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Chopped Venison
An easy way to prepare venison is to put 1 1/2 lbs. fresh raw venison through the meat chopper with 1/4 lb. raw bacon and 1 small onion. Mix well, add 1 egg, 1 teaspoon salt and pepper to taste. Form into cakes, roll them in flour and fry in frying pan with just enough fat to prevent burning.
A camp burger in all but name: venison is lean enough that it needs the bacon for fat and the egg to hold the cakes together. The main thing to get right is doneness, since ground meat behaves differently from a whole cut.
- Cook them throughWhole venison steaks can be served pink, but grinding spreads any surface bacteria through the whole mass. Ground game should reach 160F throughout; the cakes should show no pink in the centre.
- The meat chopperA hand-cranked grinder clamped to the table rather than an electric machine. A food processor pulsed in short bursts works, but it smears the fat rather than cutting it; a grinder attachment or a coarse plate gives a better texture. Keep the meat and bacon very cold before grinding.
- Grind bacon and venison togetherPassing them through at the same time distributes the fat evenly. Venison runs around 2-3 percent fat, so the quarter pound of bacon here is doing real work, not seasoning.
- SaltA teaspoon to a pound and three-quarters of meat is on the light side by modern habit but sound; the bacon brings its own salt, which varies a great deal by brand. Fry a small test cake and taste before shaping the rest.
- Flour coatingRoll the cakes just before they go into the pan. Flour left sitting on wet meat turns pasty and will slide off in the fat.
- Fat and heatMedium-high heat and a thin film of fat. Venison dries out quickly, so aim for a firm crust in about four minutes a side on cakes three-quarters of an inch thick, and stop there.
- YieldAbout seven cakes of four ounces, serving three or four. They reheat badly, so cook only what will be eaten.
Grinding was a standard answer when a hunting party had more meat than it could roast and no cold storage to speak of: it uses tougher cuts that would be poor eating as steak, it stretches the meat with onion and egg, and it cooks fast. The pairing of venison with pork fat is much older than this recipe and appears throughout European game cookery in the practice of larding, where strips of fatback are threaded into lean meat before roasting; here the same logic is simply applied at the grinder. The recipe's plainness is the point.