1: My name is Michael Hunter from antler restaurant in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
And I'm gonna share with you one of my favorite recipes from my cookbook,
venison bolognese. So we've got some tagliatelle pasta, which is just a,
an egg noodle. We've got some base vegetables, carrot, onion, celery,
shallot, garlic.
I've got my ground white tail here and just some homemade tomato sauce,
but you can use any store brand that you like.
So first up we will dice our vegetables.
We'll do a small dice and we're just going to caramelize the meat in a great big
pot, add our vegetables and then our sauce. Okay.
So I'm gonna fine dice this veg, just because I want,
I want the texture to almost disintegrate into the sauce.
I don't want big chunks of onion or carrot in there.
So if you dice it fine or on the smaller side,
it won't be as noticeable in your sauce,
but you're gonna get that really nice depth of flavor that the onions,
carrot and celery provide.
And the real fun thing about this recipe is really how you finish it in a pan
afterwards. Once the sauce is,
is finished cooking and we cook the noodles,
I'm gonna show you how at the restaurant,
we toss it together with parmesan cheese and a little bit of butter to really
finish it off and make a nice rich beautiful looking pasta dish.
And again, I'm gonna cut these just as fine as I can.
You can use a mandolin slicer if you want,
or just do it by hand like this.
I'm adding a shallot in this dish as well. Shallots are just a small,
really powerful flavored onion. If you're not familiar with using them,
check it out, they add a lot of flavor to your cooking,
but they're not really the kind of onion you want to eat raw because they are so
strong. So they're great in sauces. And,
and brazes like this one,
or they're actually really nice pickled with some vinegar, but again,
they are super strong, so you don't need a lot of them. And of course,
garlic food of the gods.
I put garlic in almost everything.
This is gonna cook for about an hour or so. So you're,
you're gonna lose a lot of that really strong garlic flavor,
but it's just a nice base that I like to have in my sauce.
So now we'll start by cooking off our meat, get a nice brown color,
and then we'll add our base veg.
So first thing you want to preheat your pot.
This has been going for about five minutes. It is ripping hot.
You see the oil's already starting to smoke,
and then we're gonna add our ground venison.
So the reason why I start it so hot is because we're adding so much meat to the
pan at once.
It's gonna cool down rapidly and I'm trying to get little crispy bits on the
meat and what those crispy bits are, is just flavor.
That brown caramelization that I keep talking about is where all the flavor
comes from for my sauce. So when I first put it in,
it starts to smoke like crazy. And then literally 30 seconds later,
it cools down and will look something like this.
So from here, we want a season salt and pepper,
And I've got some chili flakes. Add those in.
You don't want it to be super spicy,
but a little bit of chilies just gives it a nice depth of flavor and adds a
little bit of underlying heat to the sauce. Okay.
From here, we'll add our vegetables to our sauce
And just let this saute
Until the onions go a translucent color.
So I've sauteed the onions,
carrots and celery for about three to four minutes.
And you can see what I mean by translucent on that onion.
It's kind of see through. And so what we've done,
we're concentrating all those flavors, cooking out some of this moisture.
You can see the steam coming out and that's where we're getting our flavor from.
So I'm gonna deglaze this bottom of the pan,
get all this kind of brown bits off with some white wine,
Just about a cup.
We want to let that wine cook off and we'll lose that alcohol flavor.
And you always want to add the wine first,
if you add wine at the end of your cooking,
you'll end up with that alcohol flavor. And we just want the, the wine,
the acidity and flavor from the wine grape, not the alcohol.
So that's why you add the wine. First.
I've got Some stock I've made from venison bones,
Some homemade tomato sauce,
And I've just added a whole bunch of unseasoned liquids to this.
So I'm gonna add some salt and pepper To give it some seasoning.
I've got some whole herbs that we'll add and pull out later,
And I'm gonna let this simmer for about 45 minutes to an hour,
just to reduce some of the liquid in there and concentrate the flavor and break
down that meat and veg.
So here's the consistency we want our bolognese to be.
Now's a good time to find those herbs we put in and just pluck those out.
And we're just gonna keep this at a simmer while we cook our noodles.
So we've got our pasta water going.
We're gonna add some salt to season the water, season the water.
We season our pasta And
add our pasta to the pot.
Now this says on the package five minutes,
we're gonna check after about three,
cuz we're still gonna cook it in our sauce for about a minute.
All right. So my pasta is just about done.
I'm gonna show you the best way to finish a pasta dish.
You could do this for multiple orders at a time or just one,
but I'm gonna start with one ladle of sauce and my pan, I've got the heat going.
I'm gonna transfer my pasta directly to the sauce,
and we're gonna end up cooking the pasta a little bit in the sauce,
and it's gonna absorb all that flavor right into the noodles.
A little bit of salt,
Just gonna let that simmer for a second.
So we're gonna add some butter and we're gonna basically toss this until
the butter melts and the butter is
being emulsified into our sauce.
The other thing we can do to build our sauce is add some basil and
fresh grated parmesan cheese.
You definitely want to try and find the wedge of parm like I'm using here.
The stuff that's already ground is not the same.
It doesn't have the same flavor.
Apparently there's milk powder in the cheese as well.
So it doesn't melt the same.
You see, there's no more chunks of butter.
It's all emulsified into our sauce and now we are ready
to eat and enjoy. Okay,
my next little trick I'm gonna share with you is a little cookie cutter.
We have stainless steel rings at the restaurant.
We'll use to plate our pastas just so it's not spilling all over the plate
and it looks a little bit neater.
You can wind it around a meat fork too, is another trick.
This is the one we do. You can kind of spin your tongs, Your hand,
And any added sauce you can add on top.
Finish with a little more grated, parm
And fresh
basil.
We have venison Bolognese with Tagliatelle pasta straight from the hunter chef
cookbook. This is for north American Whitetail magazine. Hope you enjoy this.