Venison Recipes: The Best From the Experts

Here are the best ways to cook America’s favorite game meat from our favorite professional chefs, wild game foodies, and hunters

By Katie Hill | Published Aug 18, 2023 5:58 PM EDT

Venison recipes aren’t hard to find. But good venison recipes…now, that’s a different story. The internet is flooded with thousands of recipes for everything from meatloaf to carpaccio. You have to weed out all the “experts” who tell you to soak the meat in milk, or cook it to medium-well, or spend $75 at the fancy grocery store on spice blends and herbs you’ve never heard of. We waded through the nonsense for you and compiled some of the best venison recipes from some of the industry’s most reliable professional chefs and wild game foodies, as well as a handful of diehard hunters. This might be a good time to start defrosting the hunk of venison at the top of your freezer.

Hank Shaw’s Venison Greek Meatball Recipe Sean Sherman’s Venison Stew with Hominy Lance Lewis’ Tuscan Venison Neck/Shank with White Bean Ragu Maggie Hudlow’s Venison Carne Asada Michael Pendley’s Venison Tenderloin Milanese Wade Truong’s Sous Vide Herb-Crusted Venison Chops Jenny Nguyen-Wheatley’s Vietnamese Shaking Venison Beka Garris’ French Onion Venison Steaks Derek Horner’s Shredded Venison Blade Roast Katie Hill’s Harissa Lime Marinade Cosmo Genova’s Venison Ragout Natalie Krebs’ Perfect Venison Burgers More Venison Recipes We Love Venison Recipe FAQs

These folks are trained experts. They’ve either been through culinary school or they’ve worked extensively in restaurants. But when given the choice, they’d take a hunter-harvested venison tenderloin over a marbled ribeye any day of the week, especially if it’s one they tagged themselves.

This recipe comes from James Beard award-winning wild game chef, multi-cookbook author, food writer, and avid hunter-angler-forager Hank Shaw. Shaw’s Greek meatball recipe calls for bulgur wheat instead of breadcrumbs, lots of garlic and fresh herbs, and tomato sauce with a “Hellenic touch.” These twists make these meatballs a little different from a more standard venison meatball recipe. Shaw’s Greek meatballs originally appeared in his blog, Hunt Gather Cook.

A post shared by Owamni – by The Sioux Chef (@owamni)

Sean Sherman is an Oglala Lakota chef, known more widely as “The Sioux Chef,” who focuses on amplifying and revitalizing Indigenous foods and culinary traditions. Sherman’s Minneapolis restaurant, Owamni, won a James Beard Award for Best New Restaurant in 2022. (The above Instagram post is of a bison stew with hominy from the famed restaurant.) Sherman also won a James Beard award for Best American Cookbook in 2018 for The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen, where this recipe for venison stew with hominy originally appeared.

From The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen by Sean Sherman with Beth Dooley. Published by the University of Minnesota Press, 2017.Copyright 2017 Ghost Dancer, LLC. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

Private chef, caterer, and culinary instructor Lance Lewis is the founder of Tagged Out Kitchen, a wild game culinary class program that teaches participants everything from shot placement to best sausage-making practices. Lewis also offers field-to-table dinners and private instruction through TOK. He has a passion for using under-utilized cuts in high-quality recipes, as he does here with a neck and shank meat recipe.

These folks have all the enthusiasm and creativity necessary to stand out among run-of-the-mill wild game cooks. They publish recipes on their own websites and in other outlets, and maybe they’ve written a cookbook or two. They’re the middle sliver of the Venn diagram between culinary professionals and normal hunters who like to cook.

Between her culinary school experience, her stints working in restaurants around Wyoming and Montana, and now her job at MeatEater, Maggie Hudlow blurs the line between professional and foodie. She shows it with her latest for MeatEater, this venison carne asada recipe, which is simple enough to whip up in an afternoon but delicious enough to serve to your pickiest taco fans.

Marinade:

Michael Pendley is the man behind Realtree’s Timber 2 Table blog, where he publishes countless venison recipes just like this one for venison tenderloin Milanese. A staple in most restaurants, the Milanese preparation involves pounding cutlets, tenderloins, or other tender cuts (usually of chicken, pork, or veal) with a meat mallet before dredging and frying them. Here, Pendley uses venison tenderloins. He recommends serving the final product over risotto or pasta.

You can’t have a proper venison recipe round-up without a sous vide recipe. Here, Wade Truong of Elevated Wild uses his sous vide on an intermediate-level venison cut—the frenched rib rack—smothered in fried fresh herbs and breadcrumbs. The frenched rib chop is often called the “lollipop,” and involves cross-sections of the backstrap (exterior of the rib) still attached to the rib itself. If you don’t have a band saw, hand saw, or otherwise can’t extract a frenched rack of ribs, you can use this preparation on boneless backstraps and tenderloins as well, Truong says.

This fast-and-easy venison recipe is a childhood favorite for Jenny Nguyen-Wheatley of Food for Hunters. Wheatley is a hunting and wild foods writer and editor based in Omaha, Nebraska. She took a traditional Vietnamese beef recipe and swapped in venison, making the dish even leaner and more nutritious than it already was. If you can find farm-fresh veggies for the salad, all the better.

Marinade:

Salad:

This venison recipe from bowhunter and wild foods enthusiast Beka Garris, which she originally published in Traditional Bowhunter, has winter comfort food written all over it. Unlike your standard French onion soup, the best part of this recipe is what’s hiding underneath the cheese. This is a great preparation for any tender steak cut, and it makes for a quick, satisfying weeknight dinner—especially if you’re cooking for picky kids. (You should also check out Garris’ venison schnitzel recipe.)

These venison recipes come from OL editors and writers who have overcooked enough backstraps and dried out enough burgers to know what not to do with a full freezer. They might not have a Michelin star—heck, they might not even know how to pronounce “bourguignon”—but they can put a damn fine venison meal on the table with these recipes.

The shoulder blade can be a controversial topic in wild game cooking. Some prefer to trim all the meat off the blades and turn it into grind, flatiron steaks, or stew meat. Others, like OL’s engagement editor Derek Horner, prefer to leave the blade intact and cook the whole section down low and slow, resulting in a sumptuous pile of juicy, shredded venison.

Harissa is a spicy North African pepper paste made from chili peppers and red peppers, garlic, coriander, cumin, caraway seeds, and a bunch of other herbs and spices. It’s unbeatable in a venison marinade because, if you buy the right brand, its ingredients do most of the seasoning work for you. (It’s similar to curry paste in this way, but offers a different flavor profile.) Before you start thinking “no way my small-town grocery store carries that,” you can find it in most international food aisles (try Walmart’s grocery section) or online. Consider ordering a dried spice blend version rather than the oily paste that could get messy while shipping.

*Not all harissa pastes and blends are the same. Check the ingredients list on the jars in your grocery store. If your only options don’t include these spices, add them to taste. I use Trader Joe’s Harissa Paste and add extra garlic powder and cumin.

Cosmo Genova is a freelance writer and photographer who has contributed multiple recipes to OL. His restaurant background and passion for wild game cooking comes through in this recipe for venison ragu. There’s so much more to neck roasts than ground burger. It’s some of the finest-tasting meat on the animal if you give it time and moisture. Venison ragu is go-to recipe for neck roast, cooked down into a hearty base sauce of tomato, garlic, and wine. Served with your favorite pasta, you can make a restaurant-quality meal at home with your wild game and a few things from the pantry. Not only is it delicious, but it’s also a great dish to introduce people to wild game. You can also use any other roast for this recipe, but Genova prefers the neck. See the video for this recipe here.

One of the quickest, easiest, and tastiest ways to cook ground venison is to make burgers, and OL executive editor Natalie Krebs’ burger should be everyone’s go-to. Because this recipe uses a cast-iron skillet instead of a grill, you don’t need to wait for good BBQ weather, either. Krebs finds that venison burgers have a tendency to crumble and fall through the cracks on a grill, especially if you haven’t cooked with venison much. The more fat there is in your burger meat, the less likely this will be a problem.

I grind my own venison burger with pork fat using a ratio of about 90 percent venison to 10 percent pork fat, but any similar ratio works fine. If you don’t have any fat in your venison, don’t worry. We’ll cover that in a minute.

Pro tip: When it comes to venison burgers, I prefer to make smaller patties (4 to 6 ounces). They tend not to fall apart as easily, and you can get more caramelization if you smash the patty slightly with a spatula when it hits the skillet. Simply stack a couple on a big hamburger bun or make as many sliders as you want.

Read Next: Best Smokers

Here are some of the best recipes from the OL archives:

Yes and no. Unlike beef, venison has very little fat, which means it isn’t as marbled throughout as a beef steak might be. But certain cuts of venison—-the backstraps, tenderloins, and even some parts of the hind quarter—are just as tender as any cut of beef, as long as you don’t overcook the meat.

Yes. Many venison aficionados would argue that’s the only way to eat it. For the best flavor and texture, don’t let any muscle cuts get above medium. Remember—when you cut into that venison steak, it’s the first time that meat has ever been exposed to the atmosphere around it, which means it’s perfectly safe to eat.

The speed that you cook venison depends on the cut. If you have a piece of meat with lots of connective tissue, silver skin, and maybe even a bone or two still attached, a low-and-slow preparation is best. This gives all that extra tissue time to break down and enrich the meat. But with a pure muscle cut like a backstrap or tenderloin medallion, a fast and hot sear will ensure the interior meat stays medium rare but the exterior develops a satisfying crust.

Read Next: What Temperature Should You Cook Venison?

There are a million recipes for just about every cut of venison, although the best ways to cook venison are always under contention. It’s easy to fall into the rhythm of doing the same thing every time, but finding new and interesting venison recipes is a great way to reinvigorate your family’s love of wild game, whether it’s something as easy as a different marinade or a technique that requires a new culinary tool. Happy eating.

Katie Hill is a staff writer for Outdoor Life where she covers outdoor news, hunting, and conservation in the West. She was born and raised on the East Coast but relocated to Missoula, Montana, in 2019 to earn her master’s degree in environmental journalism. She still lives in Missoula.

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Venison Recipes: The Best From the Experts