By Lee Leschper
What’s your idea of a great meal of Alaskan bear?
A few weeks back I started a firestorm of debate on social media when I said I’d tried eating brown bear and found it inedible. And many shall-we-say outspoken Alaskans responded that (shall I say for polite company) I was an idiot.
As spring bear season is in full swing, it seems an appropriate time to ask–what’s your favorite bear recipe? Tell us how you like to cook your Alaskan bear, and let us share it with other bear hunters.
So here’s the challenge–send us your favorite recipe or technique for cooking both black bear and brown bear. And include considerations like time of year, what the bear has been eating and maybe age of the animal. Photos are okay too.
It’s an important consideration for hunters today to make the most of the game animals we harvest. Today those who do not hunt seem supportive for the most part of we who hunt to feed our families, but not for killing an animal with no intention of salvagine the meat.
Yet even Alaska’s department of fish and game acknowledges the question–meat from brown bears is not required to be salvaged in most cases, and black bear meat only until June 1.
I’ve received a couple of cooking suggestions already that sound interesting–
- corned bear, much like corned beef;
- smoking a whole bear ham, much like a pork ham; and
- grizzly breakfast sausage, which I’ve had from a friend’s fall bear, and found quite good.
My experience is based on my first big spring Southeast brownie, just out of the den and eating grass, so it should have been okay to eat. But it had a power “whang” to the meat, everyway we tried it, and finally gave up. But we have made sausage and summer sausage out of a number of spring black bears, with very satisfying results. My processor in southeast Alaska, Jerry’s Meats, makes a fine sausage, by the way.
It’s worth mentioning that most bears, at least here in Alaska, carry trichinosis and must be well-cooked to avoid contracting this nasty parasite.
So send us your favorite recipe and we’ll share it with other readers. Alaskan bears are a wonderful game animal, one of our favorites, and making the most of every bear you take is one more way to celebrate the Alaska outdoors.
Lee Leschper is publisher of AlaskaOutdoorDigest.com.
