How to Cook with Organs

How to Harvest, Clean, and Cook Tripe

The English language does little service to tripe. The dictionary tells us that the word means guts or entrails used as food. Alternatively: nonsense, gibberish, worthless, rubbish. Offal does no better. One must spell the word rather than say it to get their point across. How to convince the wary eater to eat awful rubbish? Deep fry it, of course. What is Tripe? Tripe refers to the edible parts of the four stomachs of a ruminant animal such as a...

How to Predict Weather with Bear Grease

You can make bear grease by heating the lard off a bear until it liquifies into a usable oil. It’s highly valued because of its stable shelf life at room temperature and numerous applications. I’ve personally cooked, conditioned leather, lubricated metal, and made lye soap with it. Other folks use it as hair pomade, lamp fuel, and bug repellent. I gave a jar to a bowyer once for sealing bow wood. It was valued in frontier America because it didn...

How to Make Birdseed Suet with Deer Fat

Whitetail fat isn't something that you'd typically keep during the butchering process. It’s often trimmed off, tossed into the waste pile, or “left for the birds.” However, it's worth knowing that the waxy fat melts nicely and hardens up as it cools, making it perfect for a few out-of-the-ordinary applications. When I was a young fellow, my dad taught me the value of using as much of a harvest as possible, including hanging on to the fat and...