Fargo outdoor enthusiast carves career niche as wild game chef and educator
Sep. 22—FARGO — One day a couple of years ago, Jeff Benda recalls, he and his wife, Melissa, were driving back from Bismarck to their home in Fargo when she made a life-changing suggestion.
An avid hunter and angler, Benda routinely put his culinary skills — acquired through years of working in restaurants in both Minnesota and Florida and also running a catering business — into practice making tasty dishes from wild game.
Could that, his wife wondered, become a career?
"She just out of the blue said, 'You know, I wish we could figure out a way for you to make money doing this full time,'" Benda said. "And I heard my wife say, 'You should quit your job and go hunting and fishing all the time.' ... So I did."
He laughs at the memory, but through his
Wild Game & Fish website
and
social media platforms such as Instagram,
Benda has carved out a multi-faceted outdoor career. The job description includes wild game cooking and butchering demonstrations, serving as camp chef-photographer-and-butcher-for-hire for hunting crews, posting wild game recipes to his website and providing content to a variety of publications and people in the hunting, fishing and shooting industries.
Among Benda's latest ventures is a social media campaign for the North Dakota Game and Fish Department, encouraging big game hunters to provide samples from animals they shoot this fall for chronic wasting disease testing. He also conducted a pheasant butchering and cooking demonstration, using birds purchased from a North Dakota game farm, during the
Fall Wild Outdoor Women
event, held Sept. 15-17 at Lake Metigoshe State Park near Bottineau.
In October, Benda is heading to Texas for the third time this year to teach a butchering and cooking class for the
She Hunts Skills Camp.
"I'll fly down to Texas and drive out to this ranch, and then it's a group of ladies — 12 women," Benda said. "Some of them are avid hunters, and others have never shot a gun or a bow, and so it's a great opportunity for them to learn hunting."
Typically, Benda says, he uses axis deer — an exotic Texas species — for his butchering and cooking class at the camp.
"Getting to interact with them and answer their questions has been great, I think, both for them and for myself," he said.
Benda says he had "no idea" what direction his outdoors career would take him when he launched Wild Game & Fish. Previously, he spent 16 years as a youth director for a Catholic church until Covid hit and delivered truck parts for Wallwork Truck Center in Fargo during the pandemic.
Then came his wife's suggestion.
"I got up at 4 in the morning every day and Ubered for three hours for six months so I could save up enough money to quit and do this full time," he said. "My first vision was that I was going to get to write a lot of hunting and fishing stories — that's one of my big passions. And so, just being able to sell those stories with great photos, along with recipes and just have that as my business model."
He quickly discovered being a freelance outdoor writer is a tough gig.
"I was very intentional with promising my wife that if this doesn't go well, I will just Uber more," Benda said. "I will do whatever it takes to make this business successful. And for the first year and a half, I did a lot of Uber on the side."
During the pandemic, Benda had discovered chat rooms through an app on his iPhone in which out-of-work chefs talked about teaching online cooking classes. That gave him an idea.
"I started offering these online wild game cooking classes," he said. "People would log in from all over the country, and I would stand there in front of a camera and my laptop and teach them how to do duck, pheasant, venison — things like that — and it took off like crazy, so I was able to start making money doing that."
Benda was finally able to ease off on the Uber driving by the fall of 2022, he says, when he was hired to produce a cookbook for someone else. The cookbook wasn't published, but he was paid in full.
The workload varies, he says, depending on the time of year.
"During hunting season, I'm out with clients doing that aspect of it," he said. "And then throughout the year, people will hire me as their guest speaker."
He's done fish and wild game cooking demonstrations for groups such as F-M Walleyes Unlimited, Muskies Inc., Pheasants Forever, Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, and in January will give a presentation to the North Dakota Wildlife Federation during the organization's annual conference in Fargo.
On average, Benda says, he now gives cooking demonstrations "probably about once a month."
"It's really grown," he said.
Despite his passion for fishing, hunting and cooking wild game, Benda didn't grow up in an outdoors family. Born in North Carolina, Benda says he was an "Air Force brat" and moved in 1982 to Grand Forks Air Force Base, where his dad was stationed.
He was enthralled by outdoor adventure books such as "My Side of the Mountain," "Island of the Blue Dolphins" and "Sign of the Beaver."
"I dreamed about being one of those kids who got to go get lost in the woods or be left alone in the woods and survive," said Benda, who graduated from Grand Forks Red River High School in 1993. "I was just enthralled with that idea of the outdoors but never had the opportunity myself as a kid."
That all changed in the early 2000s while attending Valley City State University, where friends introduced him to duck hunting, Benda says.
"I was hooked," he said. "I shot a couple of ducks, and the next week we went out and I shot my first pheasant, and a few weeks after that, I shot my first deer."
The experience, Benda says, was like the scene from "The Wizard of Oz" after the storm, when Dorothy steps into Oz and sees everything in color instead of black and white.
"Hunting did that for me," Benda said. "I saw North Dakota in a completely new light. And I just fell in love with it."
While hunting quickly became a passion, Benda says he wasn't as adventurous when it came to cooking the game he shot.
"All the pheasant went in a Crock Pot with cream of mushroom soup, all the ducks were marinated in Italian dressing and then wrapped in bacon, and all the deer was made into sausage," he said.
Benda got married a few years later, and while his wife — "she's a farm girl from Minnesota" — ate wild game, she quickly grew weary of deer sausage, he recalls.
She then challenged him to use wild game to make the same kind of beautiful meals he cooked with store-bought meat or for catering jobs.
"That was a big challenge to me, and so I started really scouring through cookbooks and saying, 'Well, what if, instead of lamb or beef, I use venison?' " Benda said. "Or, instead of this chicken dish, I use pheasant?"
He also found the
Facebook group of Hank Shaw,
a renowned hunter and wild game chef, and started posting recipes. Before long,
Harvesting Nature,
another cooking site, asked if they could publish one of his recipes on their website. Benda credits some of the people he worked with at Harvesting Nature for helping him get his start.
"I had never had Instagram before this," Benda said. "I was probably on six different hunting podcasts in just a couple of months, and so my Instagram followers grew and people just started reaching out to me."
Today, he has nearly 3,000 followers on Instagram, and at least 90% of his business comes from the platform, Benda says.
Prepared in more creative ways — venison souvlaki, for example — wild game and fish are now standard fare on the family menu, and it's a hit with both his wife and 8-year-old daughter, Lucia, Benda says.
Antelope is a favorite, Benda says, although this year he went "0-for-4" in drawing licenses, either in North Dakota or farther west.
"With every meal comes the story, so every time the protein hits the plate, my daughter's like, 'What are we eating today?' " Benda said. "And so I get to relive those stories, which I love to do."
With hunting seasons in full swing, the next several weeks will be a blur for Benda. It's all in a day's work in his gig as founder of Wild Game & Fish, and all of the various roles that includes.
Eventually, Benda says, he'd like to publish a cookbook featuring dishes prepared with North Dakota wild game, something that currently doesn't exist.
"Being able to connect people and having them fall in love with North Dakota like I did through the outdoors and through food, that's really my goal," Benda said. "Just to celebrate North Dakota and all the many opportunities that I've received here with family and friends and getting to raise our daughter here.
"I just want to share that with other people."
* On the web:
.
www.instagram.com/wildgameandfish
.
