It has been a while, but now that some good weather is coming ’round and the snow has melted off my barbecue (until this morning, at least), I figured it’s about time I dug into the stash of exotic meats in my freezer to revive this feature.

This weekend’s meat of choice? Antelope.

Funny thing about antelope is there’s actually no one animal called an antelope, so I’m not even sure what the meat I enjoyed on Saturday looked like before it came to me in ground meat form. But here is a picture of a pronghorn antelope, which is actually not an antelope at all:

In the comments section here a while back, Mike suggested that antelope meat goes well with sweet flavors. I also read that it’s quite lean. So, using bits of a bunch of different recipes I found online, I cut up a slice of bacon into tiny little bits and mixed it in with the meat to add some delicious fat (and bacon, obviously). I added teriyaki sauce, too, for flavor. Here are the burgers, ready for the grill:

The fire was pretty hot and I charred the burgers a little more than I would have liked. I think the sugar in the teriyaki might have caused some of the charring. Regardless, I put them on buns with a slice of grilled pineapple, a suggestion I saw at V for Venison. It looked like this:

So how is it? Pretty good, though not as transcendently awesome as the wild boar buns of the last experiment. Grilled pineapple works with a teriyaki burger, it turns out, and it definitely seemed to go well with the antelope meat.

The meat itself tastes, well, meaty. Maybe a bit like the venison burger I ate long ago? Very rich, and flavorful enough to not be overpowered by the bacon or teriyaki flavors. The former was entirely lost, the latter only barely evident. I’m never exactly sure what someone means when they say something tastes “gamey” but I think this tasted gamey.

I thoroughly enjoyed the meal, but I’m unsure how much of that was due to the antelope and how much was thanks to my first pineapple-on-a-burger experience. If I saw antelope on a menu in some item that otherwise looked good to me, I’d order it again, but there wasn’t anything so exceptional about it that makes me want to run out and buy more antelope meat.