Deer Caught in the Spotlight
Martin Gillam
Posted: September 3, 2010
This is not you grandfather's venison.
Forget gamey, tough, and wintery. Chefs are using the new light and tender venison in dishes year-round. Martin Gillam reports. This is not your grandfather’s venison. Forget the image of heavy, gamey dishes consumed beside a roaring fireplace. Instead, think light, mild, and adaptable. That’s modern venison, as farmed in New Zealand.
“There’s no physical difference between the farmed and the wild animal,” says leading New Zealand chef Graham Brown, also an ambassador for the deer industry. “But traditionally, venison is hunted in the mating season when the deer are racing around and getting stressed, and that’s the very worst time to take them for meat because they’ve got adrenalin going through their system. Our farmers do everything to keep them stress-free.
“Another big difference in the taste comes from the aging. We age it anaerobically in a vacuum bag, not by hanging it. So it doesn’t get dehydrated or oxidized, or affected by airborne bacteria, and it doesn’t take on ambient flavors from its surroundings.”
New Zealand venison is one of the most carefully raised, strictly controlled meat products on the planet. In a country long famous for its lamb, farmed venison is a relative newcomer, rising from nonexistent in the 1960s to producing half of the world’s output today. To mix a carnivorous metaphor, the industry is a classic case of making a silk purse from a sow’s ear, thanks to an accident of history.
Deer are not native to New Zealand. Red deer were introduced from Britain in 1851 to provide sport for European settlers, and the stocks were augmented in 1905 when President Theodore Roosevelt made a gift of American elk (aka red deer) from Yellowstone National Park. But by the mid-20th century wild deer had become an official pest, and the government hired hunters to cull them. The meat was sold to Europe, and the trade was so good that the wild population dwindled alarmingly. So instead of shooting them, hunters began capturing them, and the farmed deer industry was born in the early 1970s.
“It wasn’t easy,” says Andrew Duncan, whose family company is one of the country’s biggest venison exporters. “Deer are the first animals to be domesticated by humans in about five thousand years. Those early animals were captured out of the bush and had to be put behind six-foot-high fences so they wouldn’t jump out.”
Farming deer yielded instant advantages over hunting them. Deer could be bred and fed under strict control to give the tenderest meat. And not hunting them eradicated all that meat-toughening stress. “We take animal welfare very seriously, so as far as possible they are kept calm,” says Duncan. “You’ll see that at most deer farms, they don’t scatter if you drive by. When they are harvested they’re not stressed, and you get better quality meat.”
Today New Zealand has about 3,800 deer farms, raising about 1,700,000 animals. One such farm is Charlie Ewing’s Cattle Flat Station in the stunningly scenic alpine region of the South Island. This is Lord of the Rings country—much of that famous film was shot among these towering peaks, and you half expect to see Hobbits mingling with Ewing’s 6,000 deer that roam the slopes at altitudes of up to 5,000 feet. Ewing needs a helicopter to supervise his 10,000 acres.
“We began as a beef and sheep farm in the 1970s but switched to deer about 15 years ago,” says Ewing. “This is great deer country. They’re in a free range environment much like their wild state. They live on the natural grass, and we feed them a little silage and swedes [Swedish turnips or rutabagas] in the winter. The pastures here are so lush that it makes the meat softer.”
Ewing’s deer are certified under the official Cervena appellation, introduced by Deer Industry New Zealand in 1992 to guarantee quality. (The name derives from the Latin word for deer.) Based on a pasture-to-plate concept, the Cervena label requires that all animals graze free range, never be given steroids or hormones, never be kept in feedlots, be less than three years old, and be processed under strict guidelines.
At processing plants like Mountain River in Canterbury province in the South Island, each animal is carefully selected for size. “Our aim is reliability, so we want a consistent carcass about 48 kilograms [105.6 pounds] and up,” says John Sadler, director of Mountain River. “Smaller deer are used for whole saddles, slightly larger ones for racks and short loins, and bigger animals for strip loins. That gives consistency for each cut.
“We’ve developed our product range based largely on chef feedback, especially from the U.S. We now have around 40 different products a chef can choose from, such as osso buco, tenderloin, and racks in different sizes, because each chef wants his portions to be just so. We even have one U.S. buyer who wants only American elk, so we create those shipments specially.
“The cuts in the processing plant are all made by hand. There’s a lot of artisan skill involved. They’re all packed here with the end user’s name on each package, ready to ship. It’s not something we could do in a big-scale mechinical way.”
Processing plants are tightly controlled, with meat inspectors and veterinarians running constant quality and safety checks. Every single carcass is individually inspected.
“Most of our U.S. exports are chilled, not frozen, and sent by sea freight,” says Sadler. “During shipping the meat ages, becoming more tender and flavorsome, because of enzyme breakdown. It arrives in the U.S. four weeks after slaughter, and with top hygiene and vacuum packaging it has about 16 weeks’ shelf life if kept around freezing.”
“Cervena has helped break down the traditional thinking that venison has to be gamey and tough,” says Andrew Brown, executive chef of Pescatore restaurant in The George hotel in Christchurch. “It has intensity of flavor, but it’s very approachable. It’s a great conduit of earthy and organic flavor profiles.”
“It’s very versatile,” agrees Reon Hobson, Pescatore’s chef de cuisine. “Venison is perceived as a winter meat, but you can do plenty of summer dishes. We make a carpaccio from it—we marinate it in equal parts brown sugar and coffee, cook it sous-vide for two hours, then wash it off and dry it, thinly slice it, add fennel salt, and that’s it. It goes really well with olive oil ice cream.
“For a main course, we poach it sous-vide with some herbs and garlic butter, then we smoke some wine barrel shavings, turn the ash into a powder and rub it into the meat, and serve it with a smoked celeriac to match the ash, some cherries, beetroot, and pickled mushrooms. The venison can carry all that, yet remain light and subtle.”
Todd Gray, chef/co-owner of Equinox restaurant in Washington, D.C., has been a Cervena fan since the 1990s. “When I first discovered it, I was blown away with the tenderness—you can cut the loin with a fork—and by the flavor. It’s sweet, but that’s balanced by the acidity in the meat. There’s a gaminess in the mid palate but never overpowering. The wild venison we get here in the U.S. is much gamier and has a certain liver character to the taste. And with wild venison, the loin is good but, nine times out of 10, the leg will be too tough.”
Two of Gray’s most popular dishes of recent years have used venison to give a twist to preparations that traditionally feature beef.
“I took the classic French saucisson, where you normally use veal, cream, and egg, and I thought, why not use the lean Cervena? The result is a boudin blanc, served with a little coleslaw and rémoulade, with the acidity of the rémoulade going against the richness of the sausage.
“I used the same concept for meatballs—why not make them with venison? I put them on the menu two years ago, and I served them with parsnip puree and some garlic chips.”
The leanness that Gray and other chefs admire is striking—Cervena has only half the total fat of skinless chicken, and one-sixth the fat of beef tenderloin.
“As a chef, it frees you up tremendously because the mildness lets you put the meat with absolutely anything,” says Brown. “You can use it for a stir-fry, a satay, or a hamburger. You can make a beautiful roast with a simple sauce or cold smoke it and slice it like a ham. You can do fruit flavors with it, or spices. You can use Southwestern heat like chiles—it’ll carry any flavor you put with it.
“And there’s no waste—if you cut up a 10 pound Denver leg (the trimmed and de-sinewed hind leg), you lose only two or three ounces from silverskin. Even the trim meat, because it’s been so cleanly processed, can be used for things like sausages. Venison is not the cheapest meat, but all the cleaning is already done. If you trim beef or lamb to the same spec, you’ll lose an awful lot of weight in fat and sinew. Most of the animals are harvested between 18 and 24 months, and younger animals are much more tender. So you can use the leg meat, which traditionally would have been used for slow braising, and use it exactly the way you’d use fillet steak.”
For a wine pairing, “Central Otago Pinot is well suited to venison because the wine is a full-bodied style and the tannin structure plays off the texture of the venison,” says Michael Herrick, marketing director for the Mt. Difficulty winery. “For lighter dishes like venison salad, a lighter Pinot Noir can complement rather than compete. For fuller dishes like venison osso buco, the bigger single vineyard Pinots are a good choice—especially as they age, when they move away from the primary red fruit character, like dark cherries and plums, toward earthy forest floor characters.”
New Zealand sent its first farmed venison exports to the United States in 1975, and while sales have been growing steadily since, Duncan says product awareness is still a hurdle. “One of our biggest challenges has been to get people who might have preconceptions about venison to try the product. If we can get them to try it, often we have them sold. A lot of folks might have tried only wild, gamey venison.
“Chefs are great allies for us because they’re a mobile community, and a lot of them know the product from their travels. They become honorary agents for us and try to persuade their customers to try something different from beef.”
One such ally is Brad Farmerie of New York City’s Public restaurant. “You’d be hard pressed to find someone who doesn’t like Cervena venison,” he says. “It’s so consistently rich without being overpowering. I always tell people that if they don’t like venison, come and sit in my restaurant because I’ll change your mind. Even my parents said they were not venison fans, and now they order it every time they come in.”
With meat making international headlines in recent years for all the wrong reasons—mad cow disease, E-coli, and swine flu, for example—New Zealand’s quality controls and long history of natural farming have become perfect marketing tools.
“It opens up markets for us that some other suppliers can’t export to. That’s increasingly important to our sales,” says Duncan. “About five years ago there was a noticeable shift by buyers and consumers, away from ‘industrial’ farming. After the health scares, people are looking a lot closer at how meat is produced. That’s helped our profile a lot. Our quality hasn’t changed, but it’s better appreciated now. We were free range anyway, and now the world seems to want to head that way too.”
Gray says provenance is important to both chef and customer. “More than ever, people want to know where products come from, that a meat is not factory farmed. They want to know that the animals have been treated well and that the meat has been packaged and transported well.”
As a small nation dependent on agrarian exports, New Zealand is well aware that cast-iron quality control is more than just good marketing. “What we grow and harvest from the land and sea is the backbone of our economy. Without our food exports, our country is basically finished,” says Brown.
“Our standards are a matter of survival. We’ve been able to start with the best practices, and we levy every venison farmer to fund ongoing research and marketing. As a chef you’re only as good as your last meal, and as an industry we’re only as good as our last shipment.”
