So where to begin...
The story:
At school myself and some friends had always wanted to cook a whole deer, I can't remember why the idea came from and why it was a deer specifically, but it never happened. We Were too young, didn't know how to get a deer, how to get a spit or even how to cook it.
Give it another 10 or so years though and I am suddenly a butcher at a game specialist with access to the freshest deer of all sizes. My other friend who's dream it also was is now a tree surgeon with access to huge amount of off cuts of wood, and due to my degree at university I have a lot of friends who are engineers.
We each took a role; myself choosing/butchering the deer and deciding on the flavours and how to cook it, Matthew filled a one tonne builder's bag with home made charcoal, and Gav fashioned an Asado Spit and barrel for holding the charcoal. I got engaged last June and the wedding was this October so my Hen Do (or Deer Do as we named it) became the perfect excuse to make this dream come true, and gave us a large enough group of people that could help us eat a whole deer.
How we cooked it:
The deer was hung for at least a week after being skinned.
We needed the deer to be as flat as possible so I fleeced the meat off of the flanks/ribs almost all the way back to the loins so I could saw off the ribs and then stitch the flanks back together to hold the stuffing inside.
The day before cooking it I made a rub which I put all over the deer. It was made up of juniper berries, cloves, mustard seeds, cinnamon, nutmeg, onion powder, garlic, rosemary, thyme, salt, pepper and sugar and then binded together with a bit of olive oil and redcurrant jelly. (I also made a baste out of the same rub by adding red wine to it).
I stuffed the deer with apple quarters, fresh rosemary and thyme and garlic cloves and then stitched the flanks back together with twine and a trussing needle.
I laid down squares of pork skin which I stitched together and then draped it over the deer covering as much of the meat as I could ( I was a bit low on skin so sacrificed the fore shanks) and then tied it in butchers knots to secure it in place.
The deer was attached to the cross using garden twine and was positioned with the stomach side of the deer against the cross, therefore taking most of the heat, and the shoulders at the bottom, being closest to the heat.
The day of cooking we lit the charcoal and let them turn white before the deer was moved closer. The distance the deer was from the coals was decided by where we could hold our hand for 8-10 seconds in the heat. We had a meat thermometer and our desired internal temperature was 50-54 degrees C.
As the skin shrunk the baste was put on to drip behind the skin.
When the temperature was almost where we wanted it to be we lay the deer straight on to the barrel and cut the skin off. This was when the whole deer was properly basted and the meat was browned.
Pros:
The deer stayed far more moist than we had expected, and the fillets and haunches actually cooked at a similar rate.
Although the shanks weren't wrapped in pork skin and they therefore went chewy/leathery, they still tasted nice because of the rub and baste and ended up taking on a jerky sort of texture which was quite nice for the "chefs" to nibble on throughout the process.
The pork skin may have increased the cooking time but it really did protect the meat. It would have been much more dry and the extremities of the meat could have been ruined and inedible without it.
Cons/changes to make:
Start cooking it earlier - lighting the charcoal around 1pm and putting the deer on at 2pm meant we didn't eat till about 10pm. Timings were always going to be our issue though.
We should have turned the deer more than twice. We wanted the direct heat to be on the stomach of the deer as it was the part we weren't going to eat so didn't mind if it burnt/dried out, but we should have turned it a few times earlier in the cooking process to seal the meat a bit better and maybe help the internal temperature increase a little quicker.
Put salt on the pork skin because it actually made crackling and was edible - worth putting a bit of effort in to it too.
We intended to use garden wire to hold the deer on to the spit but the 3 shops we went to didn't have any. We used garden twine which was fine until there were any flames or we had to move the deer closer to the heat. This was just lack of preparation on our part.
We need to decrease the angle of the spit so the haunches of the deer are slightly closer to the heat and will cook a little faster - We put them on a grill over the coals for another 5 minutes while I prepared the fillets and shoulders for eating. This may have not been an issue had we turned the deer more regularly throughout cooking though as they really only needed minutes more on the heat.
Overall it was a success. It tasted great and we all enjoyed the process. There is something so simple and satisfying cooking a whole chunk of meat with fire, and just taking the time to be outside (regardless of the fact it was pouring with rain and we had to make a makeshift tarp shelter.
We plan on cooking a whole animal again soon, probably a suckling pig this time but another thing we have always wanted to do is dig a hole and cook something underground....so watch this space.
Cheers
Sandy
Venison Asado
Here at UK BBQ Mag we love a good story, somebody giving a new technique a go, a bbq for a special occasion. So when we saw the pics of Butcher Hannah Batchelor's Venison Asado cook "Deer Do" we wanted to find out more.... So here is the story....
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