I am a hunting guide & from a long Cattle Ranching dynasty so am lucky to have grown up on a wide arrange of different high quality meats, so would always turn my nose up to the old frontier offal recipe offerings but have grown to enjoy a few offal dishes now.
While hunting in Africa the Cape Buffalo are still one of my favorite hunts & around 8 years ago one of our camp cooks made a buffalo tongue dish to celebrate a large troublesome Bull l put down ,they made that much effort in preparing it l had to eat it & it was that good l ask them to cook it every year.The Australian Buffalo is really good for this as well.
The old man would try to get me to eat Elk & Deer heart as a camp breakfast all through my childhood as he taught me how to hunt & as we have a remote Horse Back camp if you did not eat what was cooked on the fire you went hungry,so l would sneak out & grab some of the Elk Jerky or Elk/deer Salami we always had hanging in the cold store instead, even though l would have to settle for it cold
.Now l love Elk & Deer heart cooked in a pan with lots of butter ,mushrooms & onion ,l think your taste just changes as you get older & cow etc cheek is my preferred cut to make casseroles or stews etc..
Sorry l was locked on to food ,yeh us ranchers actually call it TSEs here (Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies), as thats the actual family of disease & being ranchers CWD is a non specific bit of nothing term, ie cattle have 1/2 dozen different afflictions you could term as CWD .
We have actually had scientists study animals for over 6 years on our hunting land for TSEs , it really is a bit hyped up IMO ,the same way you would not eat a obviously sickly farm animal no one with 1/2 a brain would eat the same in a game animal .
As we have always home butchered all our meat & being guides we have done training in inspecting for diseases in a wide range of animals including fish .The only things l do not touch in offal is brains & marrow & that goes back to the mad cow disease as l seen that in Europe first hand & IMO it will only be a matter of time before we have another out break .
I am always really careful with feral pigs as l have seen humans infected with Cysticercosis in Africa & Australia funny enough, but feral pig hunting is huge there as there are literally millions of them .
I have always said a lot of the times when people say oh l tasted so & so game animal & it was tough or tasted terrible 99.9% of the time that will be because the meat was not treated or stored properly & a farmed animal treated the same would taste like that as well.
Every hunter should be making sure they inspect the carcass properly during cleaning if they are eating it & taking note of any health /disease concerns .like l say no way you pick a Sheep/cow/pig or chicken out at a Farm to eat if it was in poor condition or health, game animals should be treated no differently.
Here is some info on TSE from our Montana CDE they send out to us guides you might find interesting,the authors have been on our hunting land .
I am a hunting guide & from a long Cattle Ranching dynasty so am lucky to have grown up on a wide arrange of different high quality meats, so would always turn my nose up to the old frontier offal recipe offerings but have grown to enjoy a few offal dishes now.
While hunting in Africa the Cape Buffalo are still one of my favorite hunts & around 8 years ago one of our camp cooks made a buffalo tongue dish to celebrate a large troublesome Bull l put down ,they made that much effort in preparing it l had to eat it & it was that good l ask them to cook it every year.The Australian Buffalo is really good for this as well.
The old man would try to get me to eat Elk & Deer heart as a camp breakfast all through my childhood as he taught me how to hunt & as we have a remote Horse Back camp if you did not eat what was cooked on the fire you went hungry,so l would sneak out & grab some of the Elk Jerky or Elk/deer Salami we always had hanging in the cold store instead, even though l would have to settle for it cold
.Now l love Elk & Deer heart cooked in a pan with lots of butter ,mushrooms & onion ,l think your taste just changes as you get older & cow etc cheek is my preferred cut to make casseroles or stews etc..
Whats CWD?
Sorry l was locked on to food ,yeh us ranchers actually call it TSEs here (Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies), as thats the actual family of disease & being ranchers CWD is a non specific bit of nothing term, ie cattle have 1/2 dozen different afflictions you could term as CWD .
We have actually had scientists study animals for over 6 years on our hunting land for TSEs , it really is a bit hyped up IMO ,the same way you would not eat a obviously sickly farm animal no one with 1/2 a brain would eat the same in a game animal .
As we have always home butchered all our meat & being guides we have done training in inspecting for diseases in a wide range of animals including fish .The only things l do not touch in offal is brains & marrow & that goes back to the mad cow disease as l seen that in Europe first hand & IMO it will only be a matter of time before we have another out break .
I am always really careful with feral pigs as l have seen humans infected with Cysticercosis in Africa & Australia funny enough, but feral pig hunting is huge there as there are literally millions of them .
I have always said a lot of the times when people say oh l tasted so & so game animal & it was tough or tasted terrible 99.9% of the time that will be because the meat was not treated or stored properly & a farmed animal treated the same would taste like that as well.
Every hunter should be making sure they inspect the carcass properly during cleaning if they are eating it & taking note of any health /disease concerns .like l say no way you pick a Sheep/cow/pig or chicken out at a Farm to eat if it was in poor condition or health, game animals should be treated no differently.
Here is some info on TSE from our Montana CDE they send out to us guides you might find interesting,the authors have been on our hunting land .
https://dphhs.mt.gov/publichealth/cdepi/diseases/cwd
I guess I’ll have to stop eating humans now. Damn it!