Max’s Maverick Moose Loaf

March 9th, 2009 by Scott

This is Max:

Aside from being a total rock star and one of the coolest people I know (especially when he’s in his Batman getup), Max is the four-year-old son of my friends Emily and Greg, who are also kind of unfairly cool.  It obviously runs in the family.  So here’s the story: Last Fall, Emily had an idea to invite me to a super-swanky dinner party to celebrate the publication of Spain: A Culinary Road Trip, which she edited.  Like I said, unfairly cool, this person, although lacking the good judgment to keep me away from parties which feature both open bars and assorted celebrities.  Fortunately — and I’m not exactly sure how I pulled this off — I managed to have a friendly conversation with The Batali himself, after two cocktails, without either devolving into a slavering fanboy or making a whopping ass out of myself.  Nice.  The bulk of our discussion, as I remember it, concerned the duck hearts at Casa Mono.  They are excellent (as I was pointed out to declare in the New York Post).  The rest of the evening was equally strange and enjoyable, from the meal and the good company to the after-party, which found me at the Spotted Pig, somehow deep in conversation with Jimmy Fallon about his recent “master cleanse.”  Weird, but fun.

The following week, I felt it would be a nice thing to thank Emily for the invite.  Knowing Emily and Greg to be busy with Max — and with another addition to the family soon to arrive via stork, as well — I figured my thanks could come in the form of a home-cooked meal a la Shameless Carnivore.  They eagerly accepted, after which the question became “what to prepare?”

“Well,” said Emily, “we still have a lot of that moose and caribou that Greg brought back from his hunting trip in Alaska last year…”

“Wait a second,” I replied, incredulous.  “What are you doing holding on to all that wonderful product?”  She’d told me about the expedition months earlier, and, being a certain kind of carnivore, I simply imagined that they’d polished it off not long after.  To my delight and surprise, they hadn’t touched it.

“We didn’t really know what to do with it,” was her reasoning.

“Oh,” I said, with the sort of wicked, hungry grin that creeps across my face when I know there will soon be shenanigans, “I know what to do.  I know just what to do.”

* * *

Now, realize that this was last Fall, during which time, because of the predatory and culinary habits of a “mavericky” Vice Presidential Candidate, there was still a lot of discussion about Alaskan moose meat.  (Note: My favorite moose meat related bit came by way of David Reese’s brilliant Get Your War On.)  And here I was, amidst all the hubbub and hoopla, with an opportunity to sample the stuff, an opportunity, I’ll add, that didn’t present itself during the research for my book, which is sadly moose-free.  Caribou, yes, but no moose.

My plan was to cook up a classic American comfort food dinner — meatloaf, macaroni and cheese, and green beans — with my own little Shameless twist: not only would I be using moose for my loaf, but bacon as well.  Seeing as wild game such as venison, caribou and moose tend to be on the lean side, they’ve often been prepared with the addition of outside fats, a process known as “larding” or “barding.”  In this case, I decided to wrap the loaf in thick cut, hickory-smoked bacon from Tamarack Hollow Farm, which I’d been gifted after a recent cooking demo in the Tucker Square Greenmarket.  Brilliant, no?

When I arrived at the home of Max, Emily and Greg, I was greeted with warm smiles, a cold beer, and, straight from the freezer, packages of moose and caribou:

Unwrapping the thawed beast, I found a lovely cut of shoulder meat, glistening and dark in that deep crimson, iron-rich hue you’ll never find in a CAFO animal.  No two ways about it, this was truly wild protein, hunted in the frozen Alaskan hinterland.

Then I got to work.  First, I needed to grind the meat, which, you might be surprised to learn, doesn’t necessarily require an actual meat grinder (though if you have access to a $5,000 commercial Hobart, I cordially invite you to become my best friend).  For a small grinding job, all you really need is a food processor.  A Cuisinart is great, but even one of the mini jobs will work fine, provided you segment your meat in 1-2 inch slices and only grind a few at a time.  After all the Bullwinkle was nice and ground — also a good call when you’re cooking game animals, since the grinding also tenderizes the meat, which might tend to the tough side — I added a lightly beaten egg, a little milk, chopped onion, bread crumbs and spices, and mixed everything by hand.  With that finished, I layered the strips of bacon on the bottom of the loaf pan, like so:

All that was left to do from here was to pack the  meat into the loaf pan, top with the rest of the bacon, throw it in the oven and start working on the sides.  Of course, Kraft mac & cheese and simple veggies wouldn’t quite compliment this dish, so I upped my game a little, choosing a stellar Mac recipe from my friend Emily Farris’s wonderful cookbook, Casserole Crazy.  For the beans, I used a recipe from my childhood: simply steamed green beans — which Max helped me clean and pick the ends from — with salt and lemon pepper and a lemon-butter sauce.

Before I knew it, the loaf was ready.  We took it from the oven, carefully turned the loaf pan upside-down on the serving platter, and were gifted with this gorgeous sight:

Glorious!  Once sliced, drizzled in a simple brown gravy and plated with the sides, the meal was complete:

Of course, the big question on everyone’s mind was: What will moose taste like?  Venison?  Armadillo?  Old goats?  People?  Turns out, I have to hand it to Governor Palin — there’s a very good reason she’s hunting these suckers.  Moose has a rich, earthy flavor hard to come by in the world of modern industrial meat.  In fact, the only time I’ve ever had meat that’s tasted anywhere near this deep and pleasurably wild, it came from another hunted animal.  Even through the smoky, porcine layers of hog fat, we could all taste the essential “mooseness” of the dish.  And we loved every bite.

And so did Max.

Posted in Game 5 Comments »

5 Responses to “Max’s Maverick Moose Loaf”

1. Bruce Wayne (Max) wrote on 03/9/09 at 6:24 pm :

   THANKS FOR MAKING SAUSAGE FOR US. I LIKE YOUR SAUSAGE. –MAX (for real!)

2. Dan wrote on 03/9/09 at 7:06 pm :

   Scott, that sounds totally delicious! What can I do to get you to cook me a meal like that?

3. nana wrote on 03/10/09 at 10:20 am :

   being Max and now Sadie’s nana–I happen to know that Max also likes caribou and pasta–great article.– nana

4. Lu wrote on 03/18/09 at 10:01 am :

   When is the goat experiment?

   We’re ready!

5. Emily wrote on 05/20/09 at 10:22 pm :

   Just writing in to say I read your book, I loved it and I learned a lot. It always made me hungry.

   I took your advice and made the meat in my lamb stew into a sandwich the next day. It was amazing to say the least. I aspire to be as good a carnivore as you are one day.

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