When it is game season I love to prepare deer fillet in a red wine sauce. Since a couple of years I do have a sous-vide. Preparing meat in the sous-vide is so easy it can’t go wrong anymore. Stefan Boer (www.stefangourmet.com) prepares almost all his dishes sous-vide and he convinced me to start using one. Grateful he convinced me. See his website for a lot of sous-vide dishes. I’m lucky to have tasted a lot of dishes prepared by him.
Ingredients (for 4 persons)
- 3 pieces of deer fillet about 250 gr. per piece
- 1 piece of deer fillet about 100 gr.
- Red Wine about 300 ml.
- Shallots
- Bacon
- Carrots
- 4-5 dried Morels
- Garlic
- Laurel
- Thyme
- Salt
- Pepper
- 1/2 liter Stock (I prefer veal stock)
- Potato starch, if necessary
Preparation (in sous-vide)
Season the meat with pepper and salt as you prefer. Vacuum seal the meat, use only the 3 pieces of 250 gr. the 100 gram is needed for the sauce. When making the picture I vacuum sealed one piece of fresh laurel together with the meat, this is not necessary. Refrigerate the meat till it’s ready to be used.
Heat the water till 57.5 degrees Celsius. Cook the meat sous-vide for 2-2.5 hours. The meat was about 4 cm thick, I heated the meat for 2 hours and 15 minutes.
Red wine sauce
Bake the bacon till the bacon is crispy. Reduce some if the fat if its too fat, but you need the fat for the taste.
Cut the deer fillet of 100 grams in pieces, cut the garlic and shallots and add these to the bacon and bake for a couple of minutes. Add the red wine and let it boil to reduce the alcohol, then add the stock, wait till it boils again.
Lower the heat till the sauce just boils and add the carrot, dried morels, thyme and fresh laurel and leave it for 1 hour till all flavors are mixed and the sauce is a bit reduced.
If you do not immediately need the sauce turn off the heat and leave the ingredients together. If you want to continue sieve the sauce through a very thin sieve. Only the moisture must remain. Clean the pan and put the moisture back in the pan.
Boil the moisture and let everything reduce till 30%-50% depending on your likings. Taste the sauce, in case it’s too salt, because of the bacon, you can add cooking cream to reduce the saltness. In necessary use potato starch with water to tie the sauce. Make the sauce as thin /thick as you like. I made it a bit thicker because of the plate I was using. Season the sauce if necessary with salt and fresh pepper. Because of the deer and morels I never season it.
Meat
Remove the meat from the sous-vide. The meat is now perfectly medium-rare and needs to be baked for 1-2 minutes per side, to get the perfect brown baked color. When the meat is colored take it out of the pan. When backing 2 minutes per side you do not over bake the meat. In case you did not use the sous-vide bake the meat as you like.
Plating
Cut the meat in small pieces. Place some vegetables on the plate. I used Brussels sprouts with potato (coarsely mashed) and wasabi and haricot verts with crispy bacon.
Add the sauce over the meat or on the plate. I do not provide too much sauce and place lot of times the sauce bowl at the table, so everyone can take sauce as their likings.
Wine advice
For Christmas 2019 and New Years Eve we had a Bordeaux 2000 together with the meat. The wine was intense and had enough body for the meat and red wine sauce. A heavier Cabernet Sauvignon or a Syrah with tannin is also a good match.
