Venison Sauerbraten

My father has been begging Hank Shaw for a venison recipe for months now, and Hank has delivered. It’s outstanding! Not gamey at all, just a deeply flavorful pot roast. ~Elise

As some of you know, I am a hunter. With a few exceptions, I have not bought meat for the home in five years—everything we eat we’ve either hunted or fished for ourselves.

So I spend a lot of time adjusting traditional recipes to suit wild game. Luckily it turns out that sauerbraten, a classic German pot roast, was, apparently, originally designed for venison.

Sauerbraten comes in as many varieties as there are cooks. I’ve seen all sorts of variations on the sauce, on the cut of meat, on the cooking temperature.

At its core, however, sauerbraten involves a large piece of meat that has been marinated and slowly cooked in a vinegar-based marinade, which is then turned into a sauce.

My use of ginger snaps in the sauce comes from the sauerbraten I ate as a child at a New York restaurant called Luchows, which was a bastion of German cooking in the NYC area until it closed in 1982.

They used gingersnaps in their sauce, and I loved it. Still do.

A word on the marinade. You must boil the marinade before using it for two reasons: First, to burn off much of the alcohol in the wine—if you don’t, the meat gets a weird metallic taste—and second, the heat extracts more flavor from all the spices you put in it. Let the marinade cool completely before submerging the venison.

Oh, and use an inexpensive wine you might think about drinking on a Wednesday night; nothing fancy. Can you use something other than wine? Yes, but then it is not a sauerbraten. It is a pot roast. Still good, though.

I offer several variants on how to cook the venison here, which mostly involve temperature and time. Ideally you cook the venison very slowly over a very long period. This keeps the meat pink and preserves more of the juices.

But if you don’t have all day to cook it, you can go up to 300 degrees, which will turn the venison gray, but it will still be tender. Sauerbraten is all about the sauce, anyway.

Venison Sauerbraten Recipe

You can of course use beef for this recipe; brisket or a chuck roast would be good, and you could also use London broil or tri-tip.

Ingredients

• 3-4 pound roast of venison (or beef chuck)
• 1/4 cup melted butter or olive oil
• 8 gingersnap cookies
• 3 Tbsp butter
• 2 Tbsp flour
• Salt

Marinade Ingredients:

• 1 bottle of red wine
• 1/2 cup red wine vinegar
• 2 cups water
• 1 Tbsp black peppercorns
• 1 Tbsp juniper berries
• 1 Tbsp mustard seed
• 6-8 cloves
• 3-5 bay leaves
• 1 Tbsp dried thyme
• 2 celery stalks, chopped
• 2 carrots, peeled and chopped
• 1 medium onion, chopped

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