Elk meat is a very healthy and dietary meat, which contains a lot of useful chemical elements. Since these animals are not fed with chemicals and hormones, their meat is environmentally friendly.
Few people tried moosefruit, but whoever succeeded, everyone claims that it tastes great. She has especially good reviews in a stew. This dish is easily prepared at home, even if you do not have culinary talents and do not have much experience in the kitchen. With proper adherence to the technology with minimal effort, you will get very tasty meat. It tastes like beef in taste, so it goes well with buckwheat or pearl barley porridge, potatoes or pasta. To make a moose stew at home, the recipe of which is given below, turned out tasty, you need to use only clean pieces of meat, without films and bones. It is necessary to grind them carefully, approximately as for beef stroganoff. It is advisable to beat off the chopped moose calf slightly to make it softer. It is also necessary to add fat - without it, the finished dish will turn out to be excessively dry. The amount of fat is calculated to taste, but it should be at least 60 grams per kilogram of pure meat.
Elk stew is an excellent dish that resembles beef to its taste. If you do it yourself, you can later enjoy it both at home and during outdoor activities (hiking or on a picnic).
Homemade moose stew: recipe
To make it, you will need:
- 1 kg of elk tenderloin.
- About 150 grams of lard or internal fat.
- 3 leaves of laurel.
- 10 pieces of peppercorns.
- 1 teaspoon of salt.
- 0.5 liters of white wine.
How to cook?
First, prepare the meat. To do this, rinse it in running cold water, pat it with paper towels and cut into small pieces. Since elk meat is sometimes tough (especially if the animal was not quite young), it is advisable to place it in white wine overnight for soaking.
After that, put the pieces of moose in a cast-iron pan and put it on a small fire, you do not need to add water. In meat, there is a large amount of its own juice released when heated. Simmer a moose on a small fire for about 3-4 hours, stirring occasionally.
Prepare glass jars and lids while cooking moose - thoroughly rinse and sterilize with boiling water or steam. Then let them cool and dry.
Secondly, cut lard or fat into small pieces, then put them in the meat. There you need to add salt, bay leaf and pepper. Other spices can not be added to the stew, as this will lead to a decrease in its shelf life. Arrange everything in equal parts in banks, then fill with the juice formed during preparation.
Sterilization of the finished product
Once the stew is laid out in jars, it must be sterilized. According to GOST requirements, this should be done for at least 75 minutes, and the processing temperature should be 120 degrees. Only if these conditions are met, the product will be completely safe - bacteria will be destroyed and the risk of infection with botulism will be eliminated. It is always worth remembering that botulinum toxins affect canned food locally, so only one piece of meat can be dangerous, while the rest of the contents of the jar will not pose any threat. That is why long processing is important. To reach the required temperature of 120 degrees, you can use a household autoclave, a slow cooker with this mode, a pressure cooker or an oven. Ideally, in the above units, the moosecake should be cooked for another 3 hours after adding all the additional ingredients.
What must be taken into account?
It must also be remembered that not all multicookers have such a temperature for processing products. If you have a budget model, and the temperature is not indicated, most likely, it will not exceed 110-115 degrees. For the same reason, it is impossible to sterilize cans with stewed meat in a container with boiling water or steamer - the boiling point of water is not sufficient to destroy all dangerous microorganisms.
This means that without observing the temperature regime of the moose stew at home, the recipe of which is indicated above, cannot be prepared for long-term storage in a closed jar. However, you can make a tasty meat dish that can be stored in the refrigerator for several days, as well as freeze it.
Cooking in the oven
Stewed moosecake at home in the oven can be prepared as follows. Complete all the steps in the basic recipe. Place jars of meat on a baking sheet, spread the lids on top (if they contain rubber rings, be sure to remove them). Put them in the oven and preheat it to 200 degrees. Once the stew boils, the temperature can be reduced, but not to the minimum limit (no more than 150 degrees). Continue cooking for three hours, then remove the cans and roll them up. In the event that you removed the elastic bands from the covers, you must put them back. Closed jars must be turned over and allowed to cool.
Home Autoclave Cooking
An elk stew at home in an autoclave can be made as follows. You must fulfill all the requirements of the main recipe. Then the meat-filled cans must be rolled up with lids, after which it is necessary to verify their tightness. To do this, immerse them in a container of hot water. If the jars are not closed tightly, air bubbles will start to stand out from them. Such containers must be replaced. Then closed cans are sterilized in an autoclave for about three hours at a temperature of at least 130 degrees. Only if you comply with these requirements will you get a safe stew of moose at home. The recipe in a pressure cooker is completely analogous to the order of preparation in an autoclave.
Recipe for a slow cooker - not for canning
If you are cooking moose stew in a slow cooker, you need to follow the first steps reflected in the above recipe (rinse, cut and soak the meat, grind fat). Then the pieces of meat are laid out in a slow cooker, a little any vegetable oil is poured. The moosecake needs to be slightly fried to ensure a golden crust, after which the extinguishing mode should be turned on. A moose stew is prepared at home (a recipe in a slow cooker suggests that this dish will not be intended for long-term storage) in this mode for about an hour and a half. As soon as the set program ends, the device automatically switches to the function of maintaining heat. It is necessary to leave the multicooker working for several hours, and then the meat is salted, pepper, and the desired amount of chopped onion is added to it. You can also put chopped carrots and other vegetables or greens.
How can the best moose stew be made at home?
The recipe suggests that the meat is laid in jars tightly, not reaching about a half centimeter to the neck. When cooking homemade stews, it is imperative to clean the meat of bones, films and tendons. In addition, it is better to crop areas that have changed color. The addition of lard is also necessary, since moosecake is lean meat, and canned food between the lid and meat is required in canned food. In addition, if you do not add fat, the stew will turn out to be excessively dry and hard.
In addition, moose stew at home, the recipe with a photo of which is presented in this article, can be "improved". You can cook canned food from several types of meat at the same time. For example, you can mix moose, beef and pork, or even add poultry. If one of the types of meat is fatty, you can optionally not add lard - fat will be leaked from pieces of the product. It is necessary to store ready-made canned food at temperatures up to 15 degrees. They must not be frozen, because the temperature can be compromised due to too low temperatures.