I confess that I often feel intimidated when faced with the task of preparing a meal using a wild/local protein such as trout, venison, elk, etc. They aren’t proteins that I prepare frequently and I don’t want to waste the protein or my time if the dish fails.

Help is here for people like me! Wild game cooking classes will be offered at the new South Dakota Game, Fish & Parks Outdoor Campus-West in Rapid City. The next cooking class will be offered on Tuesday, May 8th. The featured proteins will be trout and salmon. For more details, visit the Outdoor Campus-West website.

Community Education of the Black Hills offers affordable classes on multiple topics. Among their winter/spring offerings related to local food, the following classes are still open:

Rapid City (Cuisine)

Dutch Oven Cooking

Eating in the Raw

Gluten—to Eat or Not to Eat?

Rapid City (Home and Garden)

Creating a Culinary Herb Garden

Beekeeping

Seed propagation

Spearfish

Fly-fishing Basics

For more information and to register, click here.

John Gomez, who lives in the Black Hills, sent us this article:

Here in the Hills, our deer season is basically the month of November. For me, I really don’t start thinking about hunting until Thanksgiving rolls around. The four day weekend is a perfect time to spend some real quality time in the woods. I went out once during the week and then again Thanksgiving morning. I had no success but I was okay with that, you really don’t want to take a deer without properly spending some good hours walking the woods and earning it. But now it was Friday, and I needed to fill my tag.  Besides, I wanted to make some deer jerky over the weekend. This time I brought along a friend and, midway through the morning, we were driving back with a nice three year old doe.

My friend helped me process the deer.  Right there in my garage, I pondered how this deer was probably born and lived within 50 miles of my house. It is a product of the Black Hills and it is a source of lean healthy food. Being aware of the importance of local foods, I’m glad that this deer was grown and would be consumed locally.

For the jerky,  I sliced the meat in three inch long strips about ¼” wide. I processed about ten pounds for jerky and another ten pounds I set aside for deer sausage. I also kept the tenderloins to use as steaks.

For thousands of years people have been drying meats. Now was my time to partake in this food tradition. Venison, being that it is a lean meat, is a good choice for jerky. I had dabbled with it in the past and everyone in my family seemed to enjoy it. This year I was going to home in on the best recipes and techniques for producing tasty jerky.

Jerky – Four Ways

I decided to try the jerky in two flavors, a salt-based dry cure (High Mountain Mesquite  Jerky Cure – Cabela’s $6.99)  and a Worcestershire and soy sauce-based wet marinade. I was curious to see how each would perform in taste and texture. Furthermore, I tried each of the two recipes on two drying methods – a dehydrator and a smoker. With that, my experiment was set. I spent Saturday and Sunday prepping and drying. The recipes are easy and even though it takes all weekend for a finished food, the process is surprisingly simple.

The results? I loved the taste of the Worcestershire marinade as cooked in the smoker. However, I decided to be a bit more scientific about it and proceeded to conduct a blind taste test with a few of my neighbors and family. The results were a little surprising. It seems that the dehydrated mesquite dry cure jerky was more liked than the Worcestershire flavor. However, the latter flavor was preferred when dried by the smoker. It seems that the wet marinade produced a very tasty glaze flavor on the smoker that could not be achieved in the dehydrator.

Next year I’ll try it again. For now, we’ll have a snack to carry us through the end of the year. I find that when it comes to jerky it is very much like potato chips, once you eat one you really can’t stop. As I write this, I’m chewing on a piece. How do you know when to stop eating? I guess your jaw will let you know!

Northern pike

While putting together our June 24 post about fishing in Robbinsdale Park we got curious about northern pike and their story. We emailed Gene Galinat, Regional Fisheries Manager for the South Dakota Game Fish and Parks Department, and asked how northern pike, a non-native fish, got to the Black Hills and how it is doing. Here’s what he said:

The first time we sampled northern pike in Pactola was in 2003. Since that time northern pike are showing up much more regularly in our nets and in angler catch. We’re seeing different sizes, which means they are reproducing successfully. A few pike have been collected this year for a food habits analysis. It looks like their forage of choice is the catchable rainbow trout we stock. Possibly they are foraging on enough of the trout that angler catch rates have declined…we’ve had anglers complaining about catching fewer trout.

Northern pike do exist in a few other Black Hills lakes: Stockade, Sheridan, Pactola, Canyon Lake, Memorial Pond, and recently we’ve had reports of small waters like Sunday Gulch Pond. Pike are not native to the Black Hills. These fish were illegally stocked by self-serving individuals. Northern pike are a top level predator that can crop a population of fish from the top down, i.e. they can eat the bigger fish first. While not a normal phenomenon (it’s been found walleye and smallmouth bass will eat smaller fish first due to handling difficulty and handling time of the forage), pike do seem to take large fish as forage. This is not a good thing for trout fisheries which are made up of soft-finned tubular-shaped fish.

We do still stock catchable size (~11 inches) trout in Pactola, and Pactola is still a good lake to fish for trout. Some of the other better trout lakes are Horsethief, Sylvan, Center, Legion, Iron Creek, and Bismark. Some better streams are Grace Coolidge (in Custer State Park), Spearfish and Crow Creeks.