Venison Neck Roast Recipe

If you butcher your own deer like I do, consider this method for dealing with the neck.  Most commercial butchers will simply cut away enough meat from the neck and throw it into the burger pile.  This results in a fair amount of waste and you lose some very long fiber muscle meat that is excellent for "pulled" types of recipes.  

Today I decided to try a cornbread casserole for dinner, so that was a good excuse to grab a frozen neck and make some room in the freezer.  To see that recipe check it out here:

When I harvest a deer, after skinning, I will cut off the head and then remove the neck from the body with a meat saw or cordless sawzall.  Then I will simply vacuum seal the whole roast into a bag after I remove the windpipe.  If you only have a narrow slow cooker like I have (I've been looking for a larger one) you either need to cut the roast in half again before or after freezing.  Some folks stress about chronic wasting disease and cutting the spine and cord, but my thoughts are that if there was a huge risk there it would be known.  To date, there have been no reported cases of CWD infection in people.  I try to be careful not reusing the knives and saw on other meat until they are cleaned well though.  This time I destroyed some neck meat during the "acquisition phase" of the meat which resulted in a smaller roast that fit perfectly. 

 

Ingredients:

4 cups of chicken broth

2 celery sticks

1/2 small onion chopped

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon black pepper

 

 

The beauty of the slow cooker here is you do not need to plan ahead and thaw the roast.  I just placed the frozen roast on top of some frozen celery, some coarsely chopped onion, added 4 cups of chicken broth along with salt and pepper.  Then you can forget about it for 5 or 6 hours while it cooks. 

Normally I would use some of my canned bone broth for extra flavor, but here I am simply cooking the meat for additional recipes, so I will save my bone broth for those if needed.  

 

 

After the cooking time and the meat is fall off the bone, remove the roast to cool.

 

Take two forks and shred the meat when it has cooled enough to handle, but not cold or it will not pull apart as easily.

Strain and filter that broth for later use.  I used a funnel and a paper towel to filter and poured it into a mason jar to store in the refrigerator until needed.

Now you have some nice long fiber pulled venison.  This is delicious as is in a sandwich, with  BBQ sauce, in tacos, or used in other savory recipes such as shredded cornbread casserole I will post up in the future.