Headed soon to Alpine Texas to hunt javelina & attend an inaugural Mule Deer Foundation banquet in Fort Stockton.

My wife & I hopefully will shoot 4 javelina & I'll de-bone 'em & bring the meat home. Plan to add home-grown pork & make maple sausages. So many people say these critters are "unedidle". Please say it ain't so! I've cooked stinky wild boar hogs & rutting caribou (that the native Labradorians wouldn't eat). There's always a way. We won't shoot what we won't eat, at least in N. America where we can bring the meat back home...

I'm only looking for cooking suggestions, not comments on being a knucklehead for wanting to eat these things. Thanks.

If handled properly when being skinned and the meat cleaned good it is a white meat and somewhat reminiscent of feral hog. Don't touch or mess with the musk gland, it comes off with the hide.

I normally pull the back straps and cut them into medallions, season them, coat with flour and deep fry. As for the hams my wife rubs them with a season mix she makes up, wraps them in bacon, then in aluminum foil and either slow bakes them in the oven or we build a fire and when we get a good bed of coals, I push them to the side lay the ham on the ground where the coals were and then cover it with the coals and cook till done.

Javelina from my experience have little or no fat on them and will cook dry really fast. Over the years some of my hunters would take the meat home or leave it with me very little ever went to waste. It will never replace fillet mignon by any means but it definitely is edible if handled and cooked properly.

Many thanks, I'm hungry already!

When in Alpine....explore the Holland Hotel....really charming.

Joester, when in Alpine, you have to give the Reata Restaurant a try. I have been to the Reata in Ft. Worth numerous times and the one in Alpine twice. True Texas west of the Pecos Cuisine.