Venison Shoulder Roast

Saturday 6 December

Or WTF do you do with a huge and sullen hunk of protein that we had bought on spec at Lakeland Meats? This was a case where the intertubes rather fell down on its job of omniscience, since every single recipe offered utterly different timings and methods. Here's what we wound up doing (after a certain trepidation), and it turned out fine.

The essential fact seems to be that a venison shoulder is rather like top round beef: it's never going to the tenderest cut so it can't be done rare, but it can be easily reduced to shoe leather by overcooking. The goal is medium (not even medium rare) at about 135º F inside. And left to rest.
This was a boneless, 5 lb. roast. So we cut off about 2 lbs of the scrappier bits, demembraned them, and set them marinating for a later stew.
The remaining integral 3 lb. roast went into a dutch oven, resting on a bed o' sliced onions, *covered* at 390º (sort of 200º C). Now one recipe said 10 minutes the lb., another 20, another 25. We found it took about 1h 45 m (but keep checking). Cooking it covered provided the moisture it needed to be sort of in umido, and in fact it threw off rather a lot of venison stock, as it were.
As mentioned, it then had to rest a while before we cut into it and found that it was good.
Sliced very thin, it was mighty fine eating, accompanied by a Flat Rock Merlot.

Since we had no idea if we were going to have anything edible at the end of this experiment, Barbara in the meanwhile had made up a possible pasta/side dish emergency backup main course. We had actually gotten some fresh sugar-snap peas from the Farmers' Market - I guess the peas couldn't tell a chilly late fall from a chilly spring. We just cubed up some pancetta, set it to frying, added some cubed red onions to look just like it, and then sautéed the sugar snaps in among them. Those peapods are never as tender as you think they're going to be, so we then added some white wine and broth from the venison and covered them up to steam. If the venison roast hadn't worked out, we would have had the result more or less like this; but as it was, we didn't need to do that. The Italians use them either on pasta or as a side dish as well.