^^^^ Exactly this. I’m no cook (but I avidly watch Masterchef and GBM) but thankfully my eldest daughter is and routinely presents us with fine dining (only real upside of STILL living at home) and I have learnt much from her I can recount to customers when they engage. In a couple of instances, some have also phoned her for advice, going on to become regular customers. I do enjoy “those” conversations- you never know exactly where they will end up but invariably, having engaged, most pull through to better understanding outcomes and many to sales.
Nutritional profile of venison and consumer attitudes towards game meat
- Thread starter Conor O'Gorman
- Start date
Fear of the unknown is a biggy, try and find a wild duck dish on the Internet, there's loads of farmed duck recipes, and although I haven't looked I'm sure the same can be said of farmed and wild venison. But while I'll say wild and farmed duck are different, I don't know about farmed and wild venison (I've never bought either and only cooked/ate wild).
Maybe big names such as ramsay, oliver and stein could do a whole series on game cooking rather than just touching a few recipes.
Maybe big names such as ramsay, oliver and stein could do a whole series on game cooking rather than just touching a few recipes.
Another consideration is the size and flavour profile of different deer, It can become daunting to people who don't know the difference, imagine thinking your getting a big roasting joint for the family from a red and on Inspection it's a muntjac haunch. And imagine having a mild flavoured fillet from a young hind one week and the next you get one from an old smelly rutting stag.
The main difference between farmed and wild venison in the UK is that all the farmed venison is from red deer, which are the species that is best suited to a farmed environment. It is also, according to many polls conducted on here over the years, the one with the poorest eating quality.
But it is a consistent product, which mainstream buyers like, has little wasteage (due to being abattoir killed), and has passed many more health checks than wild or park venison.
I sell fallow venison, and a significant proportion of my customers are people who say they've tried venison in the past and didn't like it. I ask them where they got it from, and when they say supermarket I can be pretty confident that what they've had in the past was red deer, and that they will try my fallow and like it.
You need to try them all, really.
No.
I wouldn't even bother to shoot a rutting buck, let alone sell it.
Which highlights another problem: A lot of wild red stags are shot during the rut, because that's when clients will pay big money to be stalking them. And those stags end up in the food chain. Which doesn't help build a reputation for venison as a quality product. In an ideal world, the mature stag cull would be all done and dusted by the middle of September, with only the breeding stags and youngsters remaining on the hill thereafter.
I think we need to be careful here as whilst muntjac are probably the most consistent in flavour throughout the year, all species do change as the year passes, not just due to rutting. Consequently, the inexperienced consumer can become confused quite easily that deer X which was nice and tasty in month Y is more gamely and stringy in month Z. Better to advise that product x is currently better and not get too hung up on consistently targeting a specific species. JMTFWIW
A non story frankly. Meat is meat. It's protein and a bit of fat that we digest and absorb as amino acids and fatty acids. All the other stuff on the web page in bold may well be accurate, but it's reinforcing the utter nonsense that "nutritionists" talk about food all promoting some speculative nonsense about micronutrients, which they also conveniently sell.Two recent studies shed light on both the nutritional value of venison and the way consumers view game. The first study examined the nutritional profile of venison from three common deer species, while the second investigated consumer attitudes towards game meat to see where field and fork can better connect.
Science matters: do you know the value of wild venison?
Conversations around food sustainability are growing louder in many parts of the world, presenting an opportunity for wild British game.basc.org.uk
It tastes good, it's high welfare, it ecologically sound. End of.
timbrayford
Well-Known Member
wild duck tastes and smells like stagnant ditchwater!
Ha ha, that might be why no ones willing to put a recipe up. In fairness I think wild anything depends where it's been killed and what it's been eating, I've only had ducks out of spring fed ponds and enjoyed them. I'd dare to say ducks out of a muddy resivour may taste different.
A bit like my experience of CWD then!
Agreed. I've had lots of roe and fallow as well and I prefer red. I think we need to be careful of generalising that one species tastes better than another as environmental factors (imho!) play a bigger part than species. A young lowland red eating good grass and arable crops will taste very different from an aging beast (stag or hind) on the hill with poor grazing. The contrast in body weights will be stark too. An 18 month old spiker can run to 110-120kg around here which I doubt will be the case on high ground in northern Scotland - maybe 60-70kg at a guess?
If anyone who loves fallow but hates red wants to be converted then I've a freezer full of steaks from a young lowland spiker that you'd be welcome to try and I'd bet you a bottle of scotch you'd hardly be able to tell the difference!
I have only ever had one person who asked about lead. A young Chinese student at Bangor University, who's partner was pregnant at the time. When I told him that the deer had been head shot, so the chances of lead contamination, while not absolutely zero, were virtually non-existent, he was happy and purchased from me.
I'm not knocking it, and have tried it. I've eaten plenty of red deer venison. It wasn't as bad as my experience with CWD
But I reckon I'd be able to distinguish the difference between fallow and red steaks pretty easily by the texture alone. Wouldn't be so easy if cooked in a casserole or something like that.
Conor O'Gorman
Well-Known Member
Fair enough. Its part of a series of articles from our science team, drawing on academic papers we would never probably read ourselves. Clearly sparking an interest given discussion on here and other places online.
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