New to smoking

[hotwheels9]

Hello from British Columbia Canada. Got my first buck with a bow opening morning of hunting season. In anticipation of harvesting my buck I purchased a smoker from Canadian Tire. It's a fairly inexpensive smoker. I believe it's a master chef but I figure it'll do the job until I get a bit of experience under my belt. Anyways I joined because I'm wanting to smoke a lot of that buck instead of just making sausage, pepperoni, etc. and was hoping to get some advice and recipes. I would like to smoke a back strap for dinner tomorrow night and was thinking of doing something with apples as I spent lots of time picking apples and feeding it to that buck. Might sound corny but it's kinda sentimental to me as I spent lots of time developing the area and feeding him. Also seeing him on the camera through out the year knowing he was the one I was going to harvest out of the other three that were on my game cam. Would appreciate it if someone could give me a good recipe to follow that would include something with apple accents or a apple rub I could do before or after I smoke the meat. Was also thinking about maybe stuffing it and wrapping it in bacon to give it a little fatty taste. Just want to say thanks and look forward to everything this forum has to offer. Cheers!

 

[noboundaries]

Hotwheels9, welcome to SMF!  Glad you here and looking for answers.  Roll Call is just for saying "hi," so check out the Wild Game section.  Ah, I just looked and you're there.

Enjoy the forum!

Ray 

 

[mike5051]

Welcome to the forum!   Congrats on that Buck!

Mike

 

[hotwheels9]

Thanks Mike

 

[smoketrailsteve]

Welcome! I grew up in BC but live in Alberta now. Love the hunting scene in BC. 

I got into BBQ/Smoking/Sausage making for exactly the same reason - to deal with whatever animal I harvested that year. 

My advice would be to brine/marinade the backstrap for a few hours. Try a brine mixture of 1 cup granulated salt to 1 gallon of water. Brine for about 1 hour per pound (plus 1 hour for good measure). You can throw other stuff in your brine like soy sauce, apple cider vinegar, worchestershire (sp?) etc.

After you brine it, dry it off and rub it with a good BBQ rub, then smoke it for a few hours at about 200-225 f. Based on the size of a typical backstrap I would only smoke it for maybe 1-2 hours and then wrap it up in aluminum foil. Add in some apple juice and apple cider vinegar to the foil packet when you wrap it. Then just leave it to finish in the electric smoker at 225 until the temperature gets to around 130f. Let it rest for 15 mins and then serve. 

The key is to brine, wrap sooner than later to retain moisture and then check temperature like a crazy person to ensure you don't overcook it. As you know, deer is super lean an its easy to turn backstrap into shoe leather. 

This is just off the top of my head what I wold do to make a "crowd pleaser" smoked game meal. Hope this helps. 

 

[smoketrailsteve]

​Also, one thing I didn't mention. I would stay away from using apple chips for smoking game meat. The flavour profile of apple chips is better for pork. Also, apple chips can impart a really strong and bitter flavour if you over smoke by just a little. Hickory works well with game. Just my 2 cents and personal experience with game meat. 

 

[hotwheels9]

Thank you so much. That was a lot of great advice.

 

[hotwheels9]

Okay so this is how it turned out

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• hotwheels9
• Sep 4, 2017

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• hotwheels9
• Sep 4, 2017

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• hotwheels9
• Sep 4, 2017

 

[gary s]

  Good morning and welcome to the forum from a beautiful sunny day here in East Texas, and the best site on the web.   Lots of               great people with tons of information on just about everything.

        Gary