Blood, Bones And Road Kill

[October 19th, 2005] Blood pudding, bone soup, wild animals—you want me to put WHAT in my mouth? No matter how forward-thinking Portland's seasonally minded dining scene has become in the past decade, there are still a few chilling dishes lurking amid the prime rib and spaghetti carbonara of local restaurant menus. You just may not know it. Chefs employ many shiver-inducing materials and gory culinary practices to create decadent meals. To unsettle readers' stomachs further: This week, Portland hosts Wild About Game*, a game-meats event that culminates this Saturday with a cook-off featuring 10 of the Northwest's most popular chefs, from Bluehour's Kenny Giambalvo to Bend's first man of the rotisserie, Merenda chef Jody Denton. Their mission? To create dishes from the type of critters some of us less adventurous eaters would consider I-5 road kill or a Safari Club-worthy addition to a hunter's trophy case.

Think you can stomach these on-the-edge culinary delights? WW queried the region's culinary experts to give us the bloody truth about cooking and eating on the wild side. VITAL STATS

Five years ago, local wild-game purveyor and WAG sponsor Nicky USA sold half of its stock of mostly Oregon-bred buffalo, elk, deer (venison) and wild birds to restaurants in big cities like New York. "Now we sell 80 percent of our stock to Oregon and Washington restaurants," Nicky founder Geoff Latham says. "There are a lot of chefs who understand that's it's an indigenous cuisine to this area."

"Wild game is generally extremely lean," says Lynne Rosetto Kasper, the host of NPR's The Splendid Table and one of the WAG cookoff's celebrity judges. "We're hearing grass-fed beef has a lot less cholesterol.... Doesn't it make sense that something that grazes instead of eating in a feed lot would be better for us?"

HARDWARE

Nicky USA transports carcasses right from local farms to its Southeast Portland headquarters where they are, ahem, "processed." "We use knife, band saw and a grinder to 'fabricate' a buffalo," Latham says.

But Vitaly Paley, the chef-owner of Paley's Place and a WAG participant this year, cautions most folks against sawing through skeletons. "If [home chefs] start working with bones, they're bound to see some of their own blood on the table. Bones are slippery little devils," Paley says. "Boiling bones to make stock is...safer."

BLOOD

"In Old World cooking, blood was the original thickener," explains Kasper. "It was considered extremely nourishing. Today, people don't use blood very much because of health concerns."

Paley isn't so squeamish: "When the Frenchies were in town last June [that'd be the French Master Chef Convention], we harvested a gallon of fresh [pig] blood from Dayton Meat Packing. Red blood—still warm." Paley made a blood cake—a sautéed black pudding with butter-poached halibut on top. "Blood, it's got such amazing coagulating properties. It's almost like cooking a custard," he says. "Maybe tasting raw blood during the cooking process was too much, but I didn't shy away from it."

BONES

"Bones inevitably have little bits of tissue clinging to them and marrow, cartilage and gelatinous stuff inside," Denton explains. "All of that stuff breaks down in a stock and gives the liquid...body. It's just colored, flavored water without it."

For Kasper, the best part of bones is that spongy stuff inside, marrow, star of the Italian dish osso buco. It tastes "like nothing else," she says. "Lush, delicious and unctuous."

"Beef marrow is full of fat. And anything full of fat—foie gras, bacon—is good," explains Denton. "You can roast a whole bone and stick a spoon in it. Whip it up with herbs and make a marrow butter out of it...then put the butter on meat—meat covered with meat fat."

ROAD KILL

Although game meats like venison (above) and buffalo are increasingly visible on Portland tables, Russian-born Paley is taking buffalo to the limit, making a "madman's headcheese" for WAG's wine-pairing event: a buffalo tongue-and-tail terrine served with mushroom-caper relish. "I never throw anything away until I find a home for it," Paley says.

Another dubious dish? Squab—or month-old pigeon, explains Latham. "Let's just say the pigeons that are breeders are eating a diet very different than the ones flying around Pioneer Courthouse Square," he swears.

"As far as road kill goes, I draw the line at raccoon, squirrel and opossum," Kasper says. "But—if it's fresh and not deeply damaged, I'll try it."