doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Anyone eat Woodchuck?

I would think most recipes for rabbit would work. It reminds me of when my Grandma was alive, I'd always bring home a rabbit for her, and she'd make traditional Hasenpfeffer. Mmmm, onions, wine, and vinegar...Waldmurmeltierpfeffer?

one time when up at deer camp one of the guys brought a big pot of ChopSuey ....we were all suspicious about it??...but he said he wouldn't tell us what it was made out of until after dinner..we said he had to eat it with us..He did....we all ate in fact I think I went back for seconds....turned out to be porcupine...Im telling you, you couldn't tell it from raccoon or possum .....

Crock pot, onions, carrots, etc
YUM!!

I have eaten groundhogs. They are great. Every bit as good as beef. They are grazing the same grass as a steer.

The biggest issue I had was the fact that we hunt them in summer. So if you kill one at mid-day, it's too hot to drag him around the rest of the day. The ones I brought home were killed late afternoon and cleaned out promptly, then put in a cooler.

I agree with skeettx above. The crock pot is perfect for making a nice tender entr�e of groundhog.

Curl

I used to run traplines in MN and WI, we lived on venison, beaver, muskrats and raccoon. I wouldn't pass up a nice young woodchuck or marmot if given the chance. Folks used to joke that "we didn't know you could eat meat that didn't have a bullet hole in it".

I much prefer the young ones just out of the den for the first couple days. Cut up, battered and chicken fried. And you really need to clean them quickly, skin them and cool the meat very soon or they will stink you out of the house while cooking. Head shots with .22 only; not blown up with a high velocity varmit bullet to the body.

I have eaten young groundhogs many times, slow roasted with potatoes and onions, or made into stew and it was very good. As Ted says, they eat the same thing as cattle... grass, alfalfa, and clover. I typically have to replant my broccoli every year until I shoot the garden raiding groundhogs. They tasted like beef to me with a finer texture to the meat. I've always taken the advice to not bother with larger older ones, and have been told they quickly get very tough and don't taste as good when they mature. But I couldn't say that's factual or not. In my area, the young are just now getting old enough to survive alone if the mother is killed, so we never hunted them until after the first week of June. So the window of time to shoot small ones for the pot was short. When I used to go chuck hunting with my Dad and Uncle as a kid, we always gutted them and put them in a cooler and after hunting, they'd drop them off at the home of a black guy my uncle worked with, and you'd have thought we were delivering gold bars. It didn't matter if they were smaller or big old gray haired boars.

Fifty years ago my Arkansas grandmothers fried the young squirrels like chicken. They made squirrel and dumplings with the old ones.

Both methods produced a good meal.

I made a good Gumbo with one,it was greasy but was very tasty.Don't forget to make a big pan of biscuits to go with it.My late retired machinist buddy reported his mother mostly raised them on groundhogs and they made shoe strings from the skins.
Mike

I always cut them into five pieces, cooked them in a crock pot with chile verde, then deboned them, and threw away the bones and used the chile/'chuck for a substitute for machaca in burritos and enchiladas.

I lived in Vermont then and you should have seen my "Woodchuck" neighbors scarf them down (the exotic "Negra Modelo" may have had something to do with it....). Not a lot of Mexican food available in those parts in the '80s. "Woodchucks" HATE woodchucks.