Wild Bites #17: a 3-minute read that makes you smarter about wild food and tells you what's to come on our website, podcast, YouTube, or To The Bone.

 -Hank and Holly (Team Hunter Angler Gardener Cook)

1. What's Hot Now

The meat in venison stir fry stays juicy and tender.

2. Smart Take: The Gateway Drug to Dry Aging

Dry aging can create spectacular flavor, but it is among the most challenging techniques to get right.

Yes, you can make an acceptable dry-ager for a couple hundred bucks, rather than spending thousands on a ready-made one. But dry aging only works well on large cuts of meat. And you need to know your molds, because some are good, but others create toxins that cannot be cooked away.

Jess Pryles of Hardcore Carnivore - Hank's first guest in Season 4 of the Hunt Gather Talk podcast - says wet aging is a perfect way for hunters to start dabbling in aging for flavor. You can use any cut of meat, and because you vacuum seal the meat, you don't have to worry about the growth of undesirable molds or bacteria.

Learn more about wet aging, and hear Hank and Jess debate - among other things - the seriousness of a bit of deer poop touching meat while you're gutting a deer, in the first episode of the season.

You can also read Hank's tutorial on dry aging venison.

3. Quotable

This will be my worst duck season ever. And I’m OK with that.

~ Hank

Hunters are fond of saying we don’t need to kill anything to enjoy a hunt. ... But no one enjoys going out day after day after day only to be met with failure.

~ Holly

Holly and Hank on our first duck hunt of the season together

One duck season, two people, two different takes on not bringing home ducks.

Holly has been hunting hard, but with little success until the very end of December. Drought has reduced local duck populations, and migrations seem to be coming later and later each year, which calls into question her work-hard-and-success-will-come approach to duck season.

Hank, on the other hand, has largely sat out this season, his motivation sapped by full freezers and Holly's struggles. He writes about it here.

4. What We're Up To

Sometimes a photo says almost everything you need to know about our life at the moment:

1. Holly eating dinner before dark Tuesday afternoon so she could head to bed early, her alarm was set for 12:45 a.m. to go duck hunting. Situation: normal.
2. Hank's crutches from meniscus surgery, waiting to find their way into storage. These things take time.
3. Sausage grinder - we've home brought some spoonies and snow geese, and Hank has been making grind with them - perfect for duck burgers.
4. Pressure cooker and canned stock - the waterfowl carcasses were (finally) piling up, so Hank made duck stock.
5. Batteries and poles for replacement teal Mojos Holly bought. She hunted with them the next day, but shot most of her teal after pulling them from her spread. (Sometimes spinning-wing decoys help; sometimes they hurt.)
6. Hurricane lamp on the ready, after losing power for 17 hours on Sunday in the massive storm that walloped our region (we were fine; more importantly, the meat in our refrigerators and freezers was fine).
7. Vac seal bags for all the ducks.
8. Boss shotshell bags. We love that Boss bismuth. (We did not get paid to say that.)
9. Binoculars. These are always on the kitchen table for watching the critters in our back yard.

5. Books. Clothing. Stickers.

Santa didn't get you what you wanted? We've got you covered at our store.

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