Recipes for Antelope?

[NickEllis]

Just got back from Wyoming with a load of antelope meat. Great hunt, had a wonderful time.

Any ideas on good grilling/cooking/broiling/etc. recipes for antelope? I've got plenty enough meat to experiment with!

Thanks,

Nick

 

[eliphalet]

Take it to a meat processor and have it made into German sausage, polish sausage etc. Only game I ever shot I wouldn't eat till it was processed.
They are fun to hunt aren't they?
Good luck.

 

[LHB1]

Nick,
Can't help you with recipe for antelope but congrats on a successful hunt. We just got back from a long vacation trip and saw LOTS (literally hundreds) of antelope in Nebraska, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico. Must be a bumper crop year.

Good shooting and be safe.
LB

 

[41magsnub]

When I get an antelope I get everything but the chops processed into sausage. The chops I either smoke with some good hickory chips or fry in oil with an onion slice on top. The smoking is better but is sort of a pain to get set up for with that small amount of meat.

 

[Sharps Shooter]

Congrats on a successful hunt.
Have you got a meat grinder? If you do you can mix ground antelope about 50/50 with regular pork sausage and whatever amount of sage you think looks right. My family enjoys breakfast sausage patties made from that mixture. The thing is though, we always cut our antelope up and freeze it not too long after we get it home. So we have to thaw it out in order to grind it and mix it with pork sausage. As you know, you're not suppose to re-freeze uncooked meat. But we get around that by cooking up all of the antelope/pork sausage patties we make. Then we place the cooked patties on a cookie sheet and set them in the deep freeze for a few hours. Once they're frozen, we just put them all in ziplock bags and put them back in the freezer. A couple of dozen will fit in one 1-gallon ziplock back. Come saturday morning, we take 2 patties out of the freezer for each person, pop them in the microwave for less than a minute, and serve them alongside pancakes with chokecherry syrup. Man, I'm making myself hungry!
Antelope stew is also one of our favorites. Just chunk the antelope up in bite size pieces, put the pieces in a bowl with a lid, along with flour, a little garlic powder, sage again, and salt and pepper. Put the lid on the bowl and shake it until the meat is coated with the flour mixture, then brown the meat in a little oil in your stew pot. Add whatever stew vegetables you like, water, and cook it just like any other stew. We use homestyle and/or beef gravy mixes to thicken it. Enjoy!

 

[Kingcreek]

Antelope is excellent meat for burgers, steak, chops, etc IF IT IS HANDLED PROPERLY. If not, it can be awful stuff.
Antelope meat (and other meat as well) is best if the animals are relaxed and haven't been running alarmed. The meat also seems to be very heat sensitive. It needs to be killed, cleaned, and cooled quickly. We carry a couple of jerrycans of fresh clean water and a few bags of ice in a cooler and a tarp to shade the carcass on the way to the locker. gut that lope, sleuce some cool clean water through him, and chuck a bag or 2 of ice into the cavity, and go directly to a locker. some of the best venison you'll ever eat.
Shoot a hard-run 'lope on a warm day, drag it a ways through the sage, and then drive it around in the back of the truck for a few hours, and your dog won't even eat it.

 

[NRA4LIFE]

I think antelope is one of the finest game meats available. If it's not good, it was not handled properly. Sorry. They need to be out of the hide IMMEDIATELY, and into a cooler. I hunt SE MT and the temps are generally not condicive to dead critters hanging around. Seems like most hunters I've seen out there leave them in the hide WAY too long. For some reason I've found, antelope do not keep well while still in the hide, regardless of temperature. I often skin them right where they fall if I can't get them back to camp within an hour or so. Last weekend I took a piece of loin meat, maybe 8" in length and simply salt and peppered it and roasted it over an alder wood fire until medium rare. Perhaps one of the best pieces of game meat I have ever eaten.

 

[svtruth]

Rear legs are

excellent as pot roast.
Flour and brown the outside, cover with water, add a can of beef or chicken broth and a bay leaf. Simmer until tender. Put in ice box over night. Add veggies, cook until they are done, thicken with a roux and have at it.
The long cooking will tenderize the meat.
Good luck.

 

[eliphalet]

Antelope is excellent meat for burgers, steak, chops, etc IF IT IS HANDLED PROPERLY. If not, it can be awful stuff.

I think antelope is one of the finest game meats available. If it's not good, it was not handled properly

Depends on more than how the "meat is handled" for durn sure.

The animal, where it's from, what it's been eating, age, sex and maybe time of year, and perhaps more, all play into the "taste".

Frosty morning opening day just at first light. Nice buck stands up from being bedded down and is immediately shot, DRT no excitement or running, gutted immediately. He is hung and skinned in about an hour or less from death in a windy snow squall so cold we stopped skinning him a couple of times to warm your hands. He is then washed in a creek and hung two or three days in cold air, then cut.
It was without a doubt the worst meat I have ever ate, well tasted, didn't eat I spit it out.
I would like to know how meat can be taken care of better than that to make it good?
Much more to it than how it is "handled".
OBTW we have done maybe 100 deer and elk all were just fine and dandy, except one old strong tasting mulie buck. We cut, grind, and wrap all our own meat and have several decades. Except for antelope it goes to the processor for sure.

 

[koja48]

If a loper has been running hard before they're bagged, that can make for poor quality/taste, also. I kept the loins & everything else became sticks or sausage. If the meat is tough or strong, soak a hardwood plank overnight, bake the meat on that while basting it with the smooth whiskey of your choice. When it's done, save the meat for coyote bait, eat the board, & drink the gravy . . .

 

[Kingcreek]

Eliphalet, Everything you did sounds ideal for good meat. unless maybe you "introduced" something to the meat from the creek? I dunno. I agree the animals diet can make some difference. I once shot a nice buck in a Minnesota swamp and it tasted kinda swampy.
I only hang my deer long enough to cool it down for cutting, usually just overnight. My antelope get clean and cooled down fast, never had any issues with my antelope meat. Thier diet is pretty limited, usually not much variety where they live.

 

[NickEllis]

Eliphalet, from everything I've heard the meat has to get cut off the bone ASAP. No hanging, like deer or beef. There's just nothing there to break down, no purpose to let it hang.

I had my antelope steaked out within an hour of their demise. We'll see how it turns out.

 

[Sunray]

There's a plethora of recipes on-line and in game cook books. A Yahoo net search will turn up about 378,000 sites.
Here's one. http://www.gamerecipe.net/category/antelope-recipes/

 

[Sharps Shooter]

Hey Elaphalet,
Your initials don't happen to be R.T., do they? Are you from Montpelier? The reason I ask is because your story about the foul tasting antelope you shot as he stood up out of his bed sounds almost identical to my long-time hunting buddy's (R.T.) story. Except as I remember it, R.T. shot his foul tasting antelope right beside the creek he washed and cooled it out in.
My hunting buddy is far from being an inexperienced hunter - that was probably at least his 10th or 12th antelope. He says about the same thing as you about antelope meat. He says up until he killed that one early in the morning standing beside that creek, he believed the reasons his antelope meat was always good was because he'd never shot an antelope that had been running for a long time and he knew how to take care of the meat properly. That one changed his mind.
I personally have never had a bad tasting antelope. But I've heard enough stories to believe I've been lucky. Maybe VERY lucky, because after reading your story and hearing almost the same thing from my buddy R.T., I can hardly believe I've always had good antelope meat because I've never killed one running and I know so much more than other hunters about how to take care of them once they're dead.
Oh and Kingcreek - antelope diet isn't anymore limited than deer or elk around here. You might find antelope way out in the sagebrush in this part of the country, but you're just as likely to find them in a farmer's wheat or alfafa field.

 

[eliphalet]

Your initials don't happen to be R.T., do they? Are you from Montpelier?

Nope, and nope.
The several bunches of antelope I saw today were all in fields but I have never shot one where you could even see a house IIRC just sage brush. Maybe the food source and never killed any but a buck is why, Ain't shot a lot of lopes anyway so Idonno.