Venison Meat Pies
Golden pies stuffed with lightly spiced ground venison. An easy recipe you can eat with your hands!
I grew up in a family of hunters, which means rabbit, elk, and venison are comfort food meats for me. Give me a bowl of rabbit stew served over fluffy mashed potatoes, or venison chili with cornbread, and I’m a happy camper.
Today I’m sharing a simple meat pie recipe perfect for ground venison or elk. We’ll cook the meat with onions and garlic before flavoring it with cinnamon and allspice. Then we’ll mix in currants and pine nuts before adding melty cheese. Everything gets wrapped up in puff pastry and baked until golden.
Many people are surprised by the spices used in this recipe. In the US, we typically think of cinnamon and allspice as flavors reserved for sweets.
But you’ll often find cinnamon and allspice combined with meat in Middle Eastern, North African, and Caribbean cuisine. It also hearkens back to Medieval Europe, when blending sweet and savory was a hallmark of everyday cooking.
Trust me, you’re going to love it. This recipe used to be on my old food blog and I got so many emails from folks asking for it that I finally decided to publish it here on Substack.
Make a batch on Sunday, then heat up your meat pies for dinner during the week. If you don’t have game meat, you can also use lean ground beef, ground turkey, or even ground chicken.
The best part? You can eat these with your hands! Holding a warm pastry in your fingers and biting into flaky dough filled with tender meat and melty cheese is supremely satisfying. What are you waiting for?
Become a supporting reader and gain access to a growing collection of recipes, plus new stories & essays added monthly — it’s like a digital cookbook that never stops expanding!