The Best Cut of Deer Spent Ten Years in the Gut Pile

The Year I Decided to Be Brave

It was my second buck of the season, a little forkhorn I shot at thirty yards. I was field dressing him and my buddy Dale was leaning on the tailgate watching me, like he always does, offering commentary nobody asked for. I pulled the heart out, held it up, and went to chuck it.

“What are you doing?” Dale said.

“Tossing the heart.”

“That’s the best cut on the whole animal and you’re throwing it to the coyotes.”

I looked at the thing in my hand. It was a perfect fist of dark red muscle, still warm. He wasn’t wrong. I’d been leaving the best eating in the woods for a decade because I was too set in my ways to try something new. I zipped it into a bag and threw it in the cooler.

Where I Went Wrong

I treated that heart like a backstrap. That was the first mistake. I trimmed it down to a couple of thick steaks, hit them with salt and pepper, dropped them in a hot pan, and cooked them the way I cook every other piece of red meat: until the outside was a nice crust and the inside was, in my head, medium.

The heart disagrees with that plan.

A heart is pure muscle. It never stops working, not once in the animal’s whole life. It’s lean in a way a backstrap isn’t, with almost no fat to carry any tenderness. Cook it past medium-rare and it turns into an old boot sole, full stop. I didn’t know that. I left it in the pan a good four minutes too long because I was scared of eating organ meat that wasn’t “done.”

What came out of that pan was a gray-brown slab you could have resoled a work boot with. I chewed the first bite for about a minute and a half. My jaw got tired. I sat there at the table feeling like a fool, and my wife asked if I wanted her to heat up some pasta.

I said no. I ate the whole thing, because I killed that deer and I wasn’t about to waste it twice.

The Second Try, and the One That Stuck

Dale called me an idiot, which by that point was his term of endearment for me, and told me how to actually do it. Here’s what I learned, the short version, because nobody needs a lecture from a guy who ruined his own dinner.

• Trim it clean. Open the heart up flat, cut away the fat cap, the silver skin, the valves, and the little chambers you can’t save. What’s left is a flat, even piece of very lean muscle.
• Hot and fast, or low and slow. There’s no in between. A quick sear on a screaming hot pan, just a minute or two a side, and pull it while the middle is still pink. Medium-rare, maybe rare. Any further and you’re back to the shoe leather.
• Don’t be scared of it. The thing that ruined my first heart wasn’t technique. It was fear. I overcooked it because I was spooked by organ meat. Once I treated it like any good cut of meat, it stopped tasting like something weird.

I did all that the next time. Sliced the heart thin, seared it hard for about ninety seconds a side, and pulled it off. Let it rest. It was tender and rich and tasted more like a good steak than half the steaks I’ve bought at a grocery store, and the whole point was that I’d been throwing it away for years.