Italian Venison Ribs Recipe - How to Cook Venison Ribs | Hank Shaw (2024)

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Cooking venison ribs can be worthwhile, and in the case of this recipe is definitely so, but there are some things you should know before starting. Otherwise, you could end up with a mouth full of chewy meat and waxy fat. And no one likes that.

You can’t just barbecue a venison rib like pork or beef ribs, largely because deer and their cousins are almost always older than their analog in the barnyard.

A typical whitetail is two to four years old, and the largest bull elk and moose can be well over a decade old. Beef is normally about eighteen months old when slaughtered, although grass-fed animals tend to be a few months older than that. Hogs are rarely more than a year old, and most of the ribs you find in a supermarket came from pigs that were about four to six months old.

Age does two things: It makes the meat tougher and more flavorful. To enjoy the latter, you must deal with the former. The answer is to braise or otherwise par-cook your venison ribs before finishing them in another way, if you choose to go that route.

Slow, moist, moderate heat gradually breaks down the connective tissue in the ribs and makes them tender enough to enjoy. On large animals, you can follow beef short rib recipes, and on deer and antelope, think closer to baby back ribs.

How do you get there? The simplest way is to season your ribs and braise them in broth with some herbs and vegetables until they are tender. This takes a few hours. You can also use a pressure cooker. Cover the venison with some water or broth and cook at full pressure for about thirty minutes.

Fat is the other issue. As any of you who have ever eaten it know, deer fat can be problematic. It is made up of very long-chain fatty acids that will coat your mouth unpleasantly as it cools. I go into this at length in this article.

The long braising with these venison ribs solves a lot of that, since it renders out most of the fat.

This particular venison ribs recipe is an adaptation of a wonderful dish in a wonderful book, Paul Bertolli’s Cooking by Hand, which would be one of my “stuck on a desert island” cookbooks. It works best with ribs cut from a large animal: certainly elk, caribou and moose, but also the exotic red deer, nilgai, and oryx.

It will work with regular deer ribs, but do this with a big buck, not a little doe or button buck.

You will want the ribs cut somewhere between four and six inches long, and either in a block of ribs or as individual ribs. Trim any excess fat off the cap of the ribs, but you do want some fat remaining.

This recipe is what the Italians call an agrodolce, a sweet and sour sauce highlighted by balsamic vinegar and saba, which is boiled down grape must. Yeah, I know, you don’t have any lying around. Only reason I do is because I grow grapes. Fortunately, you can get really close by boiling down purple grape juice and using that.

Time is all this recipe asks of you. Venison ribs can require a long while to get tender, sometimes up to 4 hours if you have an old bull or buck. But they will, eventually, and that long cooking time infuses them with so much flavor you’ll wonder why you haven’t done this before.

Once made, they keep a week in the fridge, although after Night One I shred the meat off the bones and store it in the sauce. It’s great on pasta or polenta later in the week.