How to Fry Deer Meat

An often overlooked method of cooking deer meat is frying.

Frying deer meat is simple and can be accomplished in 3 easy steps:

1. Marinade the venison
2. Cook the venison
3. Fry the meat

The Ingredients

Fried venison has two sets of ingredients on top of the venison itself.

The first is the marinade, and the second is the coating.

Fried Venison Marinade

The marinade is what gives the venison much of the flavor. Without this, the only flavor would come from the coating.

There are a couple of options for marinating venison before frying, but I find the best one to be a milk-based marinade.

Soaking venison in milk not only adds flavor to the dish but also helps to tenderize the meat and leech the blood, both of which make fried venison much better.

One of the more challenging tasks I had with venison was getting the coating to bond to the meat.

The issue was that the venison was releasing too much juice during the cooking process. Marinading in milk helped solve this problem.

While you can use any cut of meat for fried venison I like to use tender cuts such as the backstrap or tenderloin.

If you are using tougher cuts you should use buttermilk in your marinade, as it has more acidity than regular milk, thus acting as a tenderizer.

Finally, a good marinade should have plenty of flavor.

Using a milk base marinade on thin cuts makes for an astounding fried venison dish. The milk acts as a great carrier of flavors.

I use a simple marinade with only 3 ingredients:

• Buttermilk
• Sweet paprika
• Garlic powder

Venison Butchering Diagram

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Fried Venison Coating

In my opinion, fried venison is nothing without a coating. A good coating not only adds flavor to the dish but also adds a lot of texture.

While the marinade may be simple, much of the flavor is made up in the coating. This recipe uses a moderate amount of ingredients, all of which are standard pantry staples:

• All-purpose flour
• Kosher salt
• Brown sugar
• Whole black pepper
• Whole white pepper
• Garlic powder
• Onion powder
• Hungarian or Spanish paprika
• Cayenne powder

On top of all of these ingredients, you will need canola oil for frying. Other oils can work so long as they can stand moderate temperatures.

Steps For Frying Venison

The first step for frying venison is making the marinade. This step is simple:

• Mix all of the ingredients in a bowl
• Place the venison in the marinade
• Place in the refrigerator for 6-12 hours

I prefer to vacuum pack the venison and marinade. As I mentioned earlier, milk is a great carrier of flavor and can easily pick up any other flavors that are in your fridge.

Vacuum packing also intensifies the marinating process by pushing out any air. If you do a vacuum pack you could also get away with a short marinade of around 4 hours.

The next step is to make the coating for the fried venison:

• Add the flour to a large container, add all of the other ingredients to a mortar, and grind to a powder
• Add the spices to the container with the flour and mix
• Pour the venison and milk into a bowl
• Take the venison one piece at a time, shake off excess buttermilk, and dredge in the flour mixture. Rest on a wire rack

Finally, all that is left to do is cook the deer meat:

• Fill a heavy-bottomed pot with the canola oil and heat to 350°F
• Carefully drop in 3-4 pieces of venison, one at a time. Cook for 5-6 minutes. Remove the fried venison and rest on a wire rack or kitchen paper
• If you want the chicken fried deer meat a little spicier you can sprinkle some chili flakes