I've been wracking my brain for quite some time about what I should write for the subject of my first diary. Politics? Labor rights? Immigration issues? All good topics... And all things other people can speak to better than me. My wife suggested, however, that maybe there was a subject I was especially qualified to speak on: Subsistence foods.
I grew up in Northern Canada, and for a significant part of my childhood my family was quite poor. We lived on and off for a number of years on whatever my father could shoot and whatever we could scavenge, including the scrub plant life in the southern Yukon, cheap packaged food and discarded-but-occasionally-still-edible contents of the dumpster behind the Super A. Many a pot of Kraft Dinner with moose stew meat in was prepared in my parents' kitchen.
I learned some cooking from my parents. I also spent many years living on my own with my own difficulties that led me to learn more about cooking. I've seen lots of recipe posts and lots of discussion about food and cooking, but not a lot of basic information about how to use different kinds of food. I'd like to write up some of the things I've learned about how to use and get the most out of different kinds of food, not just common store-bought ingredients but those that might be available without the immediate means to buy large amounts of "typical" foodstuffs. I'm going to focus on one dietary component at a time, and in this diary I'll be talking about proteins.
Protein
It's common to think of the protein being the most expensive part of a meal, and it often is, but there are times and places where meat in particular may be the most abundant food source available. If you have access to a chest freezer, then a hunting license, a box of bullets and a tank of gas can net you upwards of 300 pounds of good-quality meat for the unbutchered net cost of around $1.00/pound and a day out in the woods during moose or elk season. Fish and small game can be even more worth your while and can be considerably easier to work with. Depending on where you live, non-animal proteins like tofu or high quality seeds and nuts may also be an inexpensive and plentiful option. The important thing is to know what is most available where you are. I'm going to speak primarily to the kinds of meat I'm most familiar with, but I'll touch on some things I've learned since I left the Yukon, as well.
The Basics
In the modern West, we're fortune enough to have three common and familiar types of meat that can act as a solid basis to understand handling of almost any other type of meat. We would of course be talking about beef, pork and chicken. If you understand the basics of how these meats behave in food, you can easily learn to use any other type of meat. I'll start off talking about the core of using those three kinds of meat.
Beef
Beef is a high quality protein that most people in the US and Canada, at least, are intimately familiar with. It's the most commonly used red meat, and being both high protein and high fat, is very high in food value. It also contains a high proportion of B vitamins and nutritional iron.
In many ways, beef is one of the simplest meats to handle. Cows are not especially susceptible to intramuscular parasites or bacteria, and so as long as the outside is fully cooked, a solid cut of very rare beef (not ground beef!) is almost always safe and good to eat. Beef has a moderately high fat content, and so rarely requires any additional oil.
Tender cuts of beef should be quickly and lightly cooked, and never more than medium-rare. Tougher cuts, stringier cuts and cuts of beef with lots of connective tissue are well-served by a long, slow cooking time, either in a closed grill (as in beef barbecue) or in a stew or braise.
Beef bones, roasted under high heat and either cracked or split completely, make an excellent basis for soups and stews, as do certain extremely bony and gelatinous beef cuts (such as oxtail) and the tendons. Beef tongue, heart, liver and kidney are all popular and commonly-used organ meats for which an absolute plethora of recipes are available.
Pork
Pork is an extremely versatile meat. Bacon, ham, ribs, chops, smoked trotters, hot dogs and head cheese, among many, many other delicious items, can be made from pork, and might even all come from the same individual animal. It's lower in fat than beef, and as high or higher in B vitamins and some minerals. Pork is excellent for roasting, grilling, pan-frying and deep-frying. Like beef, tougher pieces can be well-served by stewing or barbecuing. It can often be cooked in its own fat, and pork fat itself is an excellent cooking medium for many other things.
Pork handling can be slightly more involved than for beef. Pork is somewhat more susceptible to bacterial and parasitic infection than beef, and in any event rare pork does not have a particularly pleasing taste or texture. Tender cuts of pork should always be cooked thoroughly, with only perhaps a small amount of pink in the center for thick chops or roasts. Care should always be taken, however, not to overcook it. Tougher cuts can be well-served by cooking at low temperature, between 200 and 225 degrees Fahrenheit, for a long period. Bacon, pork sausage and other ground or uncooked, preserved pork items should always be cooked thoroughly before eating.
Pork bones are excellent for soup, with lots of rich marrow fat and gelatin. Many types of pork offal, such as the heart, liver, tongue, kidneys, brain, trotters and head all have common culinary uses, are highly nutritious and are enjoyed by many. Pork blood can be used to make blood pudding or sausage. All parts of the pig should be thoroughly cooked before eating, due to risk of parasites.
Chicken
Chicken is a lean and nutritious meat, high in phosphorus, vitamin B6 and niacin, and with a broad profile of other nutrients and minerals. Light meat has a light grain and delicate flavor, while the darker meat on the bird can have a strong meaty flavor. Chicken can be a very cost-effective meat, with 2/3rds or more of the total weight of a cleaned bird being usable meat, and nearly every part of the carcass being usable after the major muscle meat has been removed.
Care should always be taken when handling chicken or any poultry. Hands should be washed after handling, and any utensils used should be washed as well, to prevent cross-contamination of dangerous bacteria. No matter what cooking method is being used, chicken should always be cooked all the way through until no pink is visible in the meat and the juices run clear. When roasted or grilled, chicken should either be cooked with the skin on or some additional oil should be added to help keep the meat moist. Batter-frying seals in the liquid and is both a delicious way of cooking chicken and a good way of retaining the entire nutritional value of the meat. Chicken rarely benefits from long, low-temperature cooking but can be very good in soups, stews, curries, casseroles and the like when added and allowed to cook as normal in the liquid medium.
The carcass of a roast chicken is more or less required to make chicken soup, and the bones from fried or grilled chicken can be collected and used in the same manner very nicely. Chicken giblets also have a great number of uses and can be used as a soup or stew ingredient (especially in the case of the neck), as a base for gravies and sauces, and the heart and liver can be cooked in their own right, typically by frying.
Other meats and proteins
Moose and elk
Most people in the West, and especially in Canada and the US, are very familiar with beef. The nice thing about moose and elk is that they are, in many respects, an exact substitute for lean beef. You can make steaks from them, pot roasts, hamburger, ribs, stew meat... Anything you can use beef for, you can use moose or elk for.
The important thing to know when working with moose and elk is that they are, like most game meats and unlike almost any commercially-farmed meat, very strongly flavored. It's not an unpleasant flavor; moose should never smell or taste "gamey" unless it's been taken out of season. This means a couple of things:
- Moose is almost always well-served by salt. In general, moose can stand up to much stronger spices than it's usually wise to use with commercial beef, but a bit more salt than you would normally use with beef is almost always a good idea.
- Even though it is leaner than beef, don't feel like you need to leave every bit of fat on the meat. Some cuts will have some fat on them, just like beef. If it seems like it's too much for whatever you're cooking, trim it off. It's that simple. Fat is flavor, but moose is already very flavorful and doesn't require vast amounts of extra fat to be good. On the other hand, just like with beef, if you like the fat, leave it on.
One more thing to consider is the heavy bone structure. Most cuts of meat are mostly deboned, but there are certain common beef cuts that are somewhat impractical with moose. Probably the most important one is the short loin, which is usually divvyed up into steaks: Don't cook moose t-bones. The steaks are outlandishly huge and the bone is so large that it actually interferes with cooking. Cut it into a New York strip and tenderloin instead.
Besides the meat, the organs can be used very like beef organs. In particular, the liver, kidneys, heart and tongue can all be directly substituted for the equivalent beef offal. Be aware that the comparative strength of moose meat to beef goes doubly for the organs. You should never eat the brain, as many wild animals and especially moose and other deer can carry prion diseases that are not adequately dealt with by cooking.
Moose bones also make an excellent base for soup stock. For best results, roast the bones at high heat, and plunge the hot bones into a cold water bath to split them before boiling them for stock. Bones that have already been used for cooking (for instance, in a roast), and especially those that have already been split, can be used directly.
Caribou and deer
First off, for the purposes of full disclosure: I have never personally worked with white-tail or mule deer. The Yukon has a dearth of the more common deer but is rich in caribou, a very close relative of the reindeer. I've eaten venison and have seen it prepared, and it is largely similar in terms of fat content and flavor to good caribou.
The most important thing to know about venison is that it is quite unlike beef or pork and has its own requirements for handling and cooking. It's a common mistake to try to treat venison like beef. You can get good results with the following rules of thumb:
- Venison is extremely lean, with almost all of the fat on the animal in a single layer on the outside. The fat layer itself typically carries an unpleasantly gamey taste and odor, even when the deer is in season, and so should be removed. This generally means that when cooking with venison, you'll want to add fat back in. Some of the best options for adding fat back are other animal fats: Lard, suet, or rendered duck or goose fat are the best and most flavorful options. For inexpensive cooking butter and vegetable oil can be used very effectively.
- Deer blood has the same strong gamey flavor as the fat, so it is beneficial to remove as much as possible. One good way is to cover both sides of the cut of meat you're using with a heavy layer of coarse salt (kosher salt is obviously the best for this), let the meat stand for an hour on a cutting board or other flat surface, and pat the meat dry when you're done. This will draw some of the blood and some of the salt will be absorbed, seasoning the meat appropriately. You can do the same for ground venison simply by mixing the salt into the ground meat and letting it stand for an hour in a colander or strainer lined with paper towels. Salting venison to draw out the liquid this way has the added benefit of helping the meat brown.
- Venison carries intramuscular parasites. This means that it should be treated like pork in terms of food safety. Cook it at the same temperature you would cook pork and cook it all the way through, leaving only a light pink in the very center.
One of the best pieces of shorthand advice I've ever heard about dealing with venison is to cook it like pork, and use turkey recipes.
Like moose, deer bones are excellent for soup stock and should be handled the same way. You may wish to roast the split bones and render some of the marrow fat before boiling, to moderate the flavor somewhat.
Most deer offal is an acquired taste at best, and some parts (such as, again, the brain) are generally considered unsafe in all cases. The heart and liver can be used, and some people enjoy them, but I don't recommend using them unless you have to.
Wild boar
Wild boar and feral pigs are prevalent in the southeastern US and California, and there are populations elsewhere as well. Pigs are interesting in that domesticated pigs are actually not too different than their wild cousins, and so there's not much more to say beyond "use wild boar the same way you would use pork." Be sure to cook it all the way through as there is a greater risk of trichinella with wild pork than there is with the domesticated variety.
Wild pork organ meat can vary wildly in quality depending on the diet of the pig, but can often be used the same way normal pork offal is. Pigs are also a much smaller risk of prion diseases than moose, deer and the like, so wild pork brains can be used the same as any other pork brains. Because of the relative safety of pork brains, wild boar heads can also be boiled down whole to make a very excellent head cheese.
Pork bones make excellent soup directly, and require no roasting beforehand. It can be beneficial to leave the bones in the soup instead of removing them, to let more of the gelatin cook out and make the soup richer.
Rabbit
Rabbit is an extremely lean meat. It is, in fact, so lean that it is not a reasonable source of nutritional fat, and so you can actually starve to death if you try to live on rabbit alone. That being said, rabbit is a quality protein that can be readily available in many areas, and is frankly delicious.
Rabbit can be used as a one-for-one replacement for chicken in almost any dish. The only real caveat is that rabbit, and wild rabbit in particular, is so lean and dry that you absolutely require additional fat. For roasting, a drizzle of olive oil or some bacon fat will be more than sufficient. For soups, stews and sautees, some butter, vegetable oil or pork fat can be added, as appropriate to the dish. Breading and deep-frying can be just as fine a way of handling rabbit as chicken, but the rabbit will be dry compared to chicken as the food will only absorb a tiny amount of fat in proper deep-frying.
The carcass from a roast rabbit can make an excellent soup, boiled just as you would a roast chicken carcass. If the bones of the rabbit have not already been cooked in a dry heat (such as by roasting), you can roast the bones briefly until browned and then boil them in the usual manner.
Grouse, pheasant, ptarmigan and other small game birds
These types of small birds are a category all of their own. The meat is all dark and very lean, and the birds are often much too small to use in the same ways one would use a chicken or duck. The best handling for these types of birds is to roast them whole, which can be done much like a chicken with some additional oil, or grill or braise the bird after cleaning and splitting them in half. In any cooking method, some additional fat will be beneficial, and butter or bacon can be especially good.
After any dry cooking, the bones can then be boiled for soup stock, but braised or already boiled bones have generally lost too much fat, gelatin and nutrients to be very useful as soup stock. The giblets can be used for gravy like chicken giblets, or can be used to add additional depth, flavor and nutrition to a soup stock made from the bones.
Fish
There are many different kinds of fish and just as many ways to prepare them, but broadly speaking the two main properties that will change between different fish are the firmness of the flesh and the fat content. Some fish, particularly active freshwater fish like grayling, rainbow trout and pike, have a flaky flesh when cooked and a relatively low fat content. On the other end of the spectrum are fish that are relatively oily and have a very firm flesh when cooked, such as mahi mahi or Patagonian toothfish (commonly known by its marketing name, Chilean sea bass). Salmon have a flaky fish but a relatively high fat content, while catfish have a firm, solid flesh and a relatively low fat content. All of these behave slightly differently in cooking.
To begin with, most fish are well-served by batter-frying. Batter-fried fish should be cooked through, but never overcooked. Very fatty fish (or very fatty portions of fish) can be a bit troublesome to deep fry as the oil will rise to the surface of the meat and separate the batter. These fish are better served by breading than being cooked in a heavy batter, which will allow some of the excess fat to escape. Very bony fish like pike should be carefully deboned before being deep fried, simply because it can be difficult to find bones in deep-fried fish and fish bones can be a serious choking hazard.
Small fish that aren't excessively oily can be pan-fried very nicely. Rainbow trout and grayling are particularly nice cooked this way and can be panfried whole with the skin on, as can any small fish of this type without very heavy scales. Larger related fish like steelhead can be cut into strips and cooked the same way. Other large fish with thicker meat can be sliced crosswise, into steaks instead of filets, and panfried that way, which is also very nice. Catfish is often panfried with the skin removed and a light breading. When panfrying, most fish should be cooked all the way through.
Many fish are well-served by grilling, and fish that are too large or oily to pan fry well are often excellent grilled. Most grilled fish should, again, be cooked all the way through, though tuna in particular is excellent cooked medium-rare. When not grilling fish whole, the skin is best removed to allow the outside of the meat to sear on all sides.
Many fish can be baked, either whole for smaller fish or as fillets, with skin on or not for larger fish like salmon and steelhead. When baking fish, the fish should be wrapped in tinfoil to keep the fat in and keep the fish from drying out.
Fish soup can be excellent, and many fish are very good as the main ingredient in a chowder or bouillabaisse. Fish should not usually be stewed; the meat should always be added after the vegetables are mostly done cooking and generally should cook only to doneness, ten to fifteen minutes being typical.
The castoffs from a baked, grilled or roasted fish, that is, the bones, head, tail and fins, as well as parts of the fish that are not normally eaten directly, like the bloodline of tuna, can be boiled up to make an excellent and flavorful fish stock. For fish that are large enough to have an intact skeleton, one skeleton and a whole head can be the base of an entire pot of fish stock. Otherwise, heads, tails, fins and other clean castoffs can be cooked up together, which will typically make a heavier and more deeply-flavored stock.
Generally speaking, the guts of a fish should not be eaten or used due to risk of parasites, as well as toxicity in the organs of some fish. There are certainly edible fish organs such as the widely-prized monkfish liver, but these are most definitely exceptional.
Eggs
Whole eggs may well be both the most common and best protein source eaten anywhere in the world. They are very nearly a complete nutritional source by themselves; they are a good, complete protein source with a large amount of fat energy, and contain significant amounts of vitamins A, D, E and B12 and many other nutrients and trace minerals. Eggs can be eaten boiled soft, boiled hard, fried, poached, scrambled or used any number of ways in cooking.
Most bird eggs can be substituted for chicken eggs roughly by weight; one duck or turkey egg, for instance, can almost always be used in place of two chicken eggs. Quail eggs generally equate to chicken eggs at a ratio of five to one. The major difference between common types of bird eggs is the ratio of yolk to white and the relative fattiness of the yolk. Duck, turkey and goose eggs have a much richer yolk, on average, than chicken, but a similar proportion of yolk to white. Quail eggs, on the other hand, have a similar richness to chicken eggs but have a much greater percentage of yolk per egg. The egg whites of all of these different kinds of eggs have very similar nutritional value and can be used in place of one another.
Milk
Milk is a quality source of a limited amount of protein in liquid form, which can be used to augment other proteins or on its own as a high-value food ingredient. The rules for milk are very similar to the rules for eggs: Different types of common milk can be substituted for one another with the provision that the fat content can be different. Unlike eggs, however, different types of milk can have very different flavors, as well.
Goat milk is the second most common type of drinking milk in the world, placing a very, very distant second to cow milk. Goat milk is slightly lower in fat and protein than whole cow milk. It is naturally homogenized, which means that the cream content is distributed evenly throughout the milk, with the result that, in practice, goat milk is much richer than the usual cow milk. Sheep milk has a much higher fat and protein content than either cow or goat milk, with nearly twice as much fat and about 60% more protein than cow milk. In practice, again, all three can be used interchangeably with an impact on the finished flavor of the product. The additional fat in sheep milk may require a slight reduction in the amount of fat from other sources when using it in cooking.
Nuts and seeds
Much of my experience with cooking with nuts and seeds has been picked up since I moved south, as there's almost nothing in the Yukon in the seed category that's remotely edible, and certainly no tree nuts or legumes. However, the single best seed for protein content also happens to be one of the only ones I and probably many of you have experience cooking with: The pumpkin seed. Pumpkin seeds have a protein content similar to meat protein, and can be roasted very easily in a conventional oven. Peanuts, sunflower seeds, pistachios and almonds and many other tree nuts all have a similarly high protein content and in some cases a high fat content as well, giving them a broad nutritional profile.
The simplest way to prepare nuts and seeds is to roast them in the oven with salt. Another traditional method of preparing raw peanuts in particular is to boil them while slightly green. When hulled, all nuts and seeds can be used in stews, braises, curries and the like quite effectively; the long cooking time and low heat breaks the hard seeds down and gives them a nice, firm but not hard texture. Depending on the type of seed, they can also add lots of flavor to a dish.
Peanuts, almonds and other oily nuts can also be used to make sauces, by roasting and then grinding and crushing them and either simmering the crushed and ground nuts in a liquid medium or grinding them finer until they become an oily paste (as in peanut butter).
Nuts and seeds are often used in baking, as well. When added whole, small or crushed seeds or nuts can often be added to bread or cake recipes without changes to the recipe. Very fatty nuts like peanuts may require a small reduction in other fats in the recipe. Whole larger nuts may call for a slight increase in liquid in the recipe and/or baking time.
Tofu
The much-maligned soybean curd. To begin with, tofu is not a meat replacement, so put that idea out of your head. To say it is does a disservice both to meat and to this versatile ingredient. Tofu is very high in protein and moderately low in fat. It doesn't have a high vitamin content but does contain a broad spectrum of vitamins, and is an excellent source of calcium and many other minerals.
Tofu doesn't have a strong flavor on its own, so it can be used in many recipes easily. Soft tofu can be used nicely in soups, especially spicy soups. It can also be "scrambled" with meat or vegetables as in the perennial Chinese favorite ma po tofu. Firmer tofu can be cubed into soups, stews and curries, or gently stir-fried (so that it doesn't break up while cooking). If the texture of tofu is disagreeable, you can also get a firmer, toothier product by dusting cubed firm tofu with corn starch and deep frying for several minutes until golden-brown. This deep-fried tofu can be used nearly any place you would use firm tofu.
Tofu is best cooked with strong, prominent spices. In a liquid medium under medium-high heat, tofu will cook fully in fifteen minutes but will largely keep its consistency and only absorb more flavor as it cooks for up to an hour. In a dry medium, or when using deep-fried tofu, excessive cooking will cause the tofu to break down, so fried tofu or deep-fried tofu in a soup or stew should not generally cook more than fifteen or twenty minutes.
Coda
This is not a complete guide to protein in your meals; far from it, it's basically a quick summary of a lot of things I learned on the subject over 24 years in the Yukon and six more in the States. There's just too much ground to cover if I wanted to talk about everything - I could write something easily this long on all the ins and outs of northern freshwater fish alone - but hopefully this information is useful and will serve as a good starting point when dealing with and learning about alternative proteins. I'm planning to continue this as a series if it's well-received, with the next installment being about fruits, vegetables, berries and green plants. If you have any questions or corrections I'd love to hear them. Thanks for reading!