Our First Recipe: Why Venison and Apple

Our first recipe began with our dog, Umi. 

When we moved to Karuizawa, we started cooking for her at home. Wild venison from local hunters. Apples from Shinshu orchards. Vegetables, prepared simply. This became Karuizawa Harvest's first meal topper.

Two ingredients carry the Nagano provenance. The venison, from the forests around Karuizawa. The apple, from Shinshu orchards. The rest of the recipe is sourced across Japan.

Food for dogs deserves the same care as our own. Ingredients chosen for flavour and quality, not convenience.

Nose to tail

The base of the meal topper is wild venison: muscle, heart and liver, the way the region's game processors use the whole animal. Dog food is often made from trimmings and byproducts. Our recipe uses the meat itself.

The venison muscle is the core of the recipe: a lean, high-protein red meat taken from the wild sika deer that Nagano actively manages to protect its forests and farmland. To that we add two more parts of the same animal. Venison heart is a dense, clean working muscle that eats more like meat than offal. Venison liver is nutrient-dense, which is exactly why we use a small, measured amount of it.

As part of the development of our recipe, we researched other existing venison recipes in the market. We found that many used no organs at all, or substituted pork heart and liver for the venison's own.

We also learned that Nagano's forests hold more deer than they can sustain. Without natural predators, the population grows quickly and deer strip bark from young trees and graze farmland. The prefecture manages this through active culling and works to turn the venison into food rather than waste.

Once we understood that, using another animal's organs felt like missing the point. If the venison is a byproduct of that ecological management, the whole animal should be.

Field and orchard

Venison is the savoury, mineral base. The plants balance it, chosen the way a cook composes a plate: for flavour, colour and texture.

Shinshu apples bring brightness: a natural sweetness and a clean acidity that lifts the meat and keeps the recipe from feeling heavy, the same instinct that pairs apples with game on a dinner table.

Sweet potato (satsumaimo) brings body: a low-fat, whole-food carbohydrate, cured into a deep, honeyed sweetness.
Carrot brings colour and a slight crunch, with its own sweetness.

Finally, broccoli brings something different: a dense, mineral bitterness that cuts the sweetness of the other three. A small amount, used deliberately, to sharpen the plate rather than dominate it.

Put together, they do what a good meal does: savoury and sweet, dense and light, dark meat and bright vegetable, each part bringing out the others. It is food with ingredients you'd recognise from your own kitchen.

In the bowl

Our first whole-food meal topper, VENISON + APPLE, is made to go over your dog's usual meals as part of a balanced diet. It is the first in a set we are building around the landscape, each with a character of its own. Our first recipe offers a taste of the forest, because that is where Umi’s bowl started.

When you set our recipe down in front of your dog, that is really what's in the bowl. Not filler. Not trimmings. Wild venison, Shinshu apple and vegetables, chosen with the same care as your own dinner. 

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Venison & Apple is coming autumn 2026. For more on what goes into it and news of the release, leave your email below.