Is Alpaca meat the next big thing? A Hot Dish taste test
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| Photo by Kelly Dwyer |
| Broiled Alpaca leg steaks from La Pacos in Minnesota |
Let's begin with the dried meat products:
Jerky and Meat Sticks
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| from LaPacos.com |
| Hillbilly Style Alpaca Jerky |
La Pacos offers two kinds of jerky: Hillbilly Style and Appalachian Style. It's unclear why the fascination with extras from Deliverance but no matter. This jerky is as good or better than any beef variety on the pegboard at the local convenience store. One immediate visual clue that this is not beef is the absence of white ribbons of fat. The meat is a rich, dark maroon color and peels and tears identically to others. The jerky is satisfyingly chewy but not tough, and it retains a bit of moisture. Hillbilly Style provides more of a spice kick and boasts a soothingly shorter list of ingredients.
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| from lapacos.com |
| Old World Style Alpaca Meat Sticks |
At first bite, this meat stick seems to taste like pretty much every other meat stick. But these sticks don't leave grease on the hands or a waxy tallow buildup on the lips. The jalapeno variety is deliciously kicky, with visible chunks of bright green, fresh jalapeno peppers. These sticks do contain 3 percent pork, whose presence was explained as a binding agent. The Hot Dish provided samples to more than a dozen people and received zero negative responses. Alpaca sticks proved especially popular among sportsmen, for reasons we'll explain later.
Polish Sausage
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| Photo by Kelly Dwyer |
| Alpaca Polish sausage |
The Hot Dish was unable to sample the bratwurst in time for this post (a human can only eat so much meat!), but we were able to sample the Polish sausage, pictured above. We broiled these sausages, which was likely a mistake. The filling is nicely and densely packed, and the casing provides a crisp snap to each bite. There are very few white chunks of gristly material. This is when the realization begins to dawn: Alpaca meat is very similar to venison.
Next page: Alpaca burgers and steaks--and where to get them
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