Deer Carne Guisada (spicy meat stew or slow and low simmered fajita type meat filling for tacos)
Hank Shaw recently published this awesome green chile stew/taco filling recipe over at https://honest-food.net/carne-guisada-recipe-venison/ saying he prefers using venison hind leg roasts. Hank Shaw is one of my favorite current game cooking writers and we have all of his books. If you don’t subscribe to his site, you should.
Hank writes, “You can also eat this as a stew without tortillas if you don’t cook it down all the way. If you are making tacos, toppings are up to you. I’d keep it simple: cheese, pickled onions, maybe a little pico de gallo.”
In our adaptation, we changed things around a little to accommodate the regulars in our pantry and our tastes here in the West, but this is a great recipe from the now legendary game cook, Hank Shaw, so we think it is a keeper after trying it and loving it. Here is our version, which uses the tenderloin instead of the roast:
Ingredients
- 3 tablespoons lard or vegetable oil
- 1 to 2 pounds deer tenderloin, sliced and cut into small strips
- 1 teaspoon ground cumin
- 1 tablespoon sea salt
- 2 large yellow onions, quartered
- 4 cloves garlic, unpeeled
- 1/2 pound tomatillos, husked and halved
- 1 teaspoon dried sage (optional)
- 1 quart venison or beef broth
- 2 mild chile pasados or chile negros, stemmed and re-hydrated
- 8 to 12 Hatch, NM, green chiles, roasted, seeded, peeled and cut into pieces
- 1/2 cup chopped fresh cilantro
Instructions
- Heat the lard in a Dutch oven or other large, lidded pot over high heat. When it is just barely smoking, add the venison and stir well. Sear the venison well. If it gives off a lot of water, just keep searing it until the water boils away. While this is happening, mix in the salt and cumin.
- Meanwhile, char the onion, garlic and tomatillos either under a broiler or or on a cast iron frying pan. You want a little bit of blackening. Peel the garlic. Roughly chop the onion and put it, the tomatillos, and the garlic, into a blender with the sage. Puree this, adding broth as needed.
- Add the contents of the blender to the pot and stir well. Pour broth into the blender to get all the good bits left there, and pour that in the pot. After the chiles pasados or negros are rehydrated, pour some of the rehydrating water into the pot, too. At the start, everything should be rather thin. Bring this to a simmer and let it cook, stirring occasionally, for 1 hour.
- After 1 hour, add the green chiles and continue to simmer until the meat is tender. You can eat this as a stew, or continue to cook it down until thickened, in which case you can eat it as a guisado on tortillas.