A little tallow on a BBQ deer chop is tasty!
Trim it and vacpack into balls. Good suet for birds if you like them.
I like to mix it with dround just eat your burger while its hot.
Thanks for the responses!!
that article by Hank Shaw was very informative. To summarize so far it looks like some folks don’t mind a bit of fat present, with the remainder staunchly in the zero fat camp.
this deer was oat fed, and in great shape. On my mulie buck I took all the fat off, but this whitetail is so healthy I want to be open to eating the fat.
I am butchering tonight so it’s a good opportunity for an experiment:
-> At a minimum I will trim any exposed fat as it will have oxidized and be off putting.
-> next I will render a bit of fat in a pan, per the Hank Shaw article. If it smells good, it is good.
-> I will make a rollade from the belly (the “bacon” area). This will be ultra fatty and a true taste test of leaving the maximum amount on.
-> one of my “racks of venison” I will keep a moderate amount of fat on. I’m going to cook it this weekend. I will trim it up just before cooking to about a 1/4” of fat
-> anything going in the freezer will get cleaned up to lean, no fat
-> having the tenderloins tonight for dinner to get a good taste of the lean and clean deer meat
And I will keep all the fat trim to render for tallow, and then make soap with it. I made bear grease soap, so have all the things already.
I will report back with my findings and taste tests!
I would be interested to hear what the soap turns out like. Knowing the texture of deer fat on the top of my mouth if not cleaned up it would be neat to understand how it smells.
“People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election.” -Otto von Bismarck
Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.-Albert Einstein
I rendered a bunch of fat of a whitetail last year and a member here gave me his Grandma's recipe for baking cookies with it. Substitute butter with 3/4 deer fat/1/4 water. I tried it, made gingerbread cookies and can confirm they were delicious.
ok so i have some updates from the past week of experimenting with the whitetail deer fat and cooking.
my overall goal was to try the fat in different ways and see how it would taste.
to start I made some roulades with belly trim from the saddle section. they were a bit small. only seasoned with salt. After browning I slow cooked them covered at 300 degrees for a couple hours. I saved the broth and rendered fat from the pan as well. then you wrap them and cool them to get the shape set and keep some of the fat in.
To cook the roulade, i sliced pin wheels and then seared them in the cast iron pan. You can clearly see there is fat still on the pin wheels even though a ton had rendered out.
the results of this? a delicious, rich taste. the fat tasted great on its own, like a nice gristle on a fatty steak, though obviously in the venison flavour realm. there was no "coating of the mouth" or waxy texture to be had. It is even mother-in-law approved, no complaints from four people. I have done the same recipe with lamb, and this one is a clear winner.