Processing Small Game Opossum - WARNING GRAPHIC

[mrostov]

The animal in this video was harvested legally on private property in Ohio, USA.

This video shows the full spectrum of how to deal with a food animal in a bushcraft environment from being caught live in a snare to cooking. Depending upon where you live, your small game species may vary, but the principles and techniques remain the same.

Remember, live food never spoils.

FYI, Opossum, aka possum, is the only marsupial native to N. America. They are common and plentiful. Under some circumstances they will fight an animal their size or smaller. They can mess up a cat or a dog. With larger animals they play dead, and they even emit a musk that imitates a dead animal odor out of their mouths when doing this.

 

[mrostov]

On this one they are dealing with a pheasant.

 

[Robson Valley]

Yum. I've got the wild raspberries, strawberries and 3 kinds of wild blueberries for making the sauce.
There's grapes down by the river.

You like pheasant? Tough as a mallard.

 

[mrostov]

What I have found is that if you use vinegar in the cooking process, and there are a couple of methods for doing this, it makes it a lot more tender and neutralizes much of the wild game taste. Vinegar is an acid. When you cook it with vinegar it relaxes and tenderizes the meat.

This is one of the reasons for the original method of cooking birds the Italian cacciatore (hunter) style. That is where you cut up the bird, lightly brown the pieces in a bit of olive oil, a bay leaf, some crushed garlic, and some onion (cook the onion till clear before you toss the bird in). Then, after the pieces are lightly brown, put a teaspoon of pesto sauce on each piece and throw into the hot pan 1/4 cup of balsamic vinegar, covering it for 12 minutes as it steams in the vinegar.

I've done something similar to wild boar. I boiled it and threw in 2 cups of vinegar (big pot), a bunch of spices, and a bit of tomato sauce at the beginning of the boil.

Personally, I don't mind the wild game taste unless you shoot a turkey that has been living in a farmers commercial jalapeno pepper field. I never thought you could get a pre-hot-spiced bird. The best deer is one you shoot in an apple orchard that has been living on fallen apples. Deer absolutely love cannabis plants, so I have always wondered what it would be like to eat venison that was living in and around some pot fields.

 

[Robson Valley]

Pot will be legal across Canada July 01, if the feds don't drag their feet.
I'd like to see the pot-stoned deer here in the village.
Somehow, I can't believe that they are doing anything new around here.

I can tenderize ducks, pheasants, turkeys and Canada geese in the cooking. If it flies it dies. I'm so glad that I have a choice.
#1 on the list has to be our Ruffed grouse. I just do not like the taste of prairie, grain fed pheasant. Bad as Llama.

Mind you, I've never had possum. Would like to try that some day.

I find that the much milder organic acids in wines do a better job.
I'm not sure that I'd drink XXX Creek "Dry White" if it was the last bottle in my house.
I hunt bison with a check book. 17 years this spring.

 

[Janne]

If I only bagged or bought one birdie, that is what I would do, except I would take off the wings after I freed up the skin. I would keep the upper wing part as it has a bit of meat too.

Did I get plenty of birds, I would only skin the part where the breast is, and cut out the breast with underlaying ribs.

Fresh they are mild tasting in UK and Sweden. If they hand a day or three, I like to soak them in Mild youghurt for a couple if hours.

Cook with a decent wine, low and slow.
Why not cheap XXX Dry Creek? If no good to drink = no goid to cook with.

Cheap and good = plenty from New Worlds.
Cheap and good white wine? Anything dry from Venetto.

 

[Robson Valley]

Professional chef advice that cheap dry wines have robust taste. True. Good wines are grease for the cook. Best is for guests.
For wine braised bison, the mix calls for red wine. BUT, I don't want to present purple food. So I use half and half and claim all red.

Ruffs stuffed with a pomegranate dressing are OK.
There's so little on the wings and legs of out Ruffs that we just field dress them to chill the breast meat
and toss the rest back into the forest for the scavengers to smell out.

Lay the grouse on it's back on the ground and stand on the wings.
Slowly pull on the legs.>> everything comes off but the 2 wings attached to the breast.
Research shows that the faster the meat chills, the less lactate and the better it tastes.

 

[santaman2000]

Professional chef advice that cheap dry wines have robust taste. True. Good wines are grease for the cook. Best is for guests......

Cook = Somebody who gets paid poorly to cook the food you like the way you like it.
Chef = Somebody who gets paid very well to tell you what food you like and how you want it cooked.

Amateur cook and professional eater here. If you wouldn't drink it; don't cook with it.

 

[Janne]

I wonder: When you clean and dress (undress?) a rabbit or hare, you hang them up with head UP, then gently massage the abdomen. (Or you held them with head up in your hands, and massage the abdomen)
The urine and faeces close to the anus comes out nicely.
Do you do the same with possums?

He did not do it, and the poo almost touched the meat.

 

[Robson Valley]

Not every professional chef is schooled so ignorantly. Some have common sense by mistake.

 

[Janne]

How does Possum taste?

Like squirrel ? Suckling Bison?

 

[Robson Valley]

Suckling bison? Gotta be 95% bone and 1/2 of that is skull.
Depending on when they are born, early or late, a 2-yr old bison weighs about 2,000 lbs.
Bison could stampede for a couple of days because, unlike a cow, the trachea is bigger than your arm.

On the hook, a side weighs about 300 lbs and you lose another 20%+++ as bone.
The butcher prices the cut on the hook weight so your take home cost is climbing.

Think I might ask for a heart and maybe liver this year.

Blast a couple of organic possums when you can (sustained yield) might be some good suppers.
A little easier to carry out of the woods, too.

 

[Janne]

I would love to try a possum.

One thing I disliked with Mr Cantebury’s video.
He left it live for way to long. Being trapped is very stressful for an snimal, and painful too.
Then when a human/ other predator approaches the trapped animal must get scared sh#tless.

The proper way is to kill it as quickly and humanely as possible.
The meat will not spoil in one hour.

Maybe he did it because it looks more pro bushcraftey?

 

[Robson Valley]

Once upon a time, there was a graduate student at Texas A & M University. She was doing her research in Food Science.
The unequivocal conclusion was that game is best cared for with rapid cooling.
Gut-shot and run 1/2 mile does not matter as much as the chill.

You may think the animal is dead but there are many life processes, biochemical processes, which do not stop suddenly.
The faster you chill the meat, the faster these processes slow and stop.
Who cares? The direct metabolic end product will be lactate, lactic acid.
That gives you muscle pain and cramps with heavy exertion and I, for one, will not eat it in my meat.

My Ruffed grouse don't have their feathers on and guts in for 5 minutes after the drop.

 

[Janne]

For sure, but many Animalia improve by some maturing.
Cod is best if kept in the fridge for a day. Beef up to a couple of weeks. Pork a day or two.
Most birds 3-7 days.

 

[Robson Valley]

You're talking something totally different.
1. Chilling cuts the lactate and resulting sour tough consistency.
2. At 4C, the cells of the dead animal begin to break down from the release of the contents of autolytic lysosome organelles.
The proteases (lysosomal enzymes) clip the tough collagen fibrils in connective tissue "tenderizing" the meat in general.
This is the biochemistry of what you call maturing. It works very well. Chiling is still the most important.

As a note added in proof, I ask for all my bison meat to be hung at 4C for at least a week.
Ten days is too long as the lean meat begins to lose water weight by drying.

If that possum got an olive oil rub then a 3 day hang in a cold room, it would be twice the dinner.

 

[mrostov]

In the US, possums have a reputation as a scavenger. Most people won't eat them unless desperate. It's considered poor hillbilly food, roadkill waiting to happen. However, what our ancestors did during the Great Depression, when many a possum wound up on the menu, was insightful. The preferred method of harvesting possum was to snare it alive like Dave Canterbury did, but then put it in a cage and feed it corn for at least 3 days before butchering it. It was believed that it would clean them out a bit.

To me, possum tastes a bit rabbitish, but a possum has way more fat on it than a rabbit. Unlike a rabbit, you could actually live off of a diet of possum. I don't mind eating them as they spend a good chunk of their life up in a tree. Where I draw the line isn't possum, but armadillo. They eat armadillo in Mexico, you would be hard pressed to find an American eating one.

Possums are all over the place here in Texas. So, IMHO, the are a reserve food supply. If the wind blows at night and the windshield of my vehicle gets a sprinkling of dust or pollen, I can often see those distinctive possum tracks on the windshield in the morning, including the spots where they started to slide.

 

[Robson Valley]

Not enough to put me off. Not by a long shot.
I reserve the rights to supply half a dozen scratch sauce recipes. to try with possum.
Thanks, mrrostov. Armadillo? Texas Speed Bumps. Pass. They eat bugs???

Culinary efforts beyond mice always appeal to me. You ever skinned a mouse?
You put more effort into skinning that the the cooked return.

<delete> a whole paragraph of things you need to be able to do on a simple camping trip.


Just stuff that you and your kids should be able to do.
I taught my girls to cook fish in clay jackets, as I had been taught.
I think that it is fairly important to practice these things BEFORE you head down the track.
Then you look like such an ace with the food.

Cooking fires are not 48" wide and 60" tall.
Take a lesson from every First Nations tribe in North America.
Make "keyhole fires" = one for warmth and light, then drag coals down the key for cooking.

 

[santaman2000]

Not enough to put me off. Not by a long shot.
I reserve the rights to supply half a dozen scratch sauce recipes. to try with possum.
Thanks, mrrostov. Armadillo? Texas Speed Bumps. Pass. They eat bugs???.....

Armadillos eat bugs? Yep. So do possums

For that matter, so do trout. And Bluegill.

 

[mrostov]

Armadillos normally eat mostly bugs, etc. The old timers used to call them 'grave diggers'. They dig so well people way back when assumed they would eat the dead in their graves.

Hear tell they don't taste that good, but the reason I don't even touch them is that they are the only animal besides humans which suffer from leprosy, and armadillos of the US southwest are known to sometimes carry it. So, not knowing which ones do or don't (if it's visible it will show on their bellies, which is hard to see) I generally don't physically touch them if at all possible.

Other critters I avoid are:

skunks (bad sprayed odor and rabies)

feral dogs (run in packs in the US Southwest and mix with coyotes to make them wilder, and can be vicious, rabies)

mice (a wide variety of diseases including bubonic plague and 1 in 12 in the USA now have the nasty variety of hanta virus)

Texas has some of the world's largest bat colonies, a disturbingly high percentage of them carry rabies. You don't have to get bit, you can get it simply from getting guano on you.

I also avoid squirrels in the US southwest if I see some laying dead on the ground in the area for no apparent reason (bubonic plague). Otherwise they are fair game and not bad eating.

Skinning predators, especially coyotes, in the US southwest also runs a plague risk if you get their blood on your skin. They tend to eat infected rodents.

Rabbits and hares in the warm months in the southwest are crawling with ticks and other parasites and aren't worth the trouble until cold weather hits, unless you are really desperate.

Feral cats tend to avoid you unless you get one in a trap or snare (very common occurrence within many miles of any large town or city) and they can carry plague and rabies, in addition to simply being as mean as mean gets when trapped live. One man in the local area a while back lost his fingers and toes to necrosis caused by bubonic plague after he was bit by a feral cat that he tried to rescue because it was choking on a mouse. Phoenix alone has over 1 million stray cats just within the urban metroplex.