This is dinner party fare, the kind of flavours you pull out of the hat to impress the Masterchef judges, if they should happen to call. The pomegranate sauce is the star. It tastes really good, and it doesn’t so much mask the kangaroo as outshine it, so it is a good way to introduce kangaroo to your slightly less adventurous friends.
Finely chop two desertspoons of fresh rosemary. Sprinkle it over both sides of 4 kangaroo steaks (about 600 gm altogether) and press it in. Let them sit for a few minutes while you prepare the side dishes – salad and/or vegetables. They go particularly well with a rocket-based green salad, and new season boiled baby potatoes with a bit of butter and parsley.
Extract the juice from around 4 pomegranates, to get a cup of juice. The easiest way to do this is to halve pomegranates, scoop the seeds out, blend to break them up and them strain through a sieve.
Heat a little olive oil in a pan and sear the kangaroo steaks, then continue to cook for a few minutes each side until they are medium rare. Take them out of the pan and let them rest while you make the sauce.
Pour in the pomegranate juice, a couple of teaspoons of balsamic vinegar, a teaspoon of brown sugar, a pinch of salt, and a pinch of black pepper. Reduce until it is a nice sauce-like consistency.
Slice the kangaroo steaks diagonally, arrange on the plates and drizzle over the pomegranate sauce.
Hey, Linda. I asked my friendly local kangaroo butcher where he gets his meat from today. He was VERY happy to talk about it! He told me that the meat I bought was shot in Coober Pedy – he has another supplier somewhere else that I didn’t catch and they supply him alternate weeks – and processed in Pt Augusta. Always nice to know where your grub’s come from! He said that there’s no human grade roo meat coming from NSW and Qld anymore.
He served a couple of other people at this point and it got a bit disjointed (I didn’t want to interrupt his rush on late night shopping too much!) but what I got was that it’s much harder and more expensive to get a shooting license in SA. He said there’s only 16 shooters in the whole state. It’s cheaper and easier up your way, but that means less expertise and, from what I can find on the internet, worse hygeine and general food safety practice. So it’s mostly pet food grade. Roo’s dicey because it can be tough so it’s often served rare, which means a small amount of contamination could potentially be a big problem.
He told me lots of interesting stuff – like how it used to all go to Russia but they’ve put a ban on it because of bacterial contamination and now it goes to China. How the UN uses 80% roo mince and 20% soy protein to make smallgoods and sausages for the people they feed. And how he’s out 2k a week because previously he could sell the skins overseas – most ‘kid leather’ is actually roo – but with the recession there’s no market for it anymore. Which means he can’t sell to restaraunts because they want cut rates, and he can’t afford to loose any of his margain – plus, what with demand from up north, he can sell it all at retail price.
I don’t know how much of it was 100% reliable, but I certainly learnt something, and I’d like to try and catch him when we can have a proper yarn. And I have four kilos of lovely, semi-local (Coober Pedy’s not exactly in my backyard!) meat sitting in my fridge and freezer, just waiting to be transformed. Thanks for the impetus to ask!
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