When the fastest Thing on the Prairie, Meets Your Loaf Pan

A recipe we found at Wild Game Cuisine’s website, cooked twice in one week, and now refuse to shut up about…written for everyone whose camera roll has been filling up with speedgoats lately!

If you’ve spent any part of this fall on a Montana feed, you already know the picture. A buck with a black hook of horn over each ear, white rump flashing like a hazard light, dry grass to the horizon…and somebody in orange kneeling behind him, grinning like they haven’t slept since four in the morning. We’ve seen some genuinely awesome speedgoat hunting pictures lately. The kind that make a tag in your pocket feel heavier than it did in August.

Those photos are the reason this page exists. All those filled tags, all those full freezers, and the same question in every comment thread: now what do I do with it?

Pronghorn tastes like the area it came from — sage, dry grass, a little iron. What it does not have is fat. So we stopped asking it to cook and taste like beef!

The answer, it turns out, is a loaf pan, a handful of mild cheddar, and a gravy boat. Ground antelope makes a meatloaf with more character than most beef versions ever manage, because there’s nothing bland in it to begin with. The cheese, the egg and the butter aren’t there to hide the meat — they’re there to keep it moist while the oven does its work.

Three things the loaf asks of you

• Borrow it — antelope is lean enough to turn meatloaf into gravel. One cup of shredded mild cheddar and a single egg are the insurance policy. Mild, not sharp; sharp cheddar argues with sage, and sage wins…according to some.
• Foil on, then foil off: forty-five minutes covered keeps the middle from drying while it sets; ten minutes uncovered gives you a crust worth slicing through. Skip the second half, and you get a pale brick.
• Steal the drippings: a couple of tablespoons of what’s left in the baking dish, stirred into the sage gravy at the end, is the difference between gravy and gravy.

So to everyone posting those pictures, this one is for you. Congratulations on the tag. Now go preheat something. Slice it thick, and pass the gravy.

^{Feature photo via Wild Game Cuisine}