacteria at room temperature can explode to 327,680 within four hours.)
Though not safe by today’s standards, dehydration is the world’s oldest form of meat preservation—Native Americans made “pemmican” of dried ground meat, dried fruit, and suet. But commercial jerky isn’t cheap. Indeed, Peutz attributes the popularity of homemade jerky to its “luxury” price.
While her husband, Fred, preferred Peutz’s precooked jerky, Pat Hansing was partial to her vinegar-marinated venison. “I never thought I could make it, but it was much simpler than I thought,” she said.
Outfitted in an Idaho Preferred apron, Clark made rainbow trout fajitas just as simply. While the boneless fillets marinated in lime juice, cilantro, garlic, cumin, and olive oil, she combined fresh Idaho tomatoes and onions with cilantro and seasoning for a savory salsa. After briskly grilling the fillets, she slipped them into tortillas alongside sautéed Idaho peppers and onions and served them to the approving crowd.
Increasingly, said Clark, Idahoans want to buy—and eat—locally produced foods. “They want to know who grew their food and where it came from.”
For hunters, the answer is an easy one. Steve Markel was “raised to hunt and fish and we always ate what we brought home.” Attending the workshop with his wife, Judy, Markel said he would try several of the new recipes with fall’s venison—and with the elk in the couple’s freezer. “We’ll try to make the elk taste as good as it did here,” said Judy.
“A lot of people don’t like wild game or won’t eat it because they’ve heard about how it can taste,” said Allen. “We as hunters owe it to the people we are feeding to give them prime, high-quality food—and the taste depends on how the meat was taken care of from the time we killed it until the time we served it.” And so does its safety.
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