Photo by Stacy Landers, courtesy of Victoria Loomis
I killed my first deer on my sixteenth birthday.
As the kind of kid who named caterpillars, who tamed the stray cats from our barn and cried at the sight of blood—I hadn’t previously had much interest in this particular rite of passage. My dad had always found ways to include me in the tradition, though. He’d bring me on “camera hunts,” setting up early in the morning on the deer stand, where we’d watch the forest come alive—warmed by a space heater, snacking on beef jerky and powdered donuts.
But on that January morning, something clicked. The little buck looked right at me, my dad whispered encouragements into my ear, and I surprised myself by pulling the trigger. The deer ran, straight over the nearby bluff. Quietly we climbed down from the stand and made our way down the hillside—both of us wholly prepared for a full-on tracking expedition. And then we saw it: I’d shot well and true, straight through the heart.
That day is one of my favorite memories spent with my dad. We pulled the deer up the hill together, and back at the camp he showed me how to clean it. We celebrated with lunch at The Myrtles, then went home victorious—one of the best backstrap dinners I’d ever have waiting in our future.
And just like that, I was part of it. My story joined the tapestry of first kills that in so many ways shape the individual histories—spanning generations—of growing up in this place, of harvesting and tasting, of sharing and storytelling.
When speaking recently with Chef John Folse, one of our region’s top authorities on—and proponents of—wild game cuisine, he said “When I think of myself as a Louisiana chef that brings stories around the world, the best stories I can tell are not about my restaurant in NOLA, they’re not about my catering company in Baton Rouge. They’re about the roots of our cooking. How blessed we are in this utopia of plenty in South Louisiana.”
Folse’s project, for decades, has been to encourage a return to the culinary roots that shaped Louisiana’s distinctive cuisine—a return to the land we’ve inherited. The path to encouraging more wild game cooking, he’s long held, is laden with creativity—moving past the generic ground meat and sausage typically made from deer killed today.
“Growing up as a young boy in the swamp in the 1950s, the whole animal was a treasure trove of opportunity, just a treasure trove,” he said. “There is a place on the table for all primal cuts.”
Kimberly Meadowlark
Chef Dalton Prince, grilling marinated venison tenderloin.
In recent years, as consumers have become more wary of industrial-scale factory farming’s environmental impacts, treatment of animals, and lack of transparency—the move to sourcing local has coincided with an uptick in hunting across the nation. Since 2020, this trend has only accelerated as Americans sought out new hobbies, particularly those that brought them outdoors.
Speaking with five chefs—who each came to the deer stand from wildly different backgrounds—we delved into the versatile world of venison cuisine. For experienced outdoorsmen and new hunters alike (as well as for generous hunters’ lucky friends), we’ve curated a collection of recipes that bring Louisiana’s prized game to the table in forms both elegant and approachable, classic and surprising.
As wild game food blogger Nathan Judice said in a recent interview: “Anyone can cook like this. You can use venison in pretty much anything you can imagine. It’s so versatile, and it’s so healthy. The possibilities are endless.”
Chef John Folse
When John Folse speaks of his childhood, he describes the St. James Parish bayous he grew up in as “the swamp floor pantry” and a “storeroom of plenty”. “We never, ever thought about food, because there was so much,” he said. “It was all over the place.”
At as early as six years old, Folse remembers being let out of school for the holidays and heading straight for the swamp with his cousins. “We’d go into a little family camp that was very very simple, and we’d stay there for two weeks or a month by ourselves, deer hunting. We just had to be home for Christmas, our mama said.”
Eating exclusively what they grew, farmed, and killed, Folse said that his family never wasted a single piece of any animal. There were family recipes designed to cater to each part of the deer—they’d braise the tough cuts, throw the kidneys in a stew, sautée the brain for breakfast. As a chef in an increasingly-mass produced world, Folse said he still craves those dishes of his childhood. “But unless I killed the deer myself, those parts were hard to find. People just throw them away.”
Courtesy of Chef John Folse
Chef John Folse, pictured with his Venison Rolled Roast
He shared many of these recipes in his wildly-popular 2007 cookbook After the Hunt: Louisiana’s Authoritative Collection of Wild Game & Game Fish Cookery. “The game book has absolutely been the most sought after book of mine,” he said. “It was the story I wanted to make sure we brought into generations to come. This is the foundation we stand on in Louisiana cooking.”
His Deer Bombs recipe, created for a group of firemen in search of an easy, quick way to use their game, is now a regional favorite and can even be found as an appetizer on local menus. “You just pound out some cuts of meat—the best of the venison, pounded out, tender—and wrap it up in bacon with vegetables or cheese, all the things we love. It’s so simple, a little nothing recipe that really at the end of the day is what our cooking is all about: taking what we have in the moment and deciding how to eat it.”
For a surprisingly simple, showstopping dish, Folse recommends roasting a rack of venison. “You have a small rack of tenderloin with the bones in, just roasted whole. I would serve that to a king.”
And then of course, there’s the heart. “The heart is so underutilized,” he said. “People either throw it away or into a stew.” Since his book’s release, he said, his Stuffed Venison Heart has become one of the most popular dishes he makes. “You stuff the heart with a spicy venison sausage, then braise it in a cast iron skillet—it doesn’t get better than that.”
Get Chef Folse's recipes for Deer Bombs, Rack of Venison, Venison Rolled Roast, and—of course—Sausage-Stuffed Venison Heart in our recipes archive.
Chef Victoria Loomis
For Victoria Loomis, a private chef working in the Natchez area, deer hunting is a spiritual experience. Though she grew up in a hunting family, it wasn’t until her mid-twenties, during a difficult stage of her life, that she really embraced the lifestyle.
I kind of had to rebuild my life in a sense,” she said. She started with duck hunting as an outlet for her black lab. “She led me into that world,” she said of her dog Ellie. And the prospect of clean, ethical meat-consumption kept here there, eventually leading her into a deer stand.
“I found a home in deer hunting,” she said. “It was very healing for me during that time. I would just sit in the deer stand and spend eight hours at a time, thinking ‘I’m never leaving here. This is it.’ In a way, I went from being prey to predator. I grew to feel more secure in my skin than I ever had in my entire life.”
Photo by Stacy Landers, courtesy of Loomis
Victoria Loomis’s Venison Backstrap, served with okra and potatoes.
These experiences coincided with Loomis’s training at the Louisiana Culinary Institute and lent a renewed sense of reverence to her approach to food.
“I think it’s safe to say that a lot of America suffers from careless eating, not truly appreciating their food,” she said. “There’s no thought put into it, just munch munch munch. The difference with hunting and harvesting your own animal and putting the work in—the mental work, the physical work. To spend the time breaking down an animal and to see every part of it. It calls me to be more mindful than I ever have been in my life.”
[Read our profile on Chef Victoria Loomis, published in our October 2020 issue, here.]
When Loomis is preparing deer, she emphasizes the value of retaining as many of the meat’s nutrients as possible. “Basically, the least processed, the more raw, the better,” she said. “I’m not against frying deer meat, but it’s the last thing you’ll ever see me do. Like only if a customer really wants it.”
While Loomis is known for her innovative takes on game (During our conversation, she hinted at a Venison King Cake)—when it comes to deer, she tends to best love the prized fare: the tenderloin and the backstrap. Prepared with blackberries and a coffee rub, her recipe “exists for celebrations and camaraderie” of a hunt ended in harvest.
Get Chef Loomis's recipe for Venison Backstrap with Okra and Potatoes in our recipes archive.
Chef Kim Kringlie
Kim Kringlie, like many Louisiana chefs, grew up hunting deer—but not in a deer stand. A Grand Forks, North Dakota native, Kringlie remembers hunting with his father and brothers before school—his hunting clothes layered over his school uniform for an easy transition. “We’d hunt everything,” he said. “Duck, antelope, deer, bear.”
Hunting deer in the Midwest is a totally different art form than it is in South Louisiana, and often revolves around “shelterbelts”—lines of trees the United States Forest Service planted around the perimeters of farms during the 1930s as a response to the soil erosion and drought of the Dust Bowl.
“We would walk both sides of the shelterbelts, which were usually two hundred to three hundred yards wide, using walkie talkies,” said Kringlie. “The deer would be hanging out there, and we’d kind of scare them out, get them moving, then shoot.”
Kimberly Meadowlark
On a recent Saturday morning, Chef Dalton Prince grilled up some venison tenderloin for this writer, spontaneously using it on top of a roll with a poached egg and paprika.
Since moving to Louisiana in 1983 he’s settled his way into the more sit-back-and-wait style of hunting practiced here, while also mastering the nuances of Louisiana cuisine. His Covington establishment TheDakota Restaurant has presided over the Northshore as a fine dining classic for over thirty years now.
One of his favorite ways to prepare venison is “au Huitres du Bienville”. “You either sauté or roast your venison, and serve with oysters in a Bienville sauce. It’s a way to introduce that classic Louisiana style to wild game, which I’m a big fan of.”
The best thing about being a hunter in Louisiana, according to a North Dakotian chef? “They eat everything down here!”
Get Chef Kringlie's recipe for Venison au Huitres du Bienville in our recipes archive.
Chef Dalton Prince
A recent graduate of the Chef John Folse Culinary Institute at Nicholls State University, Dalton Prince has been eating venison since he was a child growing up in Labadieville. “Ever since I could hold a gun, I was shooting small game—rabbits, squirrels, birds,” he said. “Then I got into deer and duck. We’ve always been the kind of family that kind of lives off the land.”
Prince killed his first deer with his grandfather, at age twelve. “The first one is always the best,” he recalled. But the harvest that impacted him most deeply came later, at age seventeen.
“For that one, I had started to really hunt on my own, do all of the work myself—the whole nine yards. Doing everything I could to get that perfect hunt.” That deer, said the chef, “was the most satisfying meal of my entire life. I had put all the work in, from beginning to end. The purity of it, you can’t get that anywhere else.”
Kimberly Meadowlark
Chef Dalton Prince presents a Venison Philly Cheesesteak Sandwich
While attending culinary school, Prince enjoyed applying the lessons he was learning to the wild game he’d kill. “It really rounded it all out and helped me to evolve, to add new flavors, new techniques,” he said. “It was really fun to bring those to the camp, or when cooking with the family.”
These days, Prince dedicates at least one cut of every deer he kills to experimentation. Still, when cooking with friends he often turns back to that most satisfying meal: “I took the backstrap,” he said. “I sliced it really thin, marinated it in Mexican spices—cumin, garlic, onions, pepper. It was like this fajita-Philly cheesesteak sandwich. I don’t even really know, but it was fantastic.”
Get Chef Prince's recipe for a Venison Philly Cheesesteak Sandwich in our recipes archive.
Nathan Judice
About five years ago, Nathan Judice was shopping at the grocery store, staring at the rows and rows of cellophane-packaged meat. The environmental consultant couldn’t get the thoughts out of his head: “How many people, how many machines, have touched this meat?”
The epiphany drove him to shop more exclusively from local butchers, and to get involved in the Red Stick Farmers Market in Baton Rouge. And eventually, to return to the woods. “I decided, you know, I’m just going to start public land deer hunting—trying to get more of my own meat from what I catch or kill. It was this goal I had.”
A hobby chef, Judice started documenting his journey on Instagram, drawing an enthusiastic following on his account @recreationalchef, which includes photographs of plates boasting dishes like “Basic Bitch Venison Meatloaf,” Venison Heart Pizza, and Venison Chops and Zoodles.
Nathan Judice
Venison Neck Osso Bucco
“One thing that motivated me to cook wild game was the challenge of preparing it the way it should be cooked, not just turning everything into ground meat,” he said. “Being able to break down an animal into the different cuts of meat and figuring out what to do with them.”
During the fall, he said that one of his favorite venison meals to make is a venison shank with sweet potato grits. “Most people grind the shank up,” he said. “It takes longer to cook, you have to braise it. It’s similar to osso bucco, but not as large—you can typically braise the whole shank.”
For more adventurous eaters, Judice said that he’s made a venison tartar. “Venison is such good protein, and so low in fat,” he said. “And like beef, you can eat it raw in some cases. You take some pieces of backstrap or top sirloin, dice that up really fine, and make a tartar. And it’s actually really, really wonderful.”
Get Nathan Judice's recipes for Venison Tartar and Venison Osso Buco with Sweet Potato & Goat Cheese Grits in our recipes archive—and follow him on Instagram at @recreationalchef.
