Title: Gamey Meat: Here's The Deal 1
Categories: info, venison, duck, goose
Servings: 1 text file
Venison
Ducks
Goose
Anyone who has ever served wild game to someone unfamiliar with it
has probably heard them say something like, "This is gamey."
So-called gamey meat is the bane of a hunter's existence, but
putting your finger on what is and is not gamey is no easy task.
There are two sources for gaminess in meat: Unfamiliar flavors, and
meat that is tainted or otherwise off. I'll go into both here.
First and foremost, gamey meat is, well, game. Hunted meat. Mostly.
Several farmed animals, notably lamb (mutton), older goats and
guinea hens can also be perceived as gamey.
At its core, gamey meat means meat that tastes differently from
standard, store-bought, farmed meats. It is neither good nor bad,
although I'll get to cases where is it most definitely bad.
But what causes gaminess? Several reasons, starting with the nice
ones.
DIET: This is the primary reason. Supermarket meats are fed almost
entirely on corn. And corn lends a specific flavor to meats, one we
now regard as standard. It is a bland, approachable flavor. Fat from
corn-fed animals is firmer and more saturated than those eating most
other things, notably nuts or grass. You can see this clearly in
pork. Corn finished pork fat is strikingly harder and milder than
fat from hogs finished on nuts.
For the most part, wild animals eat things other than corn. And yes,
I know there are lots of wild animals that do eat corn, notably
whitetail deer, ducks, geese, pheasants and hogs. But even these
animals don't subsist entirely on corn, which is why a pheasant
doesn't taste like a chicken, even though they are cousins.
Gamey meat is almost entirely a function of the flavors in skin and
fat. Most of the stronger aromas we perceive in meat are fat soluble
and reside in that fat. A prime example is in waterfowl. A scoter
eats mostly clams, and its fat is pretty nasty (to most people). But
if you skin this bird, its meat is not terribly different from that
of a similarly skinned mallard. Ditto for spoonies, the northern
shoveler.
Most striking, at least to me, are ptarmigan and spruce grouse.
These birds' diet of berries, forbes, lichen and conifer needles
makes them the most pungent and powerful of all game birds. You
either like them or not, but gamey they are most definitely.
For big game, I've noticed that the diet of a Coues deer, a little
subspecies of whitetail that lives in the Desert Southwest, alters
its fat enough to where it does not coat your mouth the way fat from
a grain-fed whitetail in, say, Illinois would. I've had very sagey
mule deer, and mild ones. It's the fat.
And if you manage to remove all the fat from a slab of mutton, it
will be much more mild than one with its fat cap. Interestingly, one
main reason lamb is thought of as gamey is because of all our
domesticated meats, lamb is the one most often raised entirely on
grass. Only Colorado lamb is commonly finished on grain.
OLDER ATHLETES: A second, important reason for so-called gamey meat
is the fact that wild animals are older and are far more athletic
than their domesticated counterparts.
Typically, hunters bring home deer that are several years old, and
elk, bear and moose can push 10 years old or more. Most birds killed
by hunters are young of the year, but waterfowl can live beyond 30
years old, and five-year-old turkeys are not impossible.
And even young-of-the-year birds are typically older than their
domestic cousins. A fryer chicken can be as little as five weeks
old. No quail, pheasant, partridge or duck is that young. In fact,
the youngest wild animal we commonly hunt is a dove. In some rare
cases, month-old doves can be shot in warm places, where their
parents raise up to six broods a year.
Furthermore, even young-of-the-year game animals work for a living.
Their tendons are stronger, their meat is denser, and they are
normally far leaner than their couch potato relatives in the
barnyard. All of this has an effect on flavor.
Now consider an old Canada goose, which can be up to 30 years old.
Its flavor will be radically different from a five-month old
domestic goose, and even the youngest wild goose will be six months
old.
In all these contexts, "gamey meat' equals meat with character, with
depth, and with flavor wholly of itself.
