Friday, September 9, 2011

Venison Pepperoni


 In case you couldn't tell in previous posts, we eat a lot of homemade pizza here. I've looked for "less processed" pepperoni, but the best I've managed to find is one without corn syrup, but they pretty much either have some form of nitrates, or something else that doesn't belong in food or can only be purchased at a specialty store, and there really aren't any of those out here in the middle of nowhere. I had some ground venison left from a deer my in-laws had butchered for us several months ago, so I figured I'd do some research and see if I could make pepperoni with that.

This is the recipe I decided to use. I made very few changes, although I will make a few more next time. Obviously I used venison and not beef. I also used sucanat instead of sugar, and opted for using kosher salt instead of curing salt (to avoid the nitrates). Because I didn't use curing salt, I didn't end up with pink pepperoni (but then again, venison is rarely pink, anyway, once exposed to the air), but it still came up really good!

So that you can learn from the benefit of my experience, let me point something out. The recipe calls for liquid smoke. If you aren't used to reading labels, do it! I'm used to doing so because of my son's issues with food dyes, but I was especially glad for it this time. The first bottle of "liquid smoke" I picked up with nothing but high-fructose corn syrup, garlic powder, onion powder, and some other spices! If I wanted that, I could just go home and throw in some of those spices myself and skip the HFCS! So I kept looking, and finally came across a second bottle. The brand is Colgin, and the ingredients are water, natural hickory smoke flavor, vinegar, molasses, caramel color and salt. Those are ingredients I can live with (although I could do without the color, but c'est la vie.) The other change I would make in the recipe is to use less of this. The pepperoni is good, but especially since you're basically drying it instead of cooking it, with the liquid smoke it came out tasting very similar to jerky. So it was kind of a pepperoni-jerky mix. Still yummy, but not exactly what I was going for.

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