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Tender and juicy, and it is a delight in every bite!
Every game hunter’s reward is savoring that mouth-watering meat. It’s not just the hunter’s appetite for the food; it’s his love for the game itself. But as with most interest and endeavor, competition seems to be a must. We simply are born with that competitive spirit that we take it anywhere– from the wild, to the grilling station, even to the dining table. And among and amid hunters and anglers is the question of whether one game meat is superior over another and which one is actually the best.
A group of enthusiasts, each an editor to www.outdoorlife.com, armed with knowledge, skill and gusto, not to mention aprons, embarked on a backyard grilling session.
They gathered backstraps from six different big game species: whitetail buck of Massachusetts, cow moose and mule deer brought from Montana, elk all the way from Utah, antelope, and bighorn sheep from Wyoming. How were they to identify and rank which specie will come off the big winner?
Editor Andrew Mckean, humbly took the prongs and racks to do the grilling while the other five editors patiently waited and blindfolded. Each meat is rubbed with salt and pepper– all that are needed to enhance the meat’s flavor. McKean, grilled each backstrap to perfection- medium-rare that is, and made sure they are segregated for identification until the time had come for the blind-taste test.
The big five were to rate each meat 1-6, with 1 being the highest score, so each would come up with a list of their own preferred ranking for the game meat. Interestingly for people of the same interest, each one came up with a different listing of the candidates except for the one that truly excelled in taste.
Yes, three among the five picked the Elk victoriously. One of them reasoned the elk backstrap was “an easy chew” and another commented that it was the “perfect meat” because it was “balanced, flavorful and tender”.
They all agreed that the moose was the “juiciest” and it was kind of surprising that the whitetail couldn’t quite rank higher. Gathering the average of all the lists, provides this ranking, from the best to the good: first the elk, second place goes to the moose, followed by the antelope, then the mule deer, the whitetail, and finally the sheep.
Note though how we say the rank is: from best to good, not bad. Elk may be the best tasting meat game of them all but none of them tasted bad as proven by the fact that at the end of the test, all grilled meat was consumed.
