Wildside- What to do with your Wild Bounty

Dealing with bounty from the wild

 

Zane Mirfin, Wildside Column, Dealing with bounty from the wild, The Nelson Mail, 26 March 2011

First, catch your prey . . . but then what?

Novel approach: Christian Wurzinger hamming it up after hunting some dinner.

When it comes hunting,  the easiest part  actually shooting deer. After the gunsmoke clears, ears stop ringing and the photos are taken, the hard work of putting the venison on the family table usually begins.

Recent red stag success had me working hard to field-dress the beast, removing the gut and offal, and letting the beast cool in the shade of the forest.

Later in the day, I worked fast to render the beast down into boneless meat, while all-around angry wasps fought with me over ownership of the carcase. Taking about half an hour, I soon had eyefillet steaks, back straps, back legs and shoulders in a boneless state and miraculously had only sustained four wasp stings to my left hand.

Back home, we ate the steaks, and I took the frozen legs down to Rik Taikato and James Fairbrass, of Meat Solutions in Salisbury Rd, Richmond. What these guys don’t know about meat probably isn’t worth knowing and they made me up some great venison sausages, flavoured with beef fat, semolina, and paprika seasoning. Best of all, the kids loved eating them, too.

Rik and James had some great advice for me with the annual red stag rut or the roar coming up because they see deer carcases from all over the district being bought in by successful hunters.

Hunters routinely bring in whole animals, or you can bring in carcases in various stages of disassembly.

Years ago when I used to shoot lots of deer up the Owen Valley, I’d often drop in whole skinned carcases to my local butcher to be made into boxes of steaks, meat patties, sausages and salamis, but in recent years I’ve mostly cut my animals up myself into steaks, roasts and casserole pieces. I used to love eating liver and kidneys, but indiscriminate poisoning on public land now means that all offal should stay on the hill for safety’s sake to avoid any chance of consuming poison residue. So much for wild harvested organic meat.

The good news is that Rik and James can turn any animal into good eating, even suggesting that rank old rutting stags can make excellent lean salamis. They suggest keeping meat clean is an important first task for hunters, avoiding dirt, gravel, and flyblown venison. Another important task they advise is to let meat and
carcases cool properly, never putting warm meat into plastic bags where it will sweat and deteriorate very fast.

Sharp knives are an important part of fishing and hunting. James is a great believer in soft knives with soft steel that are easy to sharpen regularly. Modern hard knives often come factory sharp, but can be the very devil to sharpen properly again. I’ve always found stainless steel knives difficult to sharpen and my knife sharpening skills were pretty rudimentary until I bought a commercial Butcher Buddy tool a year or two back that allowed me to put great edges on knives every time.

On my hunting belt I always carry a diamond sharpener I use as a steel to straighten sharpen my knife edge as it bluntens with use. Be careful with sharp knives, however; it’s been my belief that getting cut or burning yourself with boiling water are probably two of biggest risks in the outdoors.

Fish, too, require treatment to obtain the best quality.  Fish need to be iced immediately, after being killed
humanely with an iky spike screwdriver through the head. As soon as you can, they should gutted and gilled, to preserve the best flavour.

Often I’ll ice my fish down and bring them home whole to process on my outside stainless bench, complete with tap that can plug the garden hose. Aimee used to hate me bringing gore and guts inside the house,
and now I can fillet fish in my dairy-worker plastic apron, hose the lot down outside when  I’m finished.

Filleting is what most people do with their fish, but you can end wasting the other half that is left. Lately, I’ve been enjoying those smaller 30cm pan-sized snapper cooked whole in tinfoil with butter and spices on the barbecue.

When I fillet a snapper, I also cut the wings off the filleted carcase and smoke them after brining in rock salt, soy sauce and brown sugar. Smoked snapper wings, complete with a cold beer, is my favourite part of the fish.  I also boil some of the heads and frames, after removing guts and gills, to make fantastic fish stock for fish soup and bouillabaisse. Then when I’m left with only snapper and flounder frames, I bury them under trees around the section as excellent organic fertiliser.

Storage of processed game and fish is important, too, and I like to chill them down as soon as possible, especially fish. Game meat and game birds are often best aged in the fridge for a few days before eating, and I’m convinced fresh fish is always best left in the fridge for a day or two before eating to fully relax all the fibres in the flesh.

Cover your fish in plastic food wrap, to avoid it drying out too much. Freezing meat and fish is always an option, but I’m a great believer in giving away fish and meat as a special gift or koha to family, friends, and neighbours. If you must freeze all your catch, make sure you get all air out of sealable bags and label with ID and date so you can eat it inside six months for best flavour.

Sometimes it’s easy to get demoralised about the outdoor scene and our shrinking resources, but lately I’ve been as successful outdoors as I’ve ever been and have had plenty of practice cutting up fish.

On one recent trip, as all four rods bent under good fish, a friend joked that ‘‘the catching is so good that I haven’t had time to fish’’.

Another morning this week I took out my brother-in-law Guy Mullon and his eldest daughter Caitlin, who now live in Melbourne to make the big bucks but where there is crap fishing on the doorstep. Guy marvelled about the quality of Tasman Bay fishing and the 30 fat snapper that packed the cooler to the max, but as we pulled ashore on the beach I knew that the work had only just begun.