Venison Deconstruction

Braised Venison Shanks.

Lambic, salt baked celery root, matsutake mushrooms

The base of the plate is coated with a salt baked celery root puree. Let's break that down a bit more…

Celery root is also known as celeriac and is a different plant than the celery grown for it's stalks. In appearance, celeriac is roughly the size & shape of a grapefruit but instead of a smooth pink exterior, imagine a dense, knobby, pale yellow root. In taste, the celery flavor is present but more intense and earthy than our stalky green celery friends. Celeriac is delicious grated raw over salads or into the remoulade in the roast chicken sandwich on our lunch menu.

    Salt baking, how & why?

Salt baking is the process of coating food in a clay like mixture of salt & egg whites. This creates a kiln like insulation and ensures a gentle & even cook. Cooking your food in a salt crust traps the heat & moisture forcing them to infuse into the food rather than disappear into the universe. If you're in a rush, salt baking can cook things ⅓ more quickly than other methods & if you're on a diet, hot salt absorbs some of the fat in meat so that's nice. Considering the essential role that salt played in the preservation & preparation of food throughout history, it's not surprising that this method is still in use today. Some of the earliest recorded accounts of salt baking date back ancient Mongolian warriors packing their meat in salt & cooking it with the salt still intact. Thus forming a hard crust on the outside & a juicy tender cut of meat inside. Similar methods exist worldwide.  Indian clay pot cooking, French “ en papillote” style which involves using paper & oriental techniques that involve using leaves or barks to wrap the food in. All methods produce the same flavorful results. When we take our celery root out of the oven, we smash through the salt crust & the celeriac is pureed with olio salt & pepper.

  Braised Venison shanks

Venison- what is it? Delicious the end. Just kidding folks! The word venison comes from the latin venari which means to hunt to pursue. It used to refer to all game animals killed by hunting and in South Africa it refers to antelope but when talking about our venison refers to deer of any cut but generally not the organs. Venison don't breed particularly well in captivity and there are an abundance of them in New Zealand which is where we get ours from. Venison is a lean cut of meat and because the shank is so muscular it benefits from a slow & low cooking method. We braise ours.

    Braising is a cooking method that combines dry & moist heat. First the meat is seared to a nice brown color then stewed slowly in a closed container of aromatics & liquid or stock of the chef's choosing. Our chef has chosen to braise the venison shanks in lambic beer, dehydrated sour cherries, & stock with a sachet of thyme, bay leaf, coriander, caraway, & grains of paradise.

    Accompanying the meat are roasted turnips & poached chestnuts. Turnips are a root vegetable and member of the brassica family. Commonly grown in temperate climates for its bulbous root.

Additionally there are some poached chestnuts. The American Chestnut was the primary food source tree for wildlife - deer, bear, turkey, squirrel, and hogs. The chestnut forest could produce 2,000 pounds of mast or more per acre, more carbohydrate than an acre of corn! Chestnuts were the favored food in the fall for game, because the sweet tasting nuts were high in protein, carbohydrate and had no bitter tasting tannins like acorns.

DEER ARE EVOLUTIONARILY PROGRAMMED TO EAT CHESTNUTS!

Chestnuts are chosen by deer over all other nuts because of their taste and nutrition. They are high in carbohydrates (40%), contain up to 10% high quality protein. This provides the critical easily usable energy source over all other available foods during the Rut in the fall. Chestnuts have no bitter-tasting tannin - and a deer's taste buds are 1,000 times as sensitive as humans. Deer prefer White Oak acorns over Red Oaks because they contain less tannin, and this is why deer prefer chestnuts over all acorns.

DEER CHOSE CHESTNUTS 100:1 OVER ACORNS!

In tests performed by Dr. James Kroll "Dr. Deer" at the Whitetail Research Institute in Nacogdoches, TX, Kroll reports: "Even though the wild deer at this location had never seen a chestnut in many generations, they got on the chestnuts within ONLY AN HOUR after we put them out. The deer ate the chestnuts 100:1 over the acorns! Chestnuts are deer's preferred food."
     The sweet taste of chestnuts actually sweetens the meat of the animals that eat it. In Spain, hogs are raised on chestnuts because of the excellent flavored meat it produces. Venison from chestnut fed deer tastes like corn-fed venison, without the gamey taste of deer that feed on bitter-tasting acorns. What grows together goes together deer & chestnuts = yum

And garnishing our lovely venison dish are celery leaves & matsutake mushrooms.Matsutake ( means pine mushroom)  is the common name for a highly sought-after mycorrhizal mushroom that grows in Asia, Europe, and North America. It is prized in Japanese, Korean, and Chinese cuisine for its distinct spicy-aromatic odor.