Executive Chef Graham Brown, a renowned expert on cooking with Cervena farmed venison from New Zealand, provides his tips for getting the best flavor & tenderness from this exciting meat.

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Transcript:
"The basic things that you need to know about cooking farm raised venison are that, first of all, this meat is not wild. It hasn't been ranged on mountains & rough fodder. It's been eating beautiful sweet grass all its life. It's been well looked after.

The meat is aged in the vacuum bag. It's not aged by hanging so it doesn't get oxidized, it doesn't get dehydrated, and it doesn't have a gamey flavor.

So you don't need to marinate it like you would do traditionally with wild-shot venison. So it's ready to use straight from the package. So open it up, pat it dry, and it's ready to use in whatever application you want.

That's not to say you can't marinate it for making a flavor profile to suit a particular dish, but it doesn't NEED to be marinated to make it ready for the plate.

The second thing is, when you do take it out of the vacuum bag, it will oxidize relatively quickly, so once you've done your cutting or fabrication, put it into a dish and cover it with a plain vegetable oil. It will keep in your refrigerator for another five or six days.

The most essential thing is to keep it nice & cold. For every day above the optimum temperature, which is 32F, or just above freezing, you lose a day's shelf life, so that's a good thing to remember.

When you're cooking with it, it's essential that you use some kind of oil or fat - just a little bit - because the meat is so lean. There's no fat on the exterior and there certainly is no intermuscular fat or marbling.

It doesn't matter what you feed deer on, they will not marble into the muscle like you would with other cattlebeasts & so on. So you need a little bit of oil or butter or some other medium, just to keep the meat from sticking & drying out on the outside.

You need to make sure the cooking surface is nice & hot, because you want to sear it to caramelize it to get that initial flavor started, and then you can cook it whatever way you want after that. I like to get that initial caramelization started to get that flavor profile going.

Seasoning can be simple or it can be complex, it's down to the dish that you're cooking it with.

The other thing is to make sure that you let it rest after you've cooked it. It is a protein, all protein shrinks up when you cook with it, and venison is no different. Particularly leg muscles, which are the working part of the animal. When you sear them over a barbecue, or a grill, or a hot pan, or a hot stove or anything, it will tend to shrink up a little bit. So once you've cooked it, let it rest. Make sure it's a little less done than you're going to serve it, and let it rest in a warm place. Let that whole muscle relax, and let the heat from the outside travel to the middle, and let the juices from the middle travel to the outside.

So it's a three way, win-win process for everybody. It benefits the meat & it's going to give the customer a better eating experience.

To serve it, you just need to bring it up to a service temperature by popping it back in the oven, or quickly back on the grill, just to bring the outside temperature up. And that's as simple as it is!"

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