Venison Bourguignon

Method

• 1)

  Slice bacon and add to a hot casserole pot to render down for 5 minutes. Dice 2 brown onions and add those to the pot once the bacon has some colour on it. Sweat the onions down until they become translucent for approximately 10 minutes. Finely slice a handful of fresh rosemary and 6 cloves of garlic and add those.

• 2)

  Brown off your venison, you can either dice it prior to cooking or my piece was slightly frozen still so I slated it and browned it whole in a hot pan with some olive oil and then sliced it up. You want to get some caramelisation on it. The idea is not to cook through as that will happen in the pot.

• 3)

  Add a low acidity 750ml bottle of red wine to the pot to deglaze, then slice up carrots into large chunks and add those with the zest of one lemon, one litre of beef stock and the diced-up venison

• 4)

  Cook with the lid on for 3 hours until the meat is soft but not falling apart by itself. Then add 2 Tbsp of corn flour to help thicken. Leave the lid off and keep cooking the stew on a medium heat until it thickens up to the desired consistency.

• 5)

  While the stew thickens, we served ours with sweet potato mash, you could do potato mash, pasta anything you like really. To make the sweet potato mash boil finely slice up sweet potato until soft (15-20 Minutes). Drain off the water then mash aggressively with the goats cheese, lemon juice, butter, salt and pepper.

• 6)

  To serve you can pop some sweet potato in the bottom of each bowl then ladle over some of the beautiful thick and glossy Venison Bourguignon.