LIVE! Cooking by Cut: The Wild Game Butchery and Cookbook We Wanted to Write
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If you’ve followed Harvesting Nature for any amount of time, you’ve probably heard us say that there’s a hell of a lot more to a deer than the backstrap. That idea is really where Cooking by Cut began.
For years, Adam Berkelmans and I have butchered animals, cooked wild game, developed recipes, taught classes, and occasionally learned the hard way that the name of the animal matters a whole lot less than understanding the piece of meat sitting in front of you.
A neck is a neck. A shank is a shank. A flat iron is a flat iron. No matter if it came from a whitetail, elk, moose, wild pig, bear, sheep, or goat, its anatomy tells you a tremendous amount about how that piece of meat wants to be cooked.
After nearly three years of research, writing, butchering, cooking, photography, and recipe testing, we are incredibly excited to finally introduce Cooking by Cut, our most ambitious book yet.
And it started with a simple question:
What if we stopped asking, “What animal do I have?” and started asking, “What cut do I have?”
The Idea Behind Cooking by Cut
The idea developed over years of traveling to hunting and butchery camps, teaching classes, and cooking for other people. Adam and I would regularly show up somewhere and be handed a random piece of meat, or sometimes meat from an animal we had never cooked before, and be asked to make something with it. Usually, that wasn’t much of a problem.
Eventually we started wondering why. The answer came back to our experience with butchery. We understood the individual cut, where it came from on the animal, what that muscle did, and how those characteristics translated into the kitchen.
A whitetail neck behaves much more like an elk or moose neck than it does a whitetail loin. Once you understand that, species becomes only one part of the equation.
Somewhere around a fire with beers after one of those camps, as many of our better ideas tend to begin, we realized there was a book in that concept. At the same time, teaching people how to butcher their own animals had exposed another problem.
Over and over, we’d hear:
“What’s this cut?”
We could answer, walk away, come back five minutes later, and hear it again. That is not a bad thing because they are learning. We needed to change the way we taught to make it more memorable.
We wanted a resource someone could read from cover to cover but could just as easily leave open on the butcher table and work through alongside an animal. A book that could help answer not only what is this?, but what do I do with it now?
That’s what Cooking by Cut became.
Not Just Another Wild Game Cookbook
There are a lot of wild game cookbooks out there. Many of them are excellent.
But we didn’t want to write another book divided into deer, elk, moose, and wild pig recipes. We also didn’t want to fill another cookbook with variations of the same recipes hunters can already find almost anywhere. We wanted to build something different. Cooking by Cut is organized around anatomy rather than species.
The book moves through an animal much like you would during the actual butchery process. You begin with the fundamentals and then work through the major sections of the animal, identifying and removing individual muscles as you go. And we go deeper than shoulders, loins, and hindquarters.
Inside those larger muscle groups are cuts many hunters never realize they’re carrying out of the woods: flat irons, mock tenders, Denver steaks, eye of round, and others that too often disappear into the grind pile.
A flat iron from a wild animal can be an incredible steak. The Denver steak is one of the places where we consistently find some of the best marbling in wild game. Even the ribs can be separated into many of the same cuts you recognize at a butcher counter. They’re already there. You just need to know how to find them.
From the Butcher Table to the Kitchen
Finding the cut is only half the equation.
For each major cut, we look at its anatomy, show you how to identify and remove it, and then examine the characteristics that matter when it’s time to cook.
We rate factors such as texture, intramuscular fat, connective tissue, and flavor potential. Then we explain which cooking techniques work best and, just as importantly, which ones to avoid.
That’s because one of the most common complaints we hear about wild game is that it’s tough or dry. Usually, the animal isn’t the problem. Understanding the cut is.
Every muscle has a job. How much that muscle worked during the animal’s life influences its characteristics, and those characteristics help determine how we should approach it in the kitchen.
The goal isn’t simply to give you recipes to follow. It’s to give you enough understanding that you eventually won’t need us to tell you exactly what to do.
There’s More to an Animal Than the Backstrap
We love backstrap. Let’s get that out of the way.
But while writing this book, we both began to question why hunters place so much value on a handful of cuts while treating others as secondary.
Adam offered an explanation that stuck with me: the backstrap is easy.
It’s easy to recognize. It’s easy to remove. It’s easy to cook. Put some salt on it, give it a good sear, and chances are you’ll have something delicious.
A neck or shank asks more from the cook.
So does a heart, tongue, or kidney. Even cuts like the flat iron and Denver steak require more knowledge simply because you have to know where to find them. But harder to prepare doesn’t mean worse.
One of the biggest takeaways from writing this book is that every cut can be delicious when you understand how to cook it.
That’s also why Cooking by Cut includes an entire section on the fifth quarter: the heart, liver, kidneys, tongue, caul fat, trotters, and other often-overlooked parts of an animal, as well as using bones for stock and marrow.
The goal isn’t to tell you that you must eat every piece. It’s to give you the knowledge to decide for yourself.
The same applies to the grinder. We love ground meat. There will always be trim, and there are plenty of things worth grinding intentionally. But there’s a difference between grinding a cut because that’s what you want to do with it and grinding it because you don’t know what it is.
A World of Ways to Cook Wild Game
Once we identified the cuts, we wanted recipes worthy of them.
Rather than sticking exclusively to familiar North American wild game dishes, we looked around the world for big, bold flavors and culinary traditions that complement each cut’s characteristics.
The book contains more than 40 globally inspired recipes, drawing from Africa, Asia, Europe, the Caribbean, North and South America, and beyond. Some will feel like pure comfort food. Others may ask you to find an unfamiliar ingredient or step a little outside your culinary comfort zone. That is intentional.
We also dug into the history and cultural inspiration behind the cuts and dishes because we’re both food-history nerds, and understanding where food comes from makes cooking it more interesting. Some cuts have histories stretching back centuries. Others are surprisingly modern.
And because a great meal deserves something equally good in the glass, we worked with Jessica Boone, the Winemaker at Passalaqua Winery, to develop a section on understanding wine and wild game, along with wine pairings for every recipe.
Three Years in the Making
This book took us nearly three years to build.
We researched the cuts over the course of an entire podcast series. We butchered animals and documented the process. We worked through how to explain each cut so someone encountering it for the first time could actually find it. We developed and tested recipes using different species rather than simply substituting venison into everything. We cooked the food, photographed it, wrote the stories, and assembled the book.
Along the way, we received help and input from some incredibly knowledgeable people in the wild-food and butchery communities, which made the final book stronger.
Adam and I also brought different strengths to the process. My brain tends to approach butchery systematically, visualizing each step and working through exactly how to communicate it. Adam came into hunting with a background in butchery and has an incredible ability to extrapolate from those fundamentals into cooking and the larger ideas surrounding meat.
Yet our approaches to food and writing complement each other remarkably well. We developed our recipes independently, but when everything came together, the book still felt like one cohesive idea.
This book represents years of what we’ve learned through research and experience, cold hands, cut thumbs, early mornings, late nights, butcher tables, kitchens, hunting camps, successes, and plenty of mistakes along the way.
More than anything, it’s our contribution toward keeping the knowledge of butchery and cooking moving forward.
We Hope You Get This Book Dirty
Five years from now, we don’t want your copy of Cooking by Cut sitting pristine on a bookshelf.
We want it dog-eared. We want notes scribbled in the margins and pages stained from sitting beside you while you break down a deer.
We hope you’ve cooked the recipes and then used what you’ve learned to create your own.
We hope someone gives a copy to a new hunter along with their first knife. We hope it finds its way onto butcher tables, into hunting camps, and eventually gets passed from one hunter to another. I hope you use yours so much that five years from now, you need another copy.
Because Cooking by Cut isn’t ultimately about memorizing our recipes.
It’s about understanding the animal in front of you.
Cooking by Cut is available now. Get your copy and put it to work.
Stop asking, “What animal do I have?”
Start asking, “What cut do I have?”
Every cut tells a different story. Learn them all.
