Wild Game Gourmet
A Journey to a Happier and Healthier Lifestyle
By Brian Sherman
Larry White has served in the military, worked as a chef at several fine dining establishments and owned a restaurant and a food truck, and the story of his life even includes a chapter when he was heavily into fitness and weightlifting. Though he is still in the business of preparing food, his journey has taken a sharp turn away from away from the frenetic pace of the Lowcountry culinary scene and toward a simpler, outdoor-centric existence.
These days, White is known as the Wildgame Gourmet. He writes, blogs, hunts and fishes and does his best to spread the word about the advantages of pursuing your prey at places other than the grocery store, processing it yourself and enjoying a happier and healthier lifestyle.
White’s way of living wasn’t always as idyllic as it is today, though he did grow up in a town named Eden, spending countless hours outdoors, hunting, fishing and exploring the forests in the North Carolina foothills. Though he most likely didn’t know it at the time, he also was receiving an education that would serve him well in two of the stops he would make along the way to becoming the Wildgame Gourmet – courtesy of his grandmother, “who was a phenomenal cook and the person that ultimately inspired me to become a chef.”
His professional cooking career got off the ground during a stint as a culinary specialist in the U.S. Coast Guard, and he also was a personal chef during that time. He honed his by Brian Sherman A The Wildgame Gourmet: A Journey to a Happier and Healthier Lifestyle southernflavormagazine.com 25 skills at The Art Institute of Charleston and later put in 14-to 16-hour days in the kitchens of upscale Lowcountry restaurants including The Ocean Room at Kiawah Island and the Peninsula Grill and Circa 1886 in Charleston. All the while, he yearned for the opportunity to return to his pastoral roots – to slow down the pace of his life down and do the things he loved to do.
“I was looking for something with less-hectic hours,” he explained. “I decided to be a stay-at-home dad, and we decided to move out of Charleston.”
The White family landed in McClellanville, a small fishing town 38 miles up Highway 17 from the Holy City. White’s website, thewildgamegourmet.com, is packed with information on the variety of ways deer, wild pigs and wild turkeys can be prepared for the dinner table. He created most of the recipes on his own, though he did draw inspiration from the time he spent working with Marc Collins at Circa 1886.
“He really opened my eyes. He would have antelope and wild boar and show me what could be done with wild game,” White said.
“Being in the restaurant industry, I got to see higher- quality ingredients, and I dove into that. I’ve always been an outdoorsman and a hunter, and I missed being outdoors. So I came back to wild game; there’s nothing fresher than wild meat.”
White pointed out that those who eat wild game are getting “a whole lot cleaner product versus farm-raised meat that’s pumped full of hormones.” He said wild animals work their muscles harder, which means they provide your body with a lot more protein, ounce for ounce.
“Compared to a farm-raised chicken, the nutrient content of venison is a lot more,” he said.
White said his blog, which he started in 2017, now averages between 1,200 and 1,500 visitors a month. He gets financial support through sponsorships with meat processing companies, and he’s hoping for an appearance
on the Food Network sometime next year. In addition, he is on the culinary team that will be producing a master class on cooking wild game for GOHUNT, which “empowers you to get the most out of your hunting season,” according to the company’s website. White also plans to start a YouTube channel sometime soon.
Despite his busy schedule, he makes time to head west “every year or so” to hunt elk in Utah or Wyoming, and he said in April or May of next year, he hopes to visit British Columbia in search of black bear. He explained why he travels across the country to participate in one of his favorite pastimes.
“It’s definitely for the difference in meat,” he said. “And I’m more of a roamer. I like to cover miles and miles of land. It’s more satisfying to hike the mountains and use my binoculars to find animals.” He added that it’s also a lot more satisfying to process your own meat, for a variety of reasons. “You have the luxury of having your own cuts broken down the way you want. You can control the fat content by adding pork fat to your venison. That’s a huge perk. You know exactly how it was packaged,” he said.
He went on to explain that when he processes a white-tailed deer, for example, he freezes what his family isn’t going to eat right away, leaving the sections of the animal as whole as possible. He said parts that require slow cooking include the neck, shanks and shoulders, while hind legs are best suited to be prepared like steak or roast – cooked medium rare because they are so lean. He said any part of the animal is OK for grinding except the shanks and neck because the connective tissue “will clog up your grinder.”
White, now 41 and apparently at the end of an arduous career journey, has discovered what he was meant to do.
Smoked wild boar tomahawk chops, seared in cast iron and served with my spin on a Colombian spicy peanut sauce. Venison pastrami sandwich on toasted challah with homemade caraway kraut, pickled mustard seeds and a copious amount of Russian dressing. southernflavormagazine.com 27 In addition to recipes, White’s website offers additional advice on how to prepare wild game. For instance, he provides five tips “that will help you step up your venison steak cookery game a few notches. They include:
1. Once you remove the hide, don’t place the meat directly under the ice in your cooler. Instead, put it on top of the ice and leave the drain cap cracked so the water will leak out. Even better: Place a contractor’s bag on top of the ice so the meat doesn’t touch the ice.
2. The direction you cut your steaks after they are cooked makes a difference. Find the grain and slice in the opposite direction. And since venison is lean, don’t cut the steaks more than a half-inch thick.
3. Use high heat on steaks that are an inch or less thick and medium-to-high heat for thicker steaks. It’s also a good idea to have a cooler zone on your grill so you can use medium heat if you need to.
4. Don’t add seasonings other than salt and pepper until you are finished cooking. You can top off your steaks with butter blended with fresh herbs “for a high-end steakhouse experience.”
5. It’s important to let your steaks rest at room temperature both before and after cooking, and keep in mind that because a steak’s internal temperature continues to rise after sit has been removed from the cooking surface, you should take them off the grill when they are a few degrees below their optimum temperature.
White’s website offers tips and recipes on preparing a wide range of other wild game delicacies, from wild boar and wild turkey to offal – the “odd bits” of an animal, including the tongue, heart, liver, kidneys and tripe. And, living in a coastal fishing and shrimping village, he recently expanded his efforts into the worlds of fish and shellfish.