PNWtrekker
Member
I have read Louis L'Amour books on and off for most of my life. I "think" it's his books that call it the poorest western meat. With over twenty million copies sold, that would make a lot of skeptics. It's interesting how much media has an impact on cultural perceptions. That being said, the antelope I ate as a kid was awful, and we ate it most years. But looking back my mom was taught by her mom to cook everything well done+ they had some generational fears of trichinosis (probably a story there). The animals we shot were often highly stressed. It's how they hunted back then, you would see pickups blitzing back and forth across the dessert like the Baja 1000. We would field dress the animals toss them in the back of a dusty pickup truck and keep filling tags all day. When all the tags were filled after several day it was an 8-hour drive home. If we were lucky, we'd peel the skin and hang them over a creek, but it was very dry country where we hunted. And we never trimmed the gristle or silver skin back then. Thinking back, no wonder it tasted bad. I had the blessing of marrying a woman that does not like "gamey" meat. I learned over the years how to properly cool, butcher, and cook wild game. It has her stamp of approval as not being "gamey." Including antelope. Side note, I still continue to swap gloves every time I touch the fur. Especially on antelope and mule deer. May just be a superstition but I think it helps.
