Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Africa What does african game taste like?

cut the fat off??? You have to be kidding - it is delicious when there is small amount of fat on a piece of 'wet' biltong (not completely dry - black on the outside and dark red in the middle)....yummy.

As someone else already stated, it is hard to explain what something tastes like at time. For comparison purposes, I would say the springbuck I had tasted most like whitetail. Hartmann's (mountain) zebra taste surprisingly like beef and one is one of my favorite. I'm told plains zebra is not nearly as palatable.

On my last trip I had kudu and eland just about every day and it is quite good. If I had to compare it to an American game animal I would probably say elk, although I've only had elk a few times. I would give the nod to eland but sometimes it is hard to tell the difference between it and kudu at times. I did however have a particularly tough kudu dish in Outjo once and have never experienced that with eland.

I would have to say gemsbuck filet is my favorite and has a richer flavor than most of the others. I've also had gemsbuck, eland and kudu liver and enjoyed them all.

Oryx to me tastes like Pronghorn Antelope. It's a dark meat, lean. makes great jerky. I bet a young one would be good. AJ

I think Nilgai is very good table fair, and sorry that one poster didn't like it and agree it was probably ill prepared and taken care of..

I have eaten Hippo, Elephant,and Lion, can't say I was overly impressed with any of it, but was surprised about the Lion as it was pretty good chicken fried.

A lot of assumptions are being made on tasting a certain animals meat just one time, self included on the Hippo, Lion and Elephant so one can't put to much emphasis on the accuracy of such statements in that so much depends on a varity of things as to how succulent game meat is such as range conditions, killing, cleaning and cooking.

About any animal makes good jerky if the maker knows his stuff and if he does the fat is REMOVED or it will go rancid plenty quick..I have eaten a lot of Zebra jerky and its good.

My favorite Safari fair is Ox Tail Soup from Buffalo tail prepared in Pierre van Tonders Selous camp..I also like the leg bones sawed up in one inch sections and grilled, then spread the marrow on toast or just eat them.

An unusual dish and quit good is (I forget the name of it)liver cooked quickly over a high flaming camp fire until its black and then a small section of gut is fried in the same fire and they are eaten together...Aha, I remember the name, it's call Vetderm, not sure about that spelling!

Elephant foot baked in the ground is etable, but not my favorite.

Menudo, is my all time favorite meal, I was raised on it so guess that is why I don't mind eating all the other ugly stuff! :

Buffalo, Impala, Lechewe, Tessebe, Gemsbok, all were wonderful. Warthog was a little bland, but still good (shoot a young one if you are shooting for the pot). Ostrich I'm not wild about. We donated the zebra to an orphanage so we didn't try it. Eland was good. I don't think anyone, or anything for that matter, ate the hyena. Spurwing Goose, Francoln and dove breasts wrapped in bacon - bring them on! Also freshly caught talapia, cooked streamside - outstanding.
Basically, don't take snug pants on safari, make sure that you have a little room to grow.

1flier had it right. Croc tail tastes somewhat like chicken and is a little more substantial heavier meat. I enjoyed it and would eat it again. We ate a lot of eland, which is excellent and kind of like eating a range fed steer, I thought. None of the game is corn fed like we're used to, nor was anything fat, except me by the time I left Africa. Most of the meat did not taste gamey to me.

Ostrich was good. To me it tasted less like bird than croc tail did.

Wart hog was good also. We had wart hog bacon with our eggs for breakfast. It was good quality lean bacon, and was a little gamey. But, you know everybody's taster is a little different and many taste differences weren't as distinct, to me, as the difference, say between carp and chocolate candy.

I imagine the gaminess of the taste depends on where the animal ranges and what it eats. Lions that eat porcupines have a sharp taste. (Sorry -- couldn't resist.)

Beyond the animals I mentioned I'm sure that we ate many other varieties of deer-type critters during 3 weeks there. One week was on a photo safari at Camp Kwando in the Okavango River Delta of Botswana where we lived in canvas tents with an unroofed lavatory area behind the tent and game that walked through the camp at night to get to the watering hole in front of our tent. By game, I mean elephants, lions, and whatever. The watering hole had hippos and crocs. We were armed with a Swiss Army knife, mosquito coil, and my wife's eyebrow brush. Camp Kwando fed us only wild game and the meals were gourmet.

I heartily recommend Camp Kwando or any place in that area.

The reason I don't remember some of the meat was that it was well washed down with various beverages, including the excellent and inexpensive wines of South Africa and South African brewery beers which were much like popular American beers but were not delivered by big horses.

BUT, for a change of pace experience one night and on the urging of some friends who were seeking mirth, we tried some native beer. It was black, stringy, lumpy, completely flat, and genuinely ugly-tasting. YUK.