My sister and her husband gave me an assortment of exotic meats for Christmas, because my family is just that awesome. Many of them are in burger form, which is massively convenient because I make a lot of burgers at home. Some of them are in steak form. All of them* will be introduced in this new TedQuarters feature, Meet the Meat.

I started with wild boar. Here’s what it presumably looked like before someone went all Lord of the Flies on it:

Here’s what it looks like as steak:

From the Internet, I expected lean, tough meat, but as you can see in the picture above the steak had some nice fatty marbling to it.

My wife and I picked up some frozen steamed buns in Flushing on Saturday after she picked me up from the airport, so my first instinct was to turn the boar into a version of the Hall of Fame Momofuku pork bun, since that seemed like a good easy recipe that would showcase the meat.

But then it turned out my wife doesn’t like hoisin sauce, which came as news to me. Turns out it takes at least a year and a half of marriage before you fully comprehend your spouse’s taste in Asian condiments. She happens to be wrong — hoisin is delicious — but even though I was once in a band called the Moo Shoo Porkestra, I was willing to adjust the recipe. That’s love, right there.

I pan-fried the boar in a little bit of olive oil and steamed the buns. Then, inspired by banh mi sandwiches and the herbs I happened to have at my disposal, I put a piece of boar on each bun with some Thai chile sauce (think sweet and sour sauce but with a little heat), fresh cilantro, and a couple of slices of cucumber and jalapeno:

Before I ate it I added a little bit of Sriracha, because Sriracha is amazing.

This wild boar bun is amazing. Honestly, I heartily recommend combining cucumbers, cilantro, jalapenos and Thai chile sauce wherever possible. Turns out they go really, really well together — really capture that sweet, spicy, sharp mix of flavors you get in a lot of southeast Asian foods.

And as for the meat? Excellent. I wouldn’t say it was tender, but it was a lot less tough than I expected — somewhere on the scale of a steak or a pork chop. Actually, halfway between a steak and a pork chop is probably a good way to describe the flavor. It tasted very meaty, but not in a way I’d call “gamey” — though I’ve never been entirely clear on what that word really means.

*- I reserve the right to not document some of them if I can’t come up with anything to say about them. But then you won’t know anyway.