Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Food, Cooking, and Game Preparation Who else cooks the "pluck" after a kill?

Might want to think twice about eating deer/elk brains. With CWD on the rise eating any kind of neural or lymphatic tissue would not be wise. Also brains have a high level of cholesterol - pork brains have the highest of any food I know.

I love eating heart, deer, elk or beef and do like beef kidneys but have never tried elk or deer. I like beef liver but my one trial of elk liver was decidedly bitter and have not tried again.

So I have been told about elk liver- make sure be blood has been well flushed out. We slice about 1/2" thick and put in a mild brine or water to do that... it takes a lot of water and lead time to get it out. Same goes for the others actually. Maybe that will help any future attempt.

Will give that a try next season already have this years elk put up. The liver on this elk looked a bit bruised though the shot was forward of the liver. So did not collect it.

Hey @Prwler, I thought you might also be interested:
-since you mentioned CWD I did some initial reading on the topic
-currently it is flagged as a risk of transmission with some suspected cases but nothing definitely proven. keep an eye out for "spontaneous Crutzfeld-Jakob" diseases as there may be correlation, even cause.
-the CWD prions exist in the whole animal. Even urine and saliva supposedly contain it. Of course, I would expect neural tissue to have higher concentrations
-CDC advises to not eat infected animals out of concern for crossover to humans
-prions take a very high temperature to denature, like 700-900°F degrees. No mention was made as to the effectiveness of acids, bases, or proteolytic enzymes.
-I did not look into if there was any sort of quick and cheap field test. Animals that are behaving / visibly impaired by CWD are obviously gone.
-(commonly known) prion diseases take a long time to manifest symptoms. There are no known cures for these types of diseases.

Perhaps you already knew this; I certainly did not know these details.

On a related topic, risk of prion-like disease was one of the first things that came to mind when they started saying how they were going to fight an overhyped flu by di**ing around with people's mitochondrial DNA. And then fools volunteered to get it!