What Does Hippo Meat Taste Like? – The Ultimate Guide
ByJaron
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Hippos are large, powerful but seemingly benign-looking animals and when it comes to their meat, they can be quite the delicacy!
While hippo meat is scarce, owing to a few factors that we will discuss in detail below, it is still considered to be one of the best exotic game meats in the world.
It has superb marbling and a better overall texture compared to other animal meat and can be cooked in many ways too.
What does hippo meat taste like? Hippo meat has a mild flavor with gamey undertones. It can be best compared to beef but is better and more flavorful than regular cow meat. Hippo meat is cooked in the same way as lamb or beef but is very hard to find, especially in the mainstream market.
Read below to learn more about hippo meat, why it is so rare, how it’s used in different regions, and the best ways to cook it!
Hippo Meat Vs Beef
One of the main reasons why hippo meat is so rare is because it is just too difficult to obtain. They might not look scary but hippopotamuses are extremely powerful and dangerous animals, especially when enraged.
Even equipped with a rifle, you would have to be extremely cautious when hunting this beast.
They are known to take down large predators with ease and have a very, very strong jaw that can exert several hundred pounds of force—enough to easily crush bone!
It would make sense that this animal would present as a challenge for game hunters—and it has, for many, many years!
Humans have been hunting and eating hippo meat for centuries. There is even archeological evidence that suggests that hippo meat was very popular in early human civilization.
However, as we have already established, hunting this animal is no easy feat so it would also make sense that its farming would be very limited due to the sheer manpower.
This difficulty is one of the reasons why we settled on domestic cattle and broiler chickens as our main source of meat.
These smaller animals are easy to put down and their meat provides more or less the same nutrition. However, when it comes to the flavor of meat, hippo meat will easily dwarf the flavor of what we are usually used to eating at home.
Hippo meat has been described by many people to be like beef but better in every way. It has more visible marbling, it caramelizes better and it has a mild but distinctly gamey flavor that shares some flavor notes with ground beef.
Generally, hippo meat is very thick, yet it has a satisfyingly chewy texture compared to other types of four-legged animal meat.
Furthermore, even though the meat contains arguably more meat fibers, it cooks the same way as beef or lamb.
Hippo meat nearly became an American food staple.
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