Food Review

[unicornduke]

So I made the venison roast. 

It turned out pretty well for the most part.

I'm a little confused on the roast, it is partially above the liquid in the pot. So that section isn't as cooked as the lower part, it's really tough too and a grey/dark brown color on the outside. Is this what should be happening?  The fat wasn't broken down all the way. So I threw it in the pot for another hour to see if that does anything. The other issue might have been that the recipe said a 2-3 pound roast but it turns out the recipe is for a 2-3 pound bone in roast, which mine was not. But it was on the smaller side at 2 pounds and I slow cooked it for four hours. If I cooked it more, it might have just cooked through eventually. 

Other than that, it turned out super tasty and the meat below the liquid line was super tender and delicious. It was more vinegar than I like, so I'll probably reduce that amount next time I make it. It doesn't have a ton of other taste in there other than meat but ehh, it's good. 

I also want to apologize to the entirety of Mexico for completely butchering the tacos I attempted to make. 

So I put down the corn thingys, put the meat on, put the ricotta on (it turned out more like queso fresco), then heated up some corn and carrots and dumped them on top. 

Comments

[graydon]

This is where the verb "seethe" comes from!

If you have the roast submerged, it gets convective heat transfer; if it's above the liquid, it only gets radiative heat transfer (and is obviously going to be a little dryer.) Radiative heat transfer works well from inside cast iron or the right kind of ceramic pot, but not from glass or stainless or a lot of other pot materials. (That is, the bits of the roast sticking out will get browned, as well as dried.)

Sometimes people turn the roast over if it's being slow cooked, sorta two thirds of the way through, or they try to make sure it's certainly all submerged.

When I do this sort of thing (usually with pork shoulder, so more fat than even plump fall venison) I tend to saute some chopped onions until about half done, plunk the roast on top (this is in a ceramic or cast iron dutch oven, although the specific examples are french :) and then add stuff. Chopped potatoes, dried apple, dried cranberry, anything like that; turnip, carrots, whatever. Then it gets some fairly acidic fruit juice; grape, cranberry, cherry, pomegranate, anything like that. (The whisky and the maple syrup (a dram each) over the roast are optional.) And then in the oven at ~300 F for about five hours for a five pound roast. That leaves it just about sliceable when cold, rather than falling apart To get venison to disintegrating I'd expect about an hour and a half a pound.

[unicornduke]

Ooooohhhh got it! That makes a lot of sense!

I did it slow cooker, so I'll definitely have to flip it or add more liquid. I'm also going to modify the recipe, the vinegar was overpowering but also some parts of the roast were dry other than the top top. I'm going to add some bacon or lard next time.

In total, it was 4 hours whole and another hour for the dry part.

Do the vegetables get horribly mushy? I like firm potatoes for the most part and I'd think five hours for them would be too much.

[graydon]

I find that the vegetables sometimes get weird -- good firm yellow potatoes cooked with pork shoulder in pomegranate juice come out looking weirdly translucently purple -- but generally they don't go mushy as such. No fork resistance but you can stab them with a fork and pick them up that way.

(Nothing says you HAVE to put the vegetables in; you could put them into the oven to roast dry around slow cooking hour four, and do the meat wet. I put the vegetables in because I want to put anything not eaten hot into the ongoing soup.)

Duck fat works well, too, if you can get it.

Vinegar is what you do when the meat is horridly tough; if you're eating an old ox, sort of thing. If it's not like that, mildly acidic -- fruit juice, wine -- works fine. And if you do use vinegar, the nicer the better. A couple tablespoons of snazzy organic apple cider vinegar go a long way.

[unicornduke]

Keeping the veg separate will probably be easier all around.

I'll cut the vinegar out and maybe just do extra lime juice next time. I'm not sure on the age of the doe, but it dropped almost immediately and I did process it decently. So it isn't tough meat as far as I can tell!

I'm definitely running up against the edges of my cooking skills, I just can't troubleshoot things because I can't figure out where to go or why things happen. I'm a lot better than I was! But there's a lot to try with new cuts of meat.

I'll stick with pig fat since it's far easier to get bacon and lard than duck fat. I don't know if anyone local does ducks.

Thanks for the help! I'll keep posting as I keep experimenting.

[graydon]

You're welcome!

(You've been a big help about gluten-free baking; I'd dismissed it ages ago and now I want to try some.)

The only thing one might really need duck fat for is roasted potatoes and that's more like going from "great" to "ascended" than strictly necessary-necessary.

Cooking takes a shedload of practice; baking can be a science but cooking is art and takes that annoying combination of paying attention and practice any art demands.

And, really, you're doing something close to hard mode; venison isn't inherently hard to cook but it's not that close to the default cuisine.

[unicornduke]

I'll try and post more of my GF baking stuff here. I do a lot and I've got a good bunch of recipes collected from various places. Only some of them are collected in onenote haha. I do feed not-GF folks my stuff and they eat it and are amazed that it is GF so the recipes are good.

I've got an eclair recipe. It's *chef's kiss* amazing

I'll ask around at market this weekend, someone might do ducks and I just don't know it. I love potatoes so to turn them to absolutely incredible would really be something. I'll have to try!