Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Cooking Squirrels

What's your favorite way?

always use to cook them in a casserole with plenty of Wild Rice.....with Worcestershire Sauce mixed in...
or an alternative is wild rice and cream of mushroom soup....

Pan fried with biscuits and gravy.

Yes pan fried with gravy and biscuits is hard to beat. The old ones are sectioned into 6 pieces and placed in a crock pot for 2.5 hours then fried. They can also be left in a little longer then deboned. Makes great barbecue sandwiches.

Section them, soak them in buttermilk overnight, throw in the crockpot with some onions and peppers and seasoning of your choice, cook until tender, debone, then add the barbecue sauce of your choice. BBQ squirrel sandwiches are great.

I like 'em braised. Then I finish them with a long simmer in gravy

I just dust them with flour and fry them in an oiled pan, on low to medium. Just the hind legs.

Brunswick Stew. That, or Pennsylvania Dutch slippery beef pot pie with squirrel substituted for beef.

Young ones, fried, with cornbread and gravy. Old ones pressure cooked, de-boned, then throw the meat back in a crockpot with chopped onions, mushroom slices, and sweet-baby-rays BBQ.

Winner!Winner!

Squirrel meat is tough. Think about it-they make their living pulling themselves around up and down trees. They are much more palatable when cooked slowly and simmered than when they are fried. I like fried squirrel too, but I prefer them with biscuits and gravy. By the time squirrel season rolled around, we were often out of venison, and my brother and I were expected to put some protein on the table. It was usually squirrel, shot out of the towering beech trees of northeast Ohio.

Classic, traditional, and delicious.

Used to pat em in flour and fry in a covered electric skillet. Been 20 yrs since I bothered.


Now, I just kill them wholesale and toss them into a ditch (after posing with pics for internet attention)

They fall under the Pol Pot provision around here. The little bastards cut all the acorns down in September and the turkeys eat them before November.

Starting whacking the little fuggers so the acorns would hang on till November in order to keep some deer around.

Be easier if my "Daddeh" left me a thousand bags of deer corn when he signed the farm over to me.

Never did this myself but told by a friend. Fry and then finish off in a pressure cooker. He said that even the old ones were tender. Kinda like the original Kentucky fried chicken. miles

In case I missed anyone posting it, I have dropped them in a Mirro pressure cooker for a quick 10 mins. That will soften them up, transfer into a skillet.

Or you could go balls-out and go 20 mins in the pressure cooker to reduce them and debone them. Then you could proceed to making your stews.

If any of you dudes have a split tail in the home, they can operate those Instapot pressure cookers.

The instapot, pressure cooking after slight pan fried would be the way to go.

Then into a stew, pot pie etc.

Young are pan fried and and the older tougher ones are made into squirrel and dumplings.

How exactly does one slow cook squirrel (older ones)...

How do you tell them apart (young vs. old).

Frying young ones should be easy, but with the older ones are you slow cooking them in broth ?

I hunt where there are plenty of big old fox squirrels - not sure that matters but they aren’t small.

PM Maddog, he is your huckleberry !

Paul, as you likely know, squirrels way south of you are larger than those small types around Dryden.