With its pale color and similar taste, the meat may be likened to a raccoon or rabbit. When contemplating skunk for your menu, the catching procedure is the first step.
When coping with a skunk, just like every other animal, you must know what to do in the event of an encounter. Skunks are quite similar to raccoons and might be trapped in the same way. After that, pat the skunk dry and hang it from its rear legs. After the animal has dried, take a sharp blade and work on it, cutting the legs and ringing the feet.
The gastrointestinal system is where things start to become a little more complicated. This phase does not need a sharp tool such as a blade; your hand will do. If you move or contact the anal duct too much, you risk contaminating the meat and imparting an undesirable taste to it. The further you move and struggle to remove the tissue, the more odor you emit, so try to get it done fast and efficiently. After that, you may begin the cooking procedure.
I rendered this fat — it stays pretty liquid like chicken fat, so I put it in the fridge. But it was good when it was fresh, in a gravy. To cook the raccoon in all its fat would make it too greasy. One guy I know uses live traps to catch raccoons and then drowns the varmints in a trash can full of water.
I wish starlings were tasty but they allegedly taste horrible. We have altogether too many of the little buggers around here. I would like to try pigeon though. Jesus Christs! Shooting a trapped animal with a pellet gun or drowning it etc is disturbed. In NC you must destroy any wild animal that is trapped. It is illegal to trap and relase. I remember Laura Ingalls Wilder writing about eating blackbirds that were destroying crops.
She wrote that the whole family loved the meat. What a great post! I am fairly snobbish about what I will eat — the conventional animals mainly,but I do eat the offal at least, which most Americans seem to find gross.
I live in a fairly red neck area and I remember talking to my neighbor who mentioned he was trying to lose weight, and eating mostly fish. I said -so no raccoon huh? Please note that it is illegal to kill most birds in the US. The exceptions are the non-natives specific species include House Sparrow, European Starling, and Rock Dove — aka common pigeon and game birds hunting license required.
Everything else is protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. I did a post a few years ago on eating pests , including links to old-time recipes for house sparrows and insect pests. It a slow, painful and completely wrong way to kill an animal. Squirrel and opossum have been on that list. My dad has tried opossum and says it reminded him of pork.
Snake is okay. It also has a lot bones so you have to chew carefully. Crawdads are a delicacy down here and frog legs very well should be. Crawdads taste somewhere between lobster and shrimp. They make great gumbo but are usually boiled with lots of spices. Frog legs are mild like chicken but delicate like fish and are great fried or with butter.
There was a recent episode of Nature on PBS about skunks, with various interesting tidbits of information, including a chemistry-based formula for neutralizing the smell involving peroxide, baking soda, and detergent. It mentioned that skunks can range over a few miles in their search for food, and can have a number of burrows in their territory.
Once you have the anal glands removed, you can work the rest of the skin off easily as any other animal. Carefully inspect for any fat tissues that may conceal other scent glands. We found some in the pits of the legs, around the neck and various other locations. These look like small light colored beans. Remove all of these or you may end up with more off flavors. In the final product, we noticed only a very minor hint of skunk smell with most of the flavor simply sweet meat.
I prefer cooking as a stew since this is a lean meat. Joel is one of the original founders of SurvivalCache. Joel is an avid outdoorsman and spends much of his free time in the mountains.
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