With the help of hunting dogs, Scott Brunk hunts turkey, pheasant and duck.
Wisconsin hunters sit in their tree stands, waiting for the rustle of underbrush and the flash of a movement. Their weekend in the wild unfolds slowly until the pulse quickens in a moment. The shot.
But the hunt is not over with a successful kill. With so many hunters eating their prey, they have to figure out how to turn their gutted prize into a meal. More often than not, their recipes revolve around the grill and the crockpot, including a healthy dose of marinade. But we’ve got to admit, duck wrapped in bacon does sound pretty tempting.
John Haugh of Green Bay, hunts every fall in northern Wisconsin with a group of family and friends at what he calls “deer camp.”
“I probably go more for the camaraderie of the deer camp than the hunting itself,” he says. “It’s not so much that I’m all that interested in going out and killing something, but that’s part of the tradition.”
Paul Graeve of Poynette, Wis., typically hunts deer from a tree stand with a rifle.
“The actual killing part is not really all that much fun, but when you prepare for it for a long time, it’s high adrenaline,” he says.
They’re not out for blood–but at some point, someone’s got to give, and it’s probably going to be a deer. So then what?
“Well the first thing you have to do, is you have to field dress the deer and gut it out,” Haugh says. “And there’s a process for that, obviously.”
Graeve’s father-in-law, Bob Keel of Sun Prairie, Wis. reveals the details of the field dressing process.
“You basically have to take the guts out of it so the deer doesn’t spoil, so you cut open the deer and pull the insides out,” Keel says.
After the field dressing process is complete, Haugh says, the deer needs to be taken back to the “deer camp” or truck.
“If we get a good deer, we take him and we’ll hang him up in a tree in front of the cottage,” Haugh says.
Haugh says he is not a “crazy huge hunter,” and he prefers to have someone else “bone out” the deer, so that he’s left with only boneless meat without having to deal with sawing through bone marrow and fat.
“I’ll take all the other trimmings and I’ll have them made into either summer sausage, bratwurst, venison brats, venison breakfast sausage,” Haugh says.
Dave Van Hemelryk has been making venison sausages for 28 years at Maplewood Meats, where Haugh takes his “trimmings” to be made into sausage.
“Here at Maplewood, we take in the boneless meat and then we use the same recipes that we have for our regular sausages such as summer sausage, bratwurst, bologna, hot dogs, and then we mix beef and pork with the venison to mellow out the flavor of the venison and to give it a desirable taste,” Van Hemelryk says.
Van Hemelryk says the best way to classify Maplewood Meats is as an old-fashioned meat market.
“We sell cuts of beef and pork, and we make our own sausages and hams and bacons, and we also butcher and process animals that farmers raise for themselves and their customers,” he says.
Rather than take his deer to a meat locker, however, Graeve prefers to cut it up, package it and freeze it himself.
“It’s kind of time-consuming, but it’s not that hard to do,” he says. “In order to not spend money on something we can do ourselves, we cut them up ourselves.”
However, Graeve says his father-in-law does most of the work.
“Just like you would with beef, you cut it up into quarters and halves and from there you cut them up into steaks. The rest you grind up for burgers,” Keel says.
After cutting off the legs and neck, Keel uses a gambrel and a pulley to work the hide off of the deer.
“I normally take a saw, cut the deer in half,” he says. “I take the front and I throw it on the block, and then I cut my roasts and my hamburger out of that. And then the hind quarters, I get my steaks, my roasts and hamburger.”Scott Brunk of La Crosse, Wis., hunts pheasant, duck and turkey with hunting dogs.
“The dogs are a riot. You’ll just be walking along and the dogs won’t be paying any attention and all of a sudden, the dog’s just going ape,” he says.
Brunk, who has been hunting actively for the past 20 years, says he likes to hunt because of the sport and challenge involved.
“Hunting is just very fun and satisfying. It’s really fun to train the dog and watch the dog work and the dog loves to find birds and retrieve them when you get them,” he says.
Brunk cleans the birds that he hunts himself. On a recent pheasant hunting trip to North Dakota, he performed the initial cleaning in the field and then finished the job at home.
“Any birds I bring home, I clean just usually in the kitchen,” Brunk adds.
Once they’ve got their kill in the kitchen, Haugh, Keel and Brunk each have multiple suggestions about how to prepare what they’ve hunted. Just like every hunter has a story, it turns out that every hunter has at least one favorite recipe, too.
Haugh recommends tying up a whole leg like a roast, marinating it and cooking it on the grill at a lower temperature.
“Put it in beef broth with Italian seasoning and it’s kind of like Italian beef sliced sandwiches,” he explains. “That’s quite excellent.”
“The other leg I usually have sliced into steaks, and those I’ll typically make fajitas,” Haugh says.
For parties, Haugh offers this crowd-pleasing method for preparing venison loins:
“Those we marinate in a Ziploc bag with olive oil and garlic and pepper and some other spices, and then cook that on the grill medium rare, and it tastes just like beef tenderloin,” he says. “You could not tell the difference. I’ve served it to my children without them knowing that it was venison. And it’s very flavorful, and not gamey at all.”
“My favorite recipe is a roast,” Keel says. “I put on the slow crock cooker, I add vegetables and then I take cream of mushroom soup, one can, one can of dried onion soup, and then I let that cook just about all day long, that’s an absolutely delicious roast … We eat a lot of hamburger with chili, meatloaf, and I make a lot of beef jerky.”
“A lot of my pheasant I filet, like you filet a fish, so it’s nothing but meat,” Brunk says, adding he also uses a crockpot to prepare pheasant. “I’ll throw it frozen in a crockpot with cream of mushroom soup and eat it that way on rice or noodles.”
But the most original way of preparing a kill comes from Brunk’s recipe box: Marinated duck wrapped in bacon, grilled to perfection.
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While these hunters take the time and effort to lovingly prepare their kill for their families, sometimes their families are not all that interested. Therefore, the hunters must occasionally attempt to trick their families into tolerating the taste of venison.
“Earlier this year I was cooking fajitas, and my wife said to me, ‘What kind of meat is this?’ and I said, ‘It’s steak.’ And she said, ‘It’s venison, isn’t it?’ I said, ‘Yes it is.’ But she ate it anyway,” Haugh says.
But sometimes, no amount of marinade or trickery can hide what’s on the plate. When Haugh’s daughter found out she was eating venison, she reacted strongly.
“We were having this wonderful meal, flavorful dinner, glass of wine,” he describes, “and I made the comment, ‘You can’t even tell it’s venison!’ and she apparently didn’t know it was. She threw her fork at me and refused to eat the rest of her meal.”
Keel says his daughter, Lisa, doesn’t like venison either, but he thinks “it’s all in her head.”
“We enjoy the venison,” he says on behalf of his wife. “In fact, we don’t buy a lot of meat because we eat a lot of venison, which a lot of people don’t.”
In many ways, hunting is environmentally friendly, as well.
“The deer need to be hunted. They’re damaging the fields, they get hit by cars, so it does nothing to the population” to hunt them, Brunk says. “Same with the birds that we hunt—hunting a pheasant does nothing to the population.”
“The goal is to reduce the size of the deer herd every year,” Haugh says.
In addition, wild venison and game are healthy, antibiotic-free protein choices.
“Most of the game meat is very lean and good for you,” Brunk says. “I think it’s kind of nice to be in touch with what you actually eat versus having someone else kill your chicken or your beef.”