We have a friend that gives us moose ground, steak, stew meat etc. My problem is with the roasts we got this year. They are so tough I think the dog would have trouble chewing it. I injected marinade into it and cooked it in the slow cooker all day! It was still tough. It seems to have been cut against the grain would that make that big of a problem? The flavor is ok, it's just tough thanks for your input

-- cynthiahemenway (chemenway@hotmail.com), June 18, 2000

Answers

If you've been stewing it all day and it's still tough I wouldn't imagine there is a whole lot more you can do. If you could grind it and make sausage, smoked moose sausage (mixed 1/2 and 1/2 with ground pork) is wonderful.

-- Tracy (trimmer@westzone.com), June 18, 2000.

Place that roast in a pressure cooker and get after it. I've taken old bucks that I couldn't eat, and I don't mind 'tough' meat. I don't have a separate freezer, so I started canning meat about a decade ago. I found you could place the toughest ol pieces of meat (deer, elk, hog, you name it) that would ruin a meat grinder, in a fruit jar, seal it, and pressure cook for 90 minutes for pints, 120 for quarts, and it'd come out tender as pie. I've had moose and bear that was put in pressure cookers, and it tendered up quite nicely.

Cutting against (or across the grain ((right angles to grain))) the grain is how you cut meat. If you cut it with the grain, you'll get very long fibers. Very chewy that way. I cut my jerky that way.

-- phil briggs (phillipbriggs@thenett.com), June 18, 2000.

In my experience, moose is quite often tough. Phil is right, though, the pressure canner will tenderize it quite nicely! My mother used to can most of our meat, and it made the best meat gravy! The alternative is to grind it and either use it as hamburger or as sausage -- when we made caribou sausage, we used one pound of bacon to two pounds of lean meat. Made great sausage!

-- Kathleen Sanderson (stonycft@worldpath.net), June 19, 2000.

This is going to sound a little strange, but it works! An AK native friend of mine told me to cut it up into 2 inch chunks and then marinate it in Pepsi, it really tenderizes it and it also gets rid of the gamey taste you can get with wild game. I didnt believe him until I tried it one day with a large steak that I cut from the thigh muscle (at least I think it was a thigh, he gave me a huge chunk of meat with a bone going through it). The first steak I tried from the meat turned out like shoe leather, the second try at it with the Pepsi treatment was nice and tender!

The pepsi also does a really good job of removing the funky taste wild rabbits get by the middle of winter from eating pine needles.

I have no idea why it works, could be the acid in the pepsi, Ive tried using diet coke too, but it didnt work nearly as well.

-- Dave (AK) (daveh@ecosse.net), June 21, 2000.

Thanks for all the ideas, I wanted to make sure i didn't let it go to waste if there was some way I could try and salvage it, because it really it great meat the ground moose is like ground round and there is so little fat it's great! Thanks again

-- cynthia (chemenway@hotmail.com), June 23, 2000.