Kangaroo with Chocolate Sauce

I’ll begin with a kangaroo dish. Here in America and just about anywhere else in the world, kangaroo is considered to be a very exotic meat. In Australia, of course, there is nothing at all exotic about this all too common native of that continent. There is nothing exotic about its taste. Kangaroo has a delicious rich red meat with virtually no fat. My first encounter with kangaroo was a couple of grilled steaks. My wife still describes it as the best steak that she ever had. I had a water buffalo steak in Kathmandu that I might have enjoyed more, but that may have been influenced by having had nothing but Indian and Southeast Asian food for several months prior. Venison backstraps compare, but probably the closest steaks that I have had to kangaroo steaks were ostrich steaks. I’m not sure which were better. I will be talking more about ostrich in later posts.

My first dish with kangaroo was Kangaroo in Chocolate Sauce. I used a rabbit recipe from 1001 Foods to Die For, which I modified a bit as I usually do. All good cooks, like Jazz, Baroque and Classical era musicians, should be able to improvise, but the recipe itself is below. There is no reason to equate kangaroo with rabbit. Both are pests to farmers that hop, but the comparison stops there. The meat of neither domestic nor wild rabbits, which are rodents, is closer to chicken while the meat of the marsupial is closer to ostrich or venison. Nevertheless, I wanted to try the rabbit recipe, and not having a rabbit, I used a kangaroo. It worked out wonderfully. Other kangaroo dishes will be presented in later posts.

Unless, you live in Australia, the biggest problem with preparing kangaroo is finding kangaroo. We found ours at Jungle Jim’s in Cincinnati, Ohio. It’s not cheap meat, but it is not outrageously expensive either.  We have bought both steaks and ground kangaroo there and look forward to our next trip there. It is quite a remarkable store that I will be bringing up quite often in the future.