Wild Foods

Wild turkey meat can be tough, especially the drumsticks. It’s why many hunters don’t even bother to keep their legs, which is a damn shame because they’re delicious. The best way to cook the drumstick also happens to be the easiest—pressure cook until the meat falls apart! If you’ve ever made soup...

Nothing beats the excitement of finding a huge, bright orange flush of chicken of the woods mushroom (Laetiporus) growing on a stump or log in the forest. For this recipe, you’ll want to use only the freshest of specimens—no pale, dry mushrooms here. If you cut the mushroom off of where it’s growing...

A bucket of stripped salmon carcasses, leaning against the stern of the boat, obstructed my daily deck-scrubbing duties. As my skipper counted the post-trip tip money, he gave the bucket a casual nod and said, "Feel free to take those collars home for dinner if you want." "Uh... what's a collar?" I...

This is the kind of special dish you only get to make once or twice a year since it requires so many hearts to make, and each bird you bring down only has one. It’s a good idea to bug your friends, family, and hunting buddies for their hearts and organs if they’re not going to use them—that way, you...

Confit is a classic French preparation of cooking meat in its own fat to create a succulent fall-apart dish. It's often used with duck legs and duck fat, but bear meat and grease also work exceptionally well. To learn more about the technique, check out this article. These crispy potato baskets...

I recently teamed up with fourth-generation chef, Linda Huang of Hummingbird Kitchen to learn some basics of Chinese cooking. She taught me how to make traditional stir fry using mule deer along with this venison dumpling recipe. Making dumplings might seem daunting, but they come together pretty...

Ryan Callaghan hits the kitchen with Linda Huang.

For some hunters, adding domestic fat to venison is taboo. For others, it’s a necessity. One thing is for sure (and no more evident than here at MeatEater): at-home butchers have a wide range of preferences regarding fat content and there are no set rules. Here are some of our thoughts on adding fat...

Some of the most common inquiries we get at MeatEater involve aging wild game meat. Recently we tackled whether or not the process is worth it. It is, but we didn’t discuss how to do it. The majority of hunters don’t have access to a temperature and humidity-controlled walk-in-cooler, which is the...

The MeatEater Crew takes over four of the nation’s biggest college football tailgating parties.

The pale-eyed pompano staring at you through the curved glass seafood counter gives a warning to the wise buyer. And god only knows what the inside of Brad Pitt's creel smelled like at the end of A River Runs Through It. The difference between a fishy-smelling fillet and a restaurant-quality dish is...

MeatEater founder Steven Rinella once said: “I’d be willing to bet that more pounds of ground venison go into making chili than any other single wild game recipe.” And we’re not willing to bet against him. Chili is the OG one-pot meal. It doesn’t take too much effort to pull together, it’s...