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Comment by jjcm | Hacker News Reader

I've been living out here in Australia for about a year and a half now. It really is a delicious meat, though it's so lean that your options for how to prepare it are pretty slim. I've found that mince is the easiest to work with by far. Kangaroo tacos are really delicious. Burgers with it are decent too. It's very close to beef in taste, just a slight bit bloodier tasting.

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i tried kangaroo (steak, medium rare) when i visited australia and it was a very lean meat. it was good, but tacos or burgers definitely sound like the way to go. i also felt very guilty eating it because they are very cute animals (at least as a tourist, the locals talked about them being pests and wanting to shoot them).

It's gamey, which means a couple of things:

1) It holds up against marinades very well, which also help to retain some moisture when cooked. Marinade cubes overnight then cook on skewers, for example. Ditto steaks, probably.

2) It goes really well in curries and stews where the flavour of the spices/sauce overpowers weaker meats. Think recipes where you'd use beef or venison.

I like roo and I should probably eat more of it than I do and substitute it for beef sometimes. I think primarily in fluid-based slow-cooker meals where the leanness doesn't necessarily cause it to dry out as it's got fluids to keep it tender.

It's still a bit game-y for me. What else do you put in the burgers?

Gamey'ness is usually bad meat. People say the same about Lamb. It tastes "gamey". That's because you are eating tough old lamb. I bet it's the same for kangaroo.

If it's very lean I would add some fat to it. Pork fat :)

I bet that would make a killer sausage.

Isn't "lamb" a young sheep? How can it be tough and old?

Sheep meat is mutton. Makes a lovely curry.

Not the animal, the meat. The meat has been butchered and then left out too long. For some meats, aging in this way improves the taste or texture - Not so much for lamb.

Thanks!

In the US, there is no distinction made between the age of sheep in the labeling of its meat. No matter how old the animal, it's lamb, not mutton.

Wow! That finally explains why I never found mutton in the US. I've been curious about that for over a decade.

we call kangaroo sausages kangabangers - havent heard of anyone mixing with pork though

Interesting, most sausages use pork fat to keep the meats from drying out. If you don't use pork fat what kind of fat do you add to the kangaroo meat to keep it moist in a sausage?

Also, haha I love the phrase "kangabangers". Sounds like an outback criminal gang. "The kangabangers shot and killed two today."

If its gamey it means you are wayyyy over cooking it! It literally goes off a cliff after medium rare so stick to that max :)

Agreed. As per my other post on here, I usually like cooking thick fillets of kangaroo meat. After marinating it, I like to sear the outside in a hot pan so the outside is almost charred, but the inside is still quite rare. Cooked this way, then sliced into 1cm thick segments and draped over a nice salad is one of the family favourites.

My preference is a stew.

http://kitchenaut.com/post/129627783499/mums-kangaroo-stew

Can confirm that this recipe is great.

Might even turn someone that thinks kangaroo meat is too gamey.

> It really is a delicious meat

Honestly, I've never really liked it. Every few years I convince myself to give it another try, and each time I'll spend a week or two cooking it every other day in different ways and I'm yet to find something I like.

Maybe mince is the thing to try next.

> Burgers with it are decent too

I agree. The steak is bit gamey. The burger mince has enough herbs and ingredients to mask that taste. The sausages "kanga bangas" aren't too bad either. Obviously plenty of tomato sauce (not ketchup mate!) is a must.

I agree, minced is the way to go otherwise it tends to be really stiff, perhaps slow cooking could solve the stiffness problem but I've never tried.

Roo burgers are the easiest solution and can be found at any Aussie supermarket or butcher.

Having never had the pleasure of trying kangaroo you make it sound like venison or bison here. VERY lean, so you must eat it rare to medium rare or you wind up over cooking the crap out of it and it winds up like tough shoe leather. Ugh.

I hope one day to make it down there and try some kangaroo steak, or some braized slow cooked kangaroo. I bet it's very healthy red meat, unless its farm raised. What is the natural diet of kangaroo? Grasses? Leaves? I doubt it is grain.

Id agree on the taste part. Never had bison, but still that same gamey taste, certainly stronger than venison.

As for cooking, no, terribly dangerous advice. Cook kangaroo well regardless of what butchers and cooking shows tell you.

Kangaroo has somewhere near 20x the bacterial levels of raw chicken. It's wild hunted meat that's been commercialised. Perfectly fine if you eat it soon after being killed, but no sold roo in Australia falls into that category.

https://www.foodsafety.com.au/news/food-safety-issues-affect...

There's plenty of ways to keep meat tender while cooking it well, pressure cooking does an amazing job.

That is very interesting. I know of no red meat in N. America that carries bacteria that must be killed by cooking it well done. Poultry is dangerous undercooked, and to a lesser extent pork, even though pork here is irradiated so much you would be ok if it's a little pink. But red meat? You can eat any red meat tartar afaik.

Off to read that link! What an interesting animal, culinary wise.

I wonder if it's like beef where cooking the outside of a solid (not ground) hunk of meat is enough to kill bacteria that mostly only hang out on the surface. This, incidentally, is why I'll happily eat rare seared steak, but I only eat burgers that are cooked through.

As for the diet of kangaroo, yeah they're grazers. You can go out and see them grazing on grasslands in the national parks around the city. Apparently it's pretty high in the good Omega 3 oil too.

Sometimes I've eaten kangaroo and enjoyed it, then tried to prepare exactly the same food again and it tasted like a horrible bloody mess. I am not an expert on cooking roo. I recommend feeding it to your children so that they think it's normal however it tastes, and leave it as a gift for the next generation.

If there really is an oversupply of roo, why do I have to hunt for it on the shelf? And why is it always in weird packages with gimmicky branding?

Marinated roo steaks are pretty good. The marinade balances out the extreme lean-ness.

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