Question i want to slow cook a deer ham and i would like to know how to soak it
Answer Clifford:
If you mean brining it, any beef brine recipe will work. If you are referring to soaking it to remove any off or gamey flavor that might not be necessary.
We soak meat for two reasons, one to impart more moisture in the case of turkey or ham brining. (do a search and you'll find lots of recipes). This just adds more moisture or flavor if the brine is heavily seasoned. This starts to run into the realm of marinades. Marinades are pure flavoring. THEY DO NOT TENDERIZE. Tenderizing is nearly impossible except by mechanical means. A meat hammer or cutting like in swiss steak is the best form of tenderizing. The powders or marinades passed off as tenderizers are a crock.
These powders contain enzymes that do not even begin to work until you reach cooking temperatures, so putting it on and letting it sit does nothing. The best you could hope for is maybe tenderizing the outer 1/8 of an inch. Papain an enzyme found in fresh pineapple only (I just learned this, canned pineapple has been heated and pastuerized so the enzyme has been broken down). Fresh pineapple will begin to break down meat but only the outer part. So don't count on marinades to do much but add flavor.
Soaking meat to lessen gamey flavor will work. It works by fostering a membrane reaction, where nature trys to equalize two unequal concentrations. All you do is dilute the flavor you want to get rid of. If you soak the meat in a concentrated flavored brine or juice, or strong beer, nature will pull some moisture out of the meat along with some of the off flavor, while the meat pulls in some of the solution all in an attempt to make the liquid in the meat and the surrounding liquid equal. It is that simple and so has obvious limitations.
Another method is to use a turkey injector kit to inject a mixture of spices and oil, like olive oil into the ham to add both moisture and flavor to dilute and cover the off flavor.
About the flavor. Off flavors usually come from a couple of sources. By far the most common is the hunter himself. It can be induced by the way you kill it. If you make a habit of chasing or shooting at spooked running deer, you meat will always taste funky. It is called Dark Cutting Meat and it has to do with the muscle chemistry of the deer before and after it dies. It has nothing to do with adrenaline but actually lactic acid, or lack of. Metabolism after the animal is dead depletes the lactic acid and lowers pH in the meat allowing bacteria to grow.
How you dress and treat it also has an impact. Gut shoot the animal and fail to cut out the meat tainted with stomach juices or feces and you'll have a taste treat to be remembered. Chill out the meat ASAP even if it is with snow. Pack the stomach and chest with clean snow to chill it down ASAP.
Trim all the fat you can off of the meat. Venison fat goes rancid quick even in the freezer. Not only will you taste it in the venison, but in a couple of months other stuff in the freezer will start to smell and taste like it too. Plastic is not impermiable. Under a microscope it looks like chain link. Lots of molecules, can pass through the plastic mesh and will co mingle to make that funky everything tastes the same funk that food stored for a long time in teh freezer eventually gets.
