Story by Tom Claycomb III

I am by no means a well-schooled chef. Nor am I sure I want to be. A lot of the elite chefs meals I’ve eaten use exquisite spices but I’m not too sure I really like them.

For instance, I was once at a lodge in Alaska on a hunt. Someone shot a moose and the camp chef, who was a revered chef in Vegas cooked up a moose backstrap. I’m sure by the higher culinary chefs standards it was awesome. To me, not so much. I didn’t like it at all,

Over the years I’ve included a few recipes in my TOJ articles. I’ll include some recipes in this article but first I want to cover some aspects that will enhance your wild game eating pleasures, some factors you may not even know consciously but will nod your head in agreement when revealed.

I never thought about it but texture is a big deal. Some 36 years ago I worked at the big Monfort beef packing plant in Greeley, Colorado. We had a big ground beef department. We had a contract with a big taco restaurant. They wanted us to mix some PDCB with their taco meat to cheapen the price. PDCB is an emulsified meat which to the common guy is meat puree. Through a mechanical process we were able to remove meat left on bones. Nothing weird, it was meat but mushy. We had to determine how much could be added before it tasted weird.

We made various blends and determined 15 percent was the maximum amount added before the meat tasted mushy. It was meat, the texture just got weird if we added too much.

Let me further drive home this point. Decades ago, I was making some sausage with a hand grinder. Most people coarse grind and then run it through an 1/8-inch fine grind. I was having trouble with the grinder and thought I’d just do a 3/8-inch coarse grind and stuff it in the casings.

The sausage was made out of a young whitetail with the proper amount of fat added and good seasoning. However, the end product was totally weird due to the texture. I’d never thought of this until this fiasco but without knowing it, we expect our hamburgers and sausage to have a certain texture when we chew it. That is what we are accustomed.

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