I just went to Deer Camp with some fancy chefs…and they overlooked the livers and hearts! I rescued a couple and brought them home and cooked them up. In the end, the livers were worth overlooking—perhaps super-fresh is the only way to go with them. But the heart I cooked was very, very nice. Lots of muscle-meat flavor with some of the smooth, tenderness of organ-meat.
It’s a highly recommended Deer Camp lunch-after-kill type of meat.
Anyway, here’s the way to cook a heart: Wash it a few times, slice it up into 1/2-inch steakettes, clean off scraps of this’n’that, wash it some more. People say to soak it in milk for an hour. I soaked mine in saltwater awhile, too. Whatever. Then fry some bacon and onions and garlics and remove from pan and pat off grease. Dip the heart pieces in salt’n’peppered flour. Heat up a couple tablespoons of butter to the previous bacony, oniony fry-leftovers. Then fry the heart pieces in that for a few minutes on each side—I prefer leaving them med-rare so they’re tender. Take out and cover with bacon and onion mix and serve over rice, say, with bread and extra-hearty red wine. Oh yeah!
Actually I did a fancy French reduction on top of all that, which was fun, but not necessary. The flavor of the heart held its own, by itself. But if you want to do the reduction, just add a couple tablespoons of whisky to the leftover crusty-everything in the pan, heat and stir slowly for a couple minutes, then set it on fire and swish it all around in pan til the fire goes out, then heat a bit more til it’s a gravy and pour on top of everything. Can’t go wrong. The recipe I was using included some sweet liquer, too, but no need for that, it just covers the excellent heart flavor.
