Far Afield
Outdoor cooking season upon us
With Oak Duke

Summer evenings spent around a campfire, great food and the added ambiance of good friendship and sharing the bounty of hunts and fishing trips is hard to beat.

These times don't happen in the fall, winter or spring.

Summer is the time for cookouts.

Share the game; pass the stories.

And I'll take a second helping of that.

Over the years we've been able to put a few notions together about campfire cooking that has added to the enjoyment of these wonderful, precious and all-toofleeting times.

So first of all, let me qualify the following with this maxim: everyone has their own tastes.

Here, there is no real right and wrong.

Cooking is not an exercise in morality, no matter how opinionated, persuasive, and dogmatic someone else may profess and pontificate "the right way."

No matter how much they wag their finger.

I hate it when someone says that I have to eat meat the way they like it, and my way is wrong.

Why do people think that way?

Those men who penned the Constitution of the United States and The Bill of Rights were the wisest and most erudite fellows to ever stick a fork in a baked potato. (Oh, that's right, potatoes were not here then. Potatoes are native in the Andes Mountains in South America, and came here via Europe.)

But the father's of the country forgot one right - The Freedom of Taste.

One person may like their meat well-done, cooked through-and-through, even burnt to a crisp. And maybe to me, meat they like may look like shoe leather, tough as tripe with the flavor cooked out.

And on the other extreme some of us like meat so bloody that you'd swear you have to stab it with a sharp fork to keep it from crawling off the plate. And then, it is not cooked enough to bring out the flavors.

The real challenge for the outdoor campfire cook, "if he chooses to accept this mission," should be to be able to cook for everyone and make them all happy, no matter what side of the campfire they are sitting on, from burnt to raw.

My favorite recipe is a treatment for venison backstraps, or tenderloin.

And I have never had anyone say anything but good about it. To date, there is never any left over for the dogs. (And my dogs like venison better than any other meat.)

The back-strap on a deer is a long, finely grained muscle that runs along either side of the backbone of a deer, about three feet long. Cut in thirds so each filet is about 10 inches long.

Venison should be taken care of properly to bring out the best flavor. The animal must dressed-out as quickly as possible. The quicker the animal is killed and dressed out, the more flavorful the meat.

I hang or "rest" my deer a few days if the temperature is right (38 degrees F. is ideal) before processing (cutting up and freezing.)

Anyway, the back-strap is then marinated in Italian salad dressing in a zip-lock bag for a couple hours in the refrigerator before cooking. And that works fine and is easy and no mess.

When camping, a cooler with ice works fine and dandy.

My favorite way to prepare grilled back-strap is to first of all, grind black pepper, or better yet grind a mix of peppercorns on the meat.

Keep flipping the backstrap and rub it in. (This is called "a rub" and there are specific spices for that, put they camouflage the natural flavor of the venison too much for me.) Then, put four equidistant slashes an inch deep on one side and three on the other.

In every other inch-deep cut, cram a big sliver of garlic and in the empty ones pack in half a pat of butter.

Kind of squeeze it together so the garlic and butter doesn't fall out of the slices before cooking.

The importance of the quality of the fire can not be understated. A good bed of hardwood coals is crucial for success. We find that using a long-handled shovel is the best way to move the coals out of the center of the fire near the edge where a metal grill can be set up to cook the meat.

A final trick-of-the-trade, when outside the house on a grill is to place the prepared back-strap in a freezer, after it is peppered and fitted with garlic and butter.

Let it get cold and then bring the filet out about half hour or so before it is placed in the honored position on the grill.

This way the center of the meat is cold and cooks slower than it would if it was the same temperature as the outside. It's better to let the outside of the meat warm up a bit so that it doesn't char too much and the cooking radiates inward toward the center a bit.

The fire needs to be hot and radiating heat. Leave the meat on about four minutes a side (four sides). But this depends on a number of variables: temperature of the fire, size and temperature of the meat, wind, outside temperature and height of the grill above the coals.

When on the grill, I like to rotate the meat three times. The first turn is 180 degrees, the second turn is 90 degrees and the third and final turn is 180 degrees. That way there is an even and consistent cooking process going on.

Poke the meat with a longhandled fork. When it starts to stiffen up, it is done.

The center of the tenderloin should be very rare and about the size of a quarter. From there and radiating out, the meat is medium well-done and juicy to welldone on the very outside of the filet, slightly blackened.

To top it off and dress it up, on the side should be a ladle or two of saut/ed wild mushrooms, depending on the season; morels in early summer, or wild oyster mushrooms a little later, or chicken-of-the-woods (Laetiporus sulphureus) during July, cooked down with a couple of shallots and a nice big shaved garlic clove.

And there is nothing finer, nothing more delectable and mouth watering, than this venison. Truly wild meat is "organic" meat. No preservatives, synthetic hormones, or chemicals of any kind. And as a super bonus, wonderfully low in cholesterol and fat.

How could something so wonderfully tasty be so good for you?

What a blessing. Be sure to give thanks. Bon appetit.

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Oak Duke, publisher of the Wellsville Daily Reporter and an author on four books, writes a regular column, "In The Outdoors.