Organ Meats

Pound for pound there’s more nutrition in organs than muscle

“What’s that mom?”

“Something yummy”

“Yeah, but what is it?”

“Chicken livers.”

“Chicken livers? Have I had those before?”

“I don’t remember sweetie boy, but I want you to try one when they’re ready.”

“Okay mom.”

This is how I think the first conversation I had about eating organ meats went with my mom. I must have been about 7 or 8. My first memories of my mother’s fried chicken livers was a mixed bag. The texture was very pleasant. The taste, not as much. I remember being confused about what I was tasting. The flavor definitely rich, salty, and fatty, but there was something new that, still to this day, is kind of hard to explain.

Liver simply tastes “livery”.

Growing up we ate organ meats sparingly, maybe a handful of times a year. Chitterlings was the most consistent organ fare in my house, a food I’ve never been able to appreciate much to my parents’ good natured disappointment.

I used to be embarrassed to have friends stop by over during winter break when my folks were cooking chitterlings. There’s only so much you can do to mask the fecal smell of boiling small intestines. My oldest friend in the world, Philip H., was the only one who could come over and understand what was going on.

Boiled intestines, not my favorite, but grilled intestines, I’m in. The first intestines outside of sausage casing I ever liked I had in San Diego when another friend, Insu, took me to a Korean BBQ restaurant.

Chitterlings are not for me, but the connection that this food has to my heritage and the traditions of Black cuisine kept the door open for me to come back to the practice of eating organ meats later in life.

In grad school I became very interested in knowing where my food comes from and how it is acquired and prepared. I started to learn how to cook as a way to be more self-sufficient and to be more marketable as a boyfriend/husband. This interest along with my Aquarian nature of going against convention, led me to explore the practice of eating organ meats. 

The practice checked all the boxes: 1) An opportunity to be unique amongst my peers; 2) Build skills in the kitchen; 3) Save money on foods; 4) Maximize my nutrition. This last point is something I had observed for years in other animals, but never really understood the significance of. Predators often eat the livers of their prey first — and sometimes that’s the only thing they eat — because liver is so nutrient dense. 

But I still had a problem. I was raised in a culture that socialized me to shun organ meats. My parents’ occasional consumption of organ meats, one I never liked, was not enough. I still had a mental block against eating the wobbly bits.

Today, my organ meat consumption very much resembles the frequency I ate them as a child. There was a period about 7 or 8 years ago that I tried to eat organ meats once a week. I found that I really liked the taste of bison liver, and found a chicken liver mousse recipe that is incredibly delicious. I did great eating organ meats on a regular basis when I was buying a braunschweiger sausage from U.S. Wellness Meats, but that got expensive and I had talked myself into learning how to make it myself. That has yet to happen.

If consuming bones and bone marrow counts as eating organs then I’m much more consistent with my organ meat consumption. The “bone broth” you buy in the store pales in comparison to the broth you can make at home. Broth made from bones of an animal and bone marrow from large mammals are packed with nutrients that you simply cannot get from consuming muscle tissue.

I lament every time I end up cooking a meal that calls for broth and I’ve forgotten to take out of the freezer the container of homemade chicken, venison, or pork broth. Not planning ahead means I have to buy the packaged stuff from the store, which is like wanting to have homemade Mac ‘n cheese and having to settle for box Mac ‘n cheese.

Despite my somewhat regular bone broth consumption, I still feel that I’m not eating enough organ meats. I’ve only ever eaten venison liver a handful of times, having had two pretty epic deer liver fails since moving to Michigan.

My first year here, my good friend Brandon harvested a health 3+year old buck and saved the liver for me. All 6 pounds of it! I had never seen a liver so big, and when I pulled it out of the bag, I was overwhelmed with a pungent and familiar smell…a high school boys locker room.

I try to avoid eating male mammals during their breeding seasons because they simply smell like hot balls. Their hormones are raging and their flesh is an assault on the senses.

At each stage of turning this deer’s liver into a paté, I tried to convince myself that the smell I was smelling would lessen as I cooked. And it worked…somewhat.

After soaking the liver in milk for a day, I sniffed and decided one more day might help.

After cooking the liver with butter and shallots, I sniffed and decided that twice the butter and shallot might help.

After adding the brandy, I sniffed and decided that triple the brandy might help.

And so on with the heavy cream, chives, and the time I allocated the finished paté to rest in the fridge. 

By the end, the smell was much less hot balls after summer football practice and more like hot balls on after apple picking.

The taste was really hard to take…

“The profile is…feet” - my friend Emily’s take

“Are you sure this is deer liver and not some alcoholic’s liver” - my friend Misha’s take

So I was excited when this year I harvested two young bucks with livers that had no hint of that testosterone smell. But when I got the livers home and began cleaning them, I turned the older buck’s liver over and noticed this…

A quick text with my father-in-law, who confirmed my suspicion of an infected liver, and my paté plans were more than halved. After inspecting the younger buck’s liver — one of the best I had ever seen — I think realized that my deer liver paté dreams were complete trashed.

When I field dressed the deer, I put both livers in the same bag. So the infected liver and the healthy liver commingled for more than 36 hours before I began to process them. Better not risk it.

Dammit!

The first deer liver paté I made was my best by a mile. I boiled ribs to get the intercostal muscle meat and puréed that with the sautéed liver from a young doe and the result was exquisite. I was so excited to share the dish with my mentor/colleague who had taken me on my first deer hunt and who had harvested this deer that I forgot to put the paté back in the fridge as I rushed to get to campus to teach that morning.

I realized my mistake about 10min into my lecture, but by then it was too late. At the time we had three cats in the house and one of them, Pumpkin Billy, was a connoisseur of all kinds of human foods. All I could do was hope he left the paté alone until I got home that afternoon.

“Did I put the top back on? I think so.”

Turns out, I didn’t, but it probably wouldn’t have matter anyway. I returned home to find the container spotless, as if I had run it through the dishwasher. I found Pumpkin Billy in a corner, lying on his back with a blissful expression on his face, barely able to lift his head. He didn’t eat a thing for 3 days and his coat was never so glossy. 

Organs meats are a critical omission to mainstream USian diets that I’m tentatively fighting to overcome. And like so many aspects of becoming more directly responsible for the food we eat, an attention to eating organs forces us to pay more attention to the quality of what we consume. If you harvest animals with the intent to consume their organs then you pay special attention to the condition of those bits, which in turn, tell you things about the health of the relative you hope to bring into your body.

You think twice about eating the flesh of the deer whose liver or heart has significant discoloration, but you only know that about the deer if you pay attention to their organs. Most hunters leave the organs in the field and just take the muscle meats. That’s important information we deprive ourselves of, potentially to our detriment.

I study condors in my day job. And a lot of what’s harming these critically endangered raptors are the parts of an animal that humans leave behind. Lead bullets fragment once they hit their target, and the flesh that’s left behind has a higher proportion of lead inside, so condors filling the niche of nature’s large animal garbage disposals end up ingesting lead and, if they ingest enough, dying.

If you hunt, consider using nonleaded ammunition for your own health, and the health of our scavenging relatives.

So much of what draws me to wild foods is the wholistic nature of being responsible to the relatives we eat. In order to meet these responsibilities, we have to become more knowledgeable about all aspects of the lives we take. In the grocery store our concerns about the flesh we buy don’t go beyond checking the expiration date. We may choose to buy the organic free range chicken, or the grass fed beef, but we don’t have direct knowledge of how those relatives lived, how they died, and how their bodies were cared for after they died

Eating organ meats can be intimidating, especially if you didn’t grow up eating them consistently. But the benefits of taking the time to procure and prepare these nutrient dense portions of a relative have benefits that bring us, hopefully, into better relations with our ecological community.

Now, where in my freezer did I bury that package of turkey livers?

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New Video Content

My series, The Do Everything Kitchen, is back with another episode on the flat things and bowls you’ll need to become a better home cook. If you’ve ever wondered what kind of cutting board you need, size of sheet pan is best, or if you should buy a set of glass and metal bowls, then this episode is for you!

I did some traveling this past weekend, which means more time in the Delta Sky Club. This time, my flight was delayed, so I had an extra couple of hours to work while getting food and drink for no extra cost. I cannot recommend airport lounges enough.

Wild Food Update

Deer Shanks!

My favorite part of a deer is the shank; equivalent to the forearms and lower legs on a human. There’s so much delicious meat here, but the trick is to cook it on low heat for a long period of time. The meat gets so tender and thanks to all the connective tissue in these muscle groups that melts during long cooking, the texture of the dish is rich, silky, and oh so juicy.

I borrowed the recipe from Hank Shaw, who runs an outstanding website of wild food recipes that are a go-to for me. I’ve got 2 more packages of shanks left and I’ll absolutely do this one again soon.

Recommendation

Meat grinder attachment for your kitchen aid.

Later this spring I’m going to post a video on Whole Cuts of Meat and why you might want to consider buying whole and processing at home.

One big way you can make a difference in the quality of the meat you consume is to grind your own meat. By doing this you can control the type and percentage of fat you put into your ground meat and it usually ends up being cheaper.

My recommendation is the Hightower Metal Meat Grinder. I love this haws of a kitchen tool. It’s a bit pricey, but it’s a tank, which means it will last generations — buy once, cry once. The density of this unit is greater than the shinier stainless steel versions, which means that it holds its temperature longer. And cold temperatures are key for making high quality ground meat and sausages. No one wants a mealy sausage.

So, if you have a kitchen aid mixer and you’re ready to step up your food prep then this is the unit you want.

Business Update

The name of the game is patience. I’ve fallen off track on my weekly postings this year and in these past two weeks I’ve been doing some recalibrating. I realized that I was way over my skis and was trying to do too much too quickly, which resulted in me doing far less than I was capable of doing in a week.

This shit is hard enough on its own, let alone with a faculty job and kids, so I reorganized my business schedule and lowered my expectations to reasonable.

One surprising step was deleting my YouTube Studio app from my phone. I spend a lot of time checking the number of views of my videos and generating anxiety over not meeting unrealistic expectations for how popular my videos are or are not. I decided moving forward that I want to be surprised by how my videos perform and put my energy towards being more consistent in posting.

So, I’m giving myself grace and being patient, while committing to a schedule that keeps me on track for enjoying the journey of building this thing into something into something sustainable.

Thanks for reading this week’s newsletter!

-Jonathan