Rudolph the red-fleshed reindeer

The Christmas Dinner Soup wasn't the only festive item I tried in December - earlier in the year I had also been fortunate to secure, via the OLIO food-sharing app, a tin of Reindeer Meat, from a Finnish company called Riipisen, which sells a range of similar products including elk and bear meat, and has its own game restaurant too in Ruka in northern Finland. I seem to remember being surprised to see tins of bear meat on sale at the airport when I went to Helsinki a few years back, as I had thought bears would probably be a protected species, but hopefully all their products are ethically-sourced.

Clearly I couldn't let Christmas pass without giving the tin a try. 

I opened up the tin to reveal a rather dry-looking puck of meat. 

It wasn't easy to get it out, so I took the advice on the website and used a tin opener on the other end and then pushed it out. That end was much wetter, as if all the moisture in the can had seeped through to the bottom. Some quite substantial nuggets of fat clung to the outer surfaces here and there.

The meat itself had a very venison-like pinkish-red colour to it. Tasting a slice, I was hard-pressed at first to describe the smell and taste; there was a slightly corned beef-like quality to it, though much leaner than that with a coarser, less processed texture. Perhaps a slightly gamey taste, but in the end I felt the closest thing to it in both taste and texture was pressed tongue. If you're not a fan of that, this might not be for you, but I quite like it and thought therefore that this was pleasant enough.

I thought it would be quite good on a Christmas cold meat platter, but the website suggested either using it in a soup or stew, or cutting it into steaks and frying those. I tried the latter, using some of the nuggets of fat to fry it in, which through up an extraordinary stink as soon as they hit the pan, again hard to describe but exactly what you might expect the blubber of a wild Arctic creature to smell like. I was glad there wasn't too much of it to pass on to the flavour of the meat. 

The reddish colour was enhanced by its frying, giving it quite a striking look on my plate. In a nod to the the tin's Scandinavian origin, I ate the reindeer steaks with some mini hasselback potatoes, mustard and a bit of redcurrant jelly mixed in with the pan juices, and of course some carrots, those being the treat we traditionally leave out for Santa's reindeer (even though they don't actually eat them as they don't have the right kind of teeth for them). Sprouts too - fresh, NOT tinned.

I also had some of the meat chopped up in a tasty if somewhat rustic-looking omelette, which was only Christmassy in that I was using up a few bits of veg, eggs and cheese in the fridge before going home to see the family.

The final slice I baked in the oven while doing some roasted veg, with a cranberry red nose on top, in a nod to the most famous of Santa's flying sleigh team. It probably would have been quite good in a bun as a Rudolphburger, though I doubt you'll be seeing that on the menus of any fast food restaurants, for fear of upsetting the children...

Until I next write - which will definitely be sooner than December 2022 - Happy New Year to you all!