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Richard Jernigan -> RE: In your locality – what’s it really like? (Feb. 24 2021 23:36:27)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Escribano
What does moose taste like compared to beef steak?
My first taste of moose was at age 11 on our 12-day road trip from Oklahoma City to Anchorage, Alaska. North of Edmonton, Alberta the pavement ended at Lesser Slave Lake. We stopped for dinner and spent the night at a big comfortable log building. The establishment was owned by a French Canadian, who also worked as chef. The main course that evening was a delicious moose meat pie. The crust was thick and flaky. The filling was seasoned like an American pot roast, the meat in bite size chunks. The chef, dressed in flannel shirt, "tin" pants and logger boots served it, along with an account of the hunt the day before when he bagged the moose. It was midsummer.
When I was in Alaska in October and December of 2018, locally raised reindeer was at least as common on the menu as beef in Anchorage and points north. Compared to moose it was mild but flavorful.
Some of my memories of eating moose are not especially fond. My Anchorage Junior High School home room met in the cafeteria. When we saw a moose carcass hanging in the kitchen in the morning, we had hamburgers for lunch at the drugstore across the street.
In the depth of winter there were miles-long stretches of the Alaska Railroad where the snow formed vertical walls six or eight feet high on either side of the track, with just enough room for the train to pass through.
If a moose was on the track in such a stretch, the train crew had no choice but to kill it and load the carcass into the baggage car. By the time the train arrived in Anchorage the carcass was likely to be frozen. It would be donated to one of the schools in town.
In mid-winter the moose were half starved, the meat was dry and tough, and it tasted very strongly of the spruce and fir foliage the moose had been subsisting on. There were often plentiful bone splinters from the moose's encounter with the train.
I'm sure ernandezR's preparation was far, far better than public school moose!
While we visited a half dozen families of my ex-wife's cousins in Norway, at one excellent dinner we were served "elk" roast and gravy. That's what they call moose in Norway. It was flavorful, tender and delicious. Its flavor and texture were different from beef, but not "gamy" like a Texas white tail buck in late season.
That visit was in midwinter. The moose had wandered into an apartment building in the northern edge of Oslo, and could not be safely herded out of the building. Its panicked attacks were dangerous, so the police had to kill it. The story made the morning paper. I have no idea why it was not half starved like Alaska moose at that time of year. We didn't ask our hosts how they came by the meat--but they seemed to be well connected.
RNJ
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