You might say that as a former chef, Roger Hess’s career really has gone to the dogs.

Not that he is complaining.

As the owner of Tailgunner Kennel, he is kept busy nowadays training and boarding Labrador retrievers and a few pointers, along with guiding for clients on pheasant hunts at the Traxler’s Hunting Preserve near Le Center.

But before he became a professional gun dog trainer, he was a professional chef.

The Litchfield native graduated from the Culinary Arts Institute at Hyde Park, N.Y., in the mid-1980s. During his ensuing kitchen career, he worked as a chef for Radisson and Hilton Hotels in Minnesota and Colorado, Lord Fletcher’s on Lake Minnetonka, and the Flagship Athletic Club in Eden Prairie.

He even did a stint as recording artist Prince’s private chef.

His final station as a professional chef was at Traxler’s Hunting Preserve, where he was able to meld his formal culinary training with his love of the outdoors by helping owners Jeff and Kathy Traxler transform what was a burger/pizza operation for hungry hunters into a top-class restaurant with a reputation for exemplary wild game dishes.

“We used to be a hunting preserve with hamburgers and pizza,” Kathy Traxler said. “Today, we’re a restaurant with a hunting preserve.”

As an outdoors enthusiast, Hess understandably is a fan of wild game as table fare. But he is equally as enthusiastic as a chef. “Wild game is low in cholesterol, a much leaner meat than domestic meats,” Hess said, adding that those same qualities also demand special consideration when cooking.

“Low and slow is what barbecue is all about, and it’s the same in the outdoor world. The big thing is not to overcook game — it’s best to leave it on the pink side,” he said.

And about the propensity for some of us to pop open a can cream of mushroom soup? “Sauces are good with game,” he said, not quite endorsing the familiar red-and-white can so many amateur game cooks reach for.

Rather, home-made béchamel or roux — a basic white sauce — is easy to make, he said. And natural ingredients like wild mushroom, berries or herbs, add a flavorful and unique dimension to wild game.

Hess said his recipes run to the “hunter’s style” of cooking.

“It’s using less of the exotic ingredients and relying instead on more natural ingredients — the wild mushrooms and berries, and heavy with sauces and gravies, the root vegetables we raise in our gardens,” he said. “It’s basically the kind of food many of us grew up on as farm families.”

These days, when he’s not dog training, he helps out at Traxler’s, guiding clients, or occasionally jumping back into the kitchen to prepare a dish for a group that has requested his services.

In addition, he has completed his seventh wild game cook book “Classic Wild Game Recipes,” which should be available early next month (read Hess' recipe as for Caramel Duck as well as other local wild game recipes in the Sunday print edtion of The Free Press.

And not one of the recipes calls for cream-of-mushroom soup.

Copies of the book are available by e-mailing Hess at roger@tailgunnerkennel.com, by phone at 507-317-3335, or at his Web site, www.tailgunnerkennel.com.



John Cross is a Free Press staff writer. Contact him at 344-6376 or by e-mail at jcross@mankatofreepress.com.