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

FAQs

How do you make bear meat less gamey? ›

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.

Sous vide the steak for three to five hours at 140–144 degrees Fahrenheit (the longer you cook it, the more tender it will be). Take it out, season it, and reverse-sear. In my humble opinion, that's the best way to enjoy the rich, robust, and unique flavors bear meat has to offer.

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.

Bear meat can be healthy when correctly prepared, but if you don't cook it thoroughly, you run the risk of contracting a parasite.

Meat Care at Home

There is no benefit to aging bear meat longer than 24 hours. It is very important to thoroughly cook bear meat until gray in color but do not cook in a microwave. Trichinosis is a common disease found in some bears, and this parasite can cause serious problems in humans.

Trichinosis is a food-borne disease caused by a microscopic parasite called Trichinella. People can get this disease by eating raw or undercooked meat from animals infected with the parasite. Often these infected meats come from wild game, such as bear, or pork products.

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.

No matter the season or where the bear was harvested, bear meat needs to be cooked thoroughly to 165-degree internal temperature. This is due to the diseases it could carry.

What does cooked bear meat taste like? ›

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.

Some game meat has received a bad reputation for palatability. For example, many hunters shun bear meat. However, most hunters who do eat black and brown/grizzly bear say the meat is usually good or very good, unless the animal has been feeding on fish.

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.

Get your skillet hot, coat with enough quality olive oil that you can roll it around in the pan. Pan fry your bear steak in the oil with some black pepper until lightly browned at the edges.

Fruit, nuts, honey and other plant parts are favorites of bear. They also eat insects and sometimes fish, but most of their food comes from plants. Bears have an excel- lent sense of smell, and can easily find food using their noses. Bears are attracted by smells, and almost everything smells like food to a bear!

The Pros and Cons of Bear Meat

As with any animal, but especially omnivores, you can run into bad tasting ones now and then. Bears that have been feeding on salmon and carrion are often not palatable, and the rancid smell of the meat itself will be a good indicator. However most black bears make fine table fare.

All grass-fed meats taste fishy, grassy, or gamy because of their high levels of Omega-3 fatty acids. The flavor of Omega-3 fatty acids is foreign to most Americans because they almost never eat any foods containing even minimal amounts of it.

Skinning the bear can help cool the meat. If skinning isn't possible right away, you can pack the abdominal cavity with ice until you are able to skin and butcher it. When the bear is skinned, trim the fat layers away from the underlying red meat. The fat can be retained and later rendered down into bear grease/lard.