Best Ever Bear Roast | Fall-Apart Tender & Easy Recipe for Bear Meat (2024)

FAQs

How do you make bear meat taste good? ›

For example, fatty stringy beef brisket is slow-cooked, barbequed, pickled, brined, and/or boiled like corned beef. This is exactly how you should handle fall bear meat. If you have bear meat that tastes like fish, stir fry the tender cuts in oyster sauce or in a Thai dish that uses fish sauce.

Soaking it

Many hunters suggest soaking your game meat in vinegar. However, vinegar's acidity can often dry the meat, making it especially tough. Instead, try soaking the meat in milk or even buttermilk, which will produce better results with most wild animals, especially when dealing with backstraps.

The texture was good, and the backstrap cuts were a bit more tender than the forequarter cuts. The flavor was mild; it tasted more or less identical to venison—which is to say a lot like beef, only with less fat and a blander flavor. There was nothing greasy or tough about it.

Proper cooking techniques can ensure that your bear meat is safe to eat. Like pork, the proper cooking time for bear meat is 375 degrees F for 20-25 minutes per pound.

Cooking bear meat: Like pork, the proper cooking time and temperature for bear meat is 375 degrees F for 20-25 minutes per pound. Internal cooking temperature should reach 160 degrees for 3 minutes or more before consumption.

Since bears can be carriers of Trichinella spiralis (the parasites that can cause the disease trichinosis in humans), it's important to carefully follow the cooking techniques below to make sure your bear meat is safe to eat.

This can be done by mechanically breaking the muscle fibers by grinding the meat into burger, by pounding the meat with a mallet, or slicing against the grain. Calpain and cathepsin are natural enzymes in meat that weaken proteins and break down collagen fibers when aging animals.

It is important to note that when using balsamic vinegar to tenderize your meat you do need to plan ahead. Depending on how tough the meat is, you should leave it soaking in the refrigerator for at least twelve hours and not longer than five days. The longer it marinates, the more tender the beef will become.

Chef Daniel Volponi says gaminess, like so much in life, boils down to diet and exercise. "You have a very distinct, almost metallic flavor in game that can be the result of a higher iron content. Anything that is wild and not farm-raised is going to have a more active lifestyle, with a more active heart rate.

As omnivores, bears often carry the larvae of a nasty parasite, Trichina spiralis. Eating undercooked bear meat can cause trichinosis, which can cause severe sickness or even death in humans.

Which bear tastes the best? ›

Spring black bears are almost always excellent to eat. Depending on the region and timing of the season, they often have been feeding only on fresh greens, and haven't gotten into too much fish or carrion. Spring bears usually won't have too much fat since it's been depleted throughout hibernation.

Spring bears are lean; fall bears are heavier…and with less carrion and more berries, the meat is probably better. As for quality of coat, that's a grab-bag. Most bears come out of the den with excellent fur, but as the spring warms they apparently get itchy.

In fact, bear resembles a stronger, lean tasting beef more than anything to me. The texture is a bit more dense than beef, but overall, it's pretty similar. One of the reasons behind my findings might be because I don't keep the fat on the bear at all.

Is it hard to get bear roast tender? No! Because bear is a fattier meat, it just takes a longer cooking time to melt fat and sinew to result in a fall-apart tender roast.

It's All About the Fat

Most wild game meat doesn't have a lot of fat, and when it does, it can taste a little sour. But bear meat is different. I've heard some hunters describe it as the pork of the woods. Early American settlers used to make bacon out of it.

No animal with backfat like that could taste bad, and the meat from this bear was amazing – a sweet, yes, almost nutty, flavor that lent itself well to a whole host of recipes, from simple grilled steaks to slow braises that really pulled out the taste of the acorns it had been feeding on.