Secret to grilling a great hamburger out of ground deer meat

Ground deer mixed with cheese and seasoning can make for some excellent hamburgers on the grill. Photo by Josh Rouse.

When I first started grilling, I began using ground deer to make hamburgers and cheeseburgers. However, there's a new way to enjoy the same great meat.

My uncle Galen Swader recently introduced me to a new way of grilling deer burgers that tastes great and is quite easy to cook. He took ground deer, which was processed at Farview Farms Meat Company, and mixed it with grated cheese (storebought cheese works just fine) and seasoning (I believe he used Boss Hawg seasoning) and then pressed the three ingredients together to make his patties. The resulting burgers were great, and he gave me a few of his deer patties to try out on my grill.

The burgers grilled a lot quicker than I expected, as the cheese inside the burger helped it cook evenly throughout. They were actually still a little bit frozen when I first threw them on the grill, but I defrosted them as much as I could in a short amount of time by putting them in Ziploc bags and dropping them in a large bowl of hot water. They would have defrosted completely, but they were frozen together and the spots where they stuck together hadn't got enough exposure to the warm water to melt. They still cooked very well and I made sure to flip them every 5 minutes or so to get that even cooking. If one side is more defrosted than the other, put the frozen side facing up away from the coals so the other side can cook while it continues to dethaw a bit in the heat of the grill. I typically grill hamburgers with the lid of the grill closed, and I was also cooking corn wrapped in aluminum foil on this day. I simply took two cobs of corn, salt and peppered them, then buttered them and wrapped them in the foil. The corn tasted great by the time I was done, although it took a little longer and didn't get as much of the grill taste that I love on my corn.

When my uncle grilled the burgers, he put bacon on the burgers with a slice of cheese over the bacon. When I made mine, I didn't use bacon but I still put a slice of cheese on it and closed the lid for about 30 seconds to let it melt. I then put slices of tomato on the burger, as well as ketchup and mustard. Both burgers tasted great, although there seemed to be a little more flavor with my uncle's bacon cheeseburger. Onions would have also been tasty on them.

Overall, this style had a much different taste than what you typically get with a deer burger. A burger made from a buck can taste a little gamey at times, but this concoction takes away the gamey taste and instead delivers an excellent combination of the cheese flavor, the seasoning and the burger itself. I'd recommend it to anyone, it doesn't take much extra work to do and adds a lot of flavor and helps the burger grill evenly.