On our national day I’m writing a few words about our national emblem and how delicious it is. You should know how to select, cook, serve and eat roo and you should do it regularly because it contains 200% of your recommended daily intake (RDI) of awesome.

Kangaroos are animals of the family Macropodidae meaning “large foot”.   Theoretically all kangaroo-like creatures are kangaroos but when the word is used it usually refers to the largest of the creatures, with words like wallaby used to describe the smaller ones.  There are four main species of large kangaroo; the red, the eastern and western grey and the antilopine, and there are forty species of kangaroo over all.  The four large main species, in particular the red, are the ones that go well with pepper sauce or rubbed with lemon myrtle olive oil and chopped thyme.

I have no idea why kangaroo meat isn’t eaten more often in Australia, it was legalised for consumption only as late as 1993 but that’s no excuse.  It’s incredibly cheap, very high quality in that it is has tender flesh that is almost fat free, and is absolutely delicious.  I think part of it is that people just don’t know how, so I’d like to clear some of that up.  Here’s how to select, cook, serve and eat roo.

Before I begin

The answers to your emails from another country are below;

  1. Yes we actually do eat them
  2. Yeah I know about drop bears, but this is not a hoax, believe me, we eat them
  3. Sure but cows are cute too and we eat those, presumably you do too
  4. Well if you’re a vegetarian why did you email me about meat expecting not to start a fight
  5. That’s fine, I’d actually prefer if you didn’t visit my site anymore

Selection

Roo’s available from just about every butcher and every supermarket in Australia, they are either farmed or “cull” kangaroos with farmed roos obviously coming from a farm and cull roos producing meat as an after-effect of being killed as a pest. When selecting kangaroo as a replacement for steaks, it’s a good idea to get loin.  It’s usually quite small compared to beef steaks so be aware of the fact that six may feed four or if you are feeding two it may be the case that you use three steaks.  When I cook most steaks I slice it on the vertical so three roo loins between two people is fine.  Select roo that is a little fatty, the steaks themselves have very little fat in them so any obvious veining is a great bonus.  When buying mince, opt for something that looks light.  Roo mince that is so red it’s purple will be dry and/or burn.

Cooking

Kangaroo meat is incredibly dense and most of the time has next to no fat.  This means that if you cook the crap out of it like your bogan grandmother cooks minute steak, you will wind up with something INCREDIBLY tough.

Select what you are going to grease the pan with.  I cook most meat in butter or olive oil, favouring butter, but cooking roo in butter is tricky.  The best way to cook roo is to rapidly sear it and then cook for a couple of minutes each side, serving medium rare.  If you try to do this in butter you may well wind up burning the butter because the pan needs to be hotter than you’d usually cook meat with butter in.  Go with olive oil or canola oil, and apply it to the pan as opposed to rubbing the meat in oil.  While rubbing a beef steak in oil is a great way to ensure that you don’t stew the steak, there is not enough fat in kangaroo to be that stingy with the oil.  Don’t drown it by any means, but don’t use less than you normally would in pursuit of some particular effect because it won’t work.

If you don’t normally rest beef steak then I think you’re doing it wrong but we can leave it there.  You must however rest kangaroo.  Once you’ve panfried it for three or four minutes each side, leave it on a plate for about five minutes to allow the muscle tissue to relax.  If you don’t, it’ll be a leathery.  Do not use a meat tenderiser on kangaroo.  Don’t use it on any meat, but do NOT use it on kangaroo, you’ll compress already dense flesh and it’ll be a disaster.  Don’t stir fry it.

Serving

You can serve roo steak with most of what you’d serve beef steak with, and most of what you’d serve venison or lamb with.  It doesn’t seem to accompany fruit well, so if you have an orange sauce for venison it’s best to leave it with the deer.  Mushroom, pepper and most caramelised-stuff sauces go incredibly well.  Mashed root vegetables work perfectly as do any usual salad combos for beef steak or lamb.

As a mince it can replace beef mince in most dishes but because it has a slightly more gamey flavour than beef, it doesn’t suit Mexican-style dishes well.  Kangaroo lasagne however, is impeccable.

Eating

There’s no reason to eat roo less often than on a standard rotation.  I eat it at least fortnightly with occasional bursts a couple of nights in one week.  It is almost fat free compared to other meats, and if you care about environmental impact it’s interesting to note that roo (although a pest in some areas) eat considerably less feed than cows.  On top of that, cows are a major contribution to greenhouse gasses and kangaroos simply aren’t due to their digestive tracts working differently and producing different gasses.  They are good for the environment and good for you.

Best of luck! go get some roo this week and serve it up for the family, they’ll love it.  You’d be unaustralian not to.