Quote from: JimboToronto on September 22, 2023, 10:44:30 PM

Quote from: Hueristic on September 22, 2023, 08:00:58 PM

Quote from: philipma1957 on September 22, 2023, 03:02:21 PM

In New Jersey I can get it back to my house in under an hour so it reduces gamey taste.

Gamey taste is from adrenaline.

The way to not get that taste is a quick kill, the longer an animal suffers and fights the more adrenaline it extrudes into the meat.

For years I got my moose meat from a friend who is an aboriginal Canadian (here we call them First Nations) so he didn't have to worry about any silly seasons or hunting licenses. He is also an expert sniper.

To get that nice clean kill you're talking about he rappelled with a limbing saw down a cliff to remove a small tree that was impeding the view from his blind to a place where moose came to drink around dusk. He'd set up his tripod and rifle and scope and wait for a moose to come to drink. He invariably harvested the moose with a single shot through the brain. The animal would drop on the spot with its head in the water to wash away the blood while he packed up his equipment and drove his quad runner (ATV) down to the moose.

He would immediately winch the carcass up to bleed it and gut it and then quarter it with his chainsaw. It would take him 4 trips with the quad to haul the moose quarters to his truck on the highway. It would still be warm when he got it into the meat locker at the reserve where it would hang for a week or so. Then it was professionally butchered, freezer wrapped, labeled and deep frozen.

It was never gamy tasting. In fact because moose meat is so lean, I usually barded it with beef fat and most people couldn't tell it wasn't beef. One time we had a semi-vegetarian guest for dinner and my GF warned me she might not even eat any meat. She asked me what was for dinner and I said "pot roast". I was surprised when she asked for not only a second helping but also a third. She said it was the best beef she'd ever had. When I said it wasn't beef she almost fainted until I told her it was natural hormone-free moose meat humanely harvested. She said it was the best meat of any kind she'd ever tasted.

It's all in the kill.

I remember I watched a documentary many years ago, which showed Chinese "dog farmers" who produced dog meat for human consumption, to be sold in the black market (I believe dog meat is illegal in China). The interesting part was that these farmers followed a specific practice: the dogs were practically tortured to death by being slaughtered in a slow, extremely painful way (they were first brutally beaten, and then slowly slaughtered/skinned alive), and all this was done right in front of the other caged dogs, so that the caged dogs could see the process. The farmers said that the fear and stress induced in the dogs made their meat much tastier, and could achieve a higher price in the market. There was some footage of the process, shown in the documentary, that still haunts me to this day...