Marinade for venison (or any red meat)

Geoff has asked for the best marinade for venison

Peter has responded with the following:

You can have two reasons for marinating.
1. up the taste sensation
2. tenderise the meat
- or both, I guess.

The taste one I’ll skip here. But for tenderising, nothing beats kiwifruit puré. The enzymes in the fruit will tenderise the meat without affecting its taste. There is even scientific research to prove it. And if you already knew that some fruits can tenderise meat, you should also note that kiwifruit will not “overdo it” compared to papaya, for example, which makes the meat squashy.

In the uni test (University of Copenhagen, Denmark), they bagged the meat and kiwi up for 48 hours. Overnight does it for me.

Jo suggests that for adding flavour to venison, you can’t go past this simple marinade

1. Mix ½ cup red wine, 1 tablespoon red wine or cider vinegar and 1 tablespoon cooking oil.
2. Cover the meat with the marinade and leave for at least 4 hours to allow the flavour to penetrate the meat.

Venison needs longer marinating time than beef steaks as the texture of venison is much finer than beef.

Another popular marinade for venison is to mix the juice of one orange with 1 tablespon crushed garlic and 1 tablespoon oil and spread this over the venison.

The main thing to remember with marinades is that there are three components:

Acid - usually vinegar or lemon juice

Oil – a good cooking oil that doesn’t have too much of its own flavour ( unless you want that particular flavour).  Olive and peanut oils are ones to avoid for this reason.

Seasonings - herbs, wine, spices

You can play around with different combinations to find ones that work for you and that you enjoy.

You will need approximately 1 cup of liquid to ½ kg meat.

Other useful tips include:

1. Use plastic or glass containers for marinating meat as  metal can react with the acids and spoil the flavour.
2. Use shallow containers to allow the marinade to cover as much of the surface of the meat as possible.
3. Turn the meat every 30 minutes to make sure all the meat is evenly marinated.