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Jamie Carlson shares outstanding wild game recipes

Bruce: Welcome to another episode of Whitetail Rendezvous. I’m with Jamie Carlson from up there in Minneapolis, Minnesota today. We’re gonna talk a little bit different, folks. We’re gonna talk about Jamie Carlson shares outstanding wild game recipes . . . this is Jamie’s website – youhavetocookitright.com. Jamie, welcome to the show. Let’s talk about what you do after you harvest your buck or your doe.

Jamie: Well, like you said, my site is youhavetocookitright.com, and I hunt whitetail deer here in Minnesota, along with just about everything else that you can hunt in the state of Minnesota, and I’m a big fan of doing everything myself. After I shoot a deer, I bring it home. It usually sits no longer than 12 to 24 hours. I butcher everything myself, I use as much of the animal as I possibly can, including all the offal. The heart is probably my favorite thing to eat on earth, so I always eat that first. Kidneys, liver, the tongue, everything comes out of the animal. I use everything, I make sausages, salamis . . . everything you can make, I do it myself.

Bruce: Well, let’s just talk about your recipe. Now, I’ve had a lot of garlic hearts in my lifetime, ‘cuz I’ve lived long enough, and I’ve had it fixed a lot of different ways. What’s your best, favorite heart recipe?

Jamie: My personal favorite heart recipe is for breakfast. I trim the heart really well, get all the fat, the sinew, and the connective tissue out of the middle; slice it into strips, season it with Cavender’s Greek Seasoning, roll it in flour, fry it in butter, and serve it with eggs and potatoes.

Bruce: That sounds pretty good to me.

pickled hearts, grilled hearts, everything – heart tartar. I got an elk heart last year that I made an elk tartar

Jamie: Yeah, and pickled hearts, grilled hearts, everything – heart tartar. I got an elk heart last year that I made an elk tartar out of the heart that was just about as good as anything you’ve ever had.

Bruce: Let’s just go back. You’re sitting in your tree stand, you’re on blind, you’re on a drive, and you put a buck down, or doe down. You know how to prepare your meat. Help us understand what it takes to get it from the field to the plate. Why don’t you take five minutes, if it takes that, and talk about that.

Jamie: Okay, well, I bow hunt and I rifle hunt. When I rifle hunt, I’m usually Northern Minnesota, up by North Dakota. I bow hunt in and around the Twin Cities here, and all over the state, really. When I get a deer, first thing I like to do is make sure that it’s absolutely a clean shot, clean kill, get her down. Then I go right at it, gut it, get rid of everything. Collect the heart, the liver, the kidneys out of the gut pile, get them rinsed and cleaned as quickly as possible. I usually travel with a cooler full of ice everywhere I go, just so I can get stuff on ice as quick as possible. With the offal – the heart, the kidneys, and the liver – they spoil so quickly that you really need to be prepared for those. Zip lock bag, rinsed in cold water, packed in ice, until you’re ready to use them. Then you can bring those home, and eat them in any way you want.

As far as the rest of the deer, I like to rinse it out really well. Again, I usually have 5 gallons of water with me, so I rinse out all the blood and everything from the internal cavity. I like to take the tenderloins out immediately, otherwise they get a dried crust on the one side, and you end up losing a lot of your tenderloin that way. Pull those out, package them, put them on ice. The rest of the deer, then, usually survives the trip home pretty well. I throw a couple bags of ice inside the cavity, depending on the temperature outside. You know, we hunt deer here all the way into December, and the temperatures here . . . well, we’re pretty cool, so you don’t need to chill them too much.

If I want steaks, I can cut those later, but we like to grill whole loins.

Once I get a deer home . . . skin it, break it down into quarters . . . I usually take the front quarters and scrape all the meat off of them, take the shanks and cut them up into ossobuco servings. Take all the meat from the front quarters, grind all that up, and that usually goes . . . my wife really enjoys cooking with ground venison, so we have ground venison, and then I make sausages out of all the stuff from the front shoulders. The neck meat comes out. That’s all gonna get ground up and used for sausages as well. Trim all the meat out of the ribs, that all gets ground up for sausages. Then start working on those back-straps, and pull them all out. The hindquarters – break those down into whole chunks of meat. I typically don’t like to break them down any further than that. I freeze everything in whole loins. If I want steaks, I can cut those later, but we like to grill whole loins.

It’s easier to get that rare to medium-rare temperature on a whole loin, than it is when you get those smaller steaks. Those back-straps, I usually cut them into two or three portions, depending on the size of the deer. The back hams usually come out into three really nice pieces of whole meat. Then those back shanks as well, I’ll usually take those, break them down, make stocks, and soup, and everything else out of those. Keep as much of the bones as possible for roasting and turning into stocks that I can freeze and use throughout the year. Then from there, I usually determine how much ground meat I have, and how much of the chuck meat I have, so I can figure out what kind of sausages I want to make.

If I’m gonna make trail bologna, or summer sausage, or a dry cured sausage . . . the whole loins that I have, I usually take a couple of them, and I’ll salt them and air dry them and cure them into what’s known as a lonza. It’s a whole loin, dried and cured, similar to maybe a prosciutto, on a smaller level, and then have that to slice and eat through the year. Just try to use as much of the animal for everything I can.