Did you get wild or farmed? I found it to be a mild taste in farmed venison.

I am not an expert on venison. No one in my family hunted, but I suspect that the gamy taste of venison comes from the fact that most game deer are bucks...and in other meat animals an uncastrated male has a very strong taste. That's why they castrate feeder pigs....and a ram is pretty well inedible...even as mutton.
A doe that has been roaming the corn fields is pretty good eating.
Linda C

I can say I am jaded. The neighbor has a farm butcher shop and they take hours and hours to get all the silver off the meat. Silver will give a strong flavor, as leveing the bone in. Also depends on what the deer is eating, all the deer on this hill are soybean, corn, berry fed. Neighbor just brought over my share of a 4 year old doe that was hit on the road 3 nights ago. I smelled the roast and no odor at all. The boys took their share, sliced it and are making Terraki jerky in the smoker, yum!
I like to marinate venison roasts, steaks with a sweet/sour type sauce, seems to compliment the meat.
This roast I think I am going to marinate and smoke it, see how that works.
I like smoked meat, just tonight smoked a aged top sirloin for dinner with side horseradish sauce. Tasty

I agree with the younger, doe meat being more palatable, but diet certainly plays a part too. That 8 point buck may be a prize to hang on the wall, but it isn't a treat in the oven - it will be about as gamey as anything you will ever eat. My neighbor is an avid hunter and regularly gifts me venison and rabbit and he is the one that taught me that the old deer is not the one for the table.

Of course, I've never had farmed venison, so I can't comment on that.

Alexa

I strongly believe that the taste of the venison comes from proper dressing in the field. If it's improperly drawn and dressed it will have an unpleasant taste. Hunting is way more than point and shoot if you want good taste to the meat. I don't know anything about farm raised and fed venison; I don't get it, frankly, and don't see the need. Why are we killing animals in the wild when we're "farm raising" them for meat? We have beef/buffalo farms -- why venison farms? However, if you're just going to raise and slaughter an animal without regard to proper field dressing a "wild animal" than expect the compromise to taste. It's not the same as mass slaughtering beef cattle -- we're used to that taste.
Annie1971

Proper field dressing, complete removal of silver skin, and proper cooking are absolutely vital. My husband hunts on the same land every year, and the diet of the deer he brings home consists predominantly of corn and apples.

We (I) have a "no trophy" rule (we're both hunters, but I stick to upland birds). My husband lets other hunters go on and on about trophy bucks. He quietly and methodically selects a small doe or young buck to bring home every year. It might not seem as "impressive" for a couple hours in November, but considering we eat it all year long, he knows what to look for.

I eat lots and lots of venison from Whitetail deer. A friend gave me some Mule Deer venison this fall and I found it fatter and milder. Buffalo is pretty tough but the huge grill sized steaks are impressive. I think elk is probably the finest venison I've eaten and fully equal to the best beef. A local game farm has been selling culls at prices comparable to beef. Some city hunters only want horns so the meat is gifted to hungry locals. If I can get up tomorrow morning I can probably shoot a Whitetail walking up my driveway which they use as a trail. Wish I knew which one ate my tomatoes last summer... I'd love to blast that one in particular.

The single most important thing is to keep the hair out of the meat! Deer hair has skin oils that spread out when cooked and give the meat an awful taste. Just one hair in the frying pan will give the off flavor to the whole batch. If you are gifted with venison rinse it under cold running water and inspect well for any stray hairs.

I butcher my own deer with a knife so no bones ever in my venison. I've had venison steaks with bone in and not noticed any unusual flavor. Membranes, what I think some are calling "silver" don't have much affect on flavor. They are tough so they make cutting a steak difficult. I get the thick ones with a fillet knife just like I'd skin a fish. The reason I butcher with a knife is to be cheap. I'm practiced at it so it only takes a couple three hours for me to go from whole deer to everything in the freezer. If you are not practiced probably the best thing you can do is have a butcher take care of it. It costs to have it cut, wrapped, ground with pork fat, and frozen.

I've become a huge fan of blackened cajun seasoned venison... black on the outside and very rare on the inside. Very sweet and tender to my taste. I prefer to fry mine in bacon grease but vegtable oil works.

For some reason vension cooked with tomatoes takes on a very particular and stronger taste. Venison chili will have a remarkable venison taste. To my taste beef and venison don't mix well. Pork and venison do go together very well. My grandfather's favorite burger was half pork and half venison.

Older animals tend to be tough. Tame rabbits over a year old can be so tough you can't take a bite! There is good reason people prefer lamb, fryer chickens, and veal. The young ones are tender and taste milder. They also have a better feed conversion ratio... that is the amount of feed needed to produce an amount of meat. It is better for the environment to eat young animals.

Most people I know that don't like vension don't like the idea of eating a deer. If you don't care for the flavor but want to eat some to keep peace with the family hunter put some steak sauce on it... lots of steak sauce.

Good Hunting!

: )
lyra

When I was younger I'd skin and pickle the tounge to show off to the guys... lifting it whole from the pickle jar I'd proclaim that I got a "buck"... LOL! Jessy can help you figure what part of a buck the pickled tounge resembles.

DH hunts and I don't particularly care for venison. But I also think that the gamey taste has plenty to do with what it eats.

We live in a farming community where local deer tend to feed mostly on corn and grains, and seem to be less gamey. However, DH hunts much farther north, past Algonquin, which is primarily coniferous, and I find the deer harvested there is very gamey, probably because they feed primarily on cedar and forest growth.

Funny though, I don't find the moose from the same area tastes as gamey as the deer.

The deer farm near here has tours for the kids, so that is nice. My brother bought a roast from them, outragious price per lb and really wasn't as good as the free range ones around here.
Next to the trophy horn stories around here is who makes the best deer bologna, alot of deer bolgona is made around here.
If you aren't processing your own deer, you must ask how the butcher handles the volume of deer. Alot of the butchers don't process one at a time, it's too labor intensive. They grind them all up for hamburg one big batch.
So many deer are taken to butcher shops, who knows what deer you are getting when you pick it up. I have seen stacks of them on arrival and more hanging, the don't bother with the tags, most people want hamburg anyway.
Actually it's gross, I won't eat it. I am there for the slicing of the tenderloin, grab that and away I go, lol.
I have seen guys grind it with hair on it also, they just run it thru the grinder a second time.

The 8 point buck and I have an agreement, he may eat at the pear tree and he must walk around the perimeter of the upper garden, he listens to me. The girls are the biggest pain in the butt, 4 of them had pool parties all year last year torn 4 panels in my pool cover. That was $$$ to repair.

Soaking the meat in cold water after it's field dressed will take the gamy taste out. We ate a lot of vension growing up and it never tasted gamy. The older ones were tough, like any older animal, and had to be cooked slow and moist.

OK, maybe I am wrong about the bone-in, boneless thing. What I do know is the first venison I tasted was killed in upper WS. What we have every year now is killed right here in the middle of nowhere and my husband kills us one (or two) every year. We have it processed by a local guy who is very careful to keep ours separate if he has more than one to process at a time. (We learned the hard way that the larger processing meat market didn't keep the stuff separate that he made the sausage and jerkey from.)

These deer have a wonderful place to live, full of corn fields and woods for plentiful bark and wild vegetation. I have a huge perennial garden and a hosta shade garden and although we see at least 20 or more (at a time) in the winter right in the yard, they have never bothered my gardens in growing season. They have better stuff to eat. That is probably why I have never had to use methods to deter them during my growing season. Oh yes, they did stomp on my peppers that I had growing in and among the tomato cages, but that was only because it was a clear pathway that they chose to use.

As far as 'trophies' go. We would never mount a deer head on our wall (or a dog, cat or grandma) but I always look for uses for antlers since they can be found in the woods if you can get them before the other predators do. Deer shed their antlers EVERY YEAR. You don't need to kill a deer to get antlers. (Just in case you didn't know that.)

Add me to the people who completely miss the point in trophy animals. Can't eat them and I find it kind of morbid to have dead animals on my wall. (shrug)

Here the rats on hooves eat well, my apples, my hay, the neighbor's corn. They taste a lot like grass fed beef, very lean and a bit stronger than commercially available fat beef.

Flavor does depend on diet, of course. I've had some small "swamp deer" and some from the middle of the National Forest where they've been eating pine trees and they have a discernible flavor.

Bucks have a scent gland that must be removed when field dressing and like Michael/Lyra, I've always been told to be sure there is no hair at all. The silver skin IS very tough, I always remove it, but I don't know if it gives it a strong flavor.

We also butchered out own and Grandpa always mixed pork with venison for burger.

Farm raised venison escapes me entirely. We have a huge wild deer herd, so big that a neighboring county has a problem with TB and if you have 40 acres you can shoot 5 does this year. The food supply is short in hard winters and feeding them causes huge congregations of deer so they can transmit things like cronic wasting disease or TB.

If you really want to shoot something, go out in the pasture and shoot a Hereford, it's the same darned thing. And they DO have horns too, if you really need them for your wall.

Young bucks and does are, by definition, much better eating than the old bucks. It's like the difference between eating 16 month old steer and a 7 year old bull.

Annie

When my neighbor goes hunting, he gives us some of the venison . We use primarily the ground stuff in chili mixed with a little bit of ground chuck. Daughter doesn't like it , says she can tell the difference because of the fillings in her teeth reacting with the venison.

Sorry, the farmed venison I had was elk and it was really nice. My dad hunted a lot when I was younger and I didn't like any of the wild game he brought home - deer, moose, geese, grouse and maybe things I don't care to know about. Too strong for me. It probably didn't help that my mom wasn't the greatest cook. She had her meals that were fine but anything outside of it um, no comment.

Soaking in buttermilk helps!

Soaking in plain milk will remove the 'gamey' taste, too.
I have even used dried powdered milk for this.
Reconstituted, of course.

Rusty