Holiday Moose

Yes moose, not mousse.  No typo.  No chocolate.  No cream.  Here in the great white north, game meat is a part of the fabric of life.  Interestingly however, it is illegal to purchase game meat here in Saskatchewan though it is legal in neighboring Alberta.  A couple of years ago, we wanted to establish a new Christmas traditional feast and the suggestion that bubbled to the top was venison.  Now you can’t just go down to the local butcher and order some up, so one needs to be more creative.  The last time my fiancé went to Calgary, he purchased a 6 pound venison sirloin, frozen solid for this year’s dinner.  I happened to mention this to my father-in-law and let the games begin!

He, of course, mentioned it to a friend of his who immediately delivered a fresh venison roast….quickly followed by some venison for sausage making (yes, I had mentioned that I planned to make sausage from some of it).  He talked to a friend of his who offered up elk sausage that he had made, along with several pounds of ground moose and a 3 pound moose loin roast!  Apparently hunter’s wives tire of game meat and after all, there is a hell of a lot of meat on a moose!  But now what to do with a moose roast?  I’d never eaten it, seen it or touched it much less cooked one!

The roast is very dark in color (I will skip adding a photo of the raw meat since it is decidedly unappetizing!) – almost purple and it was tied as you would tie a normal loin roast but beyond that I didn’t know what to do.  So I took to the internet, reading game hunter sites, cook sites and even some humorous posts about cooking moose wile chugging Jack Daniels.  I have found that when it comes to something you are really unsure about, look for commonalities in different posts. What I found to be most common was; trim the fat and silver to reduce the gaminess and cover with strips of bacon during roasting to maintain the moisture since the meat is extremely lean.  So I trimmed, retied, marinated, seared and roasted with surprisingly excellent results!

For a 3 pound roast, I marinated for 2 hours with about a cup of dry white wine, a couple of splashes of balsamic vinegar, olive oil, fresh thyme, rosemary and black pepper.  Then I seared it well on all sides, put it an a roaster, draped it with bacon slices, poured the marinade in and scattered onions and fresh cranberries around the roast and roasted at 350 degrees for about 1 1/2 hours until the internal temperature reached 145.  I then rested it while I deglazed the pan with about 1/2 cup of Madeira wine.  I strained the liquids and put them back into the pan with some beef demi-glace that I made this weekend, which thickened the gravy to a perfect consistency.  Discard bacon, slice and serve!

The roast was wonderful though It was surprisingly on the rare side of medium, even at 145 out of the oven (which will rise about 5 more degrees during resting).  It was tender with a mild game flavor that went well with the sauce.  The cranberry added a nice background tartness while the Madiera tempered the meaty flavor.  I highly recommend this dish if you come across some moose meat.  And if you live in an area where hunting is a way of life, all you need do is mention it and you will have a freezer full of game to experiment with!