Roasted Venison

Soon it will be hunting season and every hunter hopes to lucky enough to bag a deer. Preserving the meat is important but the real fun comes in cooking the venison. I thought I would make a few entries on some of the ways I preserve and cook venison. Watch for other venison methods and recipes to be published over the next week or so.

Venison roast is a nice change from pork or beef roasts. Here is how I make venison roast.

Venison Roasted

There are a few important things to know when cooking venison. Venison is very lean so a fat needs to be added when cooking. Usually the fat is ground pork if cooking ground venison or bacon for roasts. Do not over cook venison or it will be too dry. When I was first looking for recipes for cooking venison, one source indicated to soak in salt water but most sources say to avoid salting the meat prior to cooking. If there is any connective tissue on the roast, remove that as it will give an unpleasant taste.

I started with two frozen venison roasts, one was sirloin tip and the other rump. The roasts were thawed in the refrigerator overnight. Any connective tissue was cut away. Each roast was wrapped with bacon strips and placed in a glass baking dish. Wrapping the roast is easy. Just start at one end wrapping around the roast then move slice by slice until the entire roast is wrapped.

I cooked the uncovered roasts at 300 degrees farenheit on convection oven setting until the interal temperature was 140 degrees farenheit.

Venison Cut

The roasts where carefully removed from the baking pan and allowed to rest before cutting. There was enough juices for gravy but they needed to be put through a gravy separator to remove the fat first. Then I placed the juices in a sauce pan, added a little Worchestershire sauce and brought to a light boil. I used an arrowroot flour slurry to make a thin gravy. When the gravy was finished it was time to cut the meat.

Each slice of meat has an outer layer of bacon that looks nice when plated especially with a little gravy. I like to keep roasted venison meals more like old fashioned country cooking. This venison was served with baked potatoes, carrot coins and homemade sour dough bread.

Enjoy!

Garden Gnome