I Tempted Her With Pheasant

Last month when I was at Kookoolan Farm I bought a pheasant from Chrissie. I've never cooked a pheasant before but thought it would be fun. Like my goose adventure, only with less grease! I find cooking exotic birds to be a bit less intimidating than cooking exotic beasts. They seem more accessable, and like with the goose I ended up with lots of 'extra food' from the pheasant.

Cooking a pheasant clearly should not be a just me for dinner kind of night so I invited some friends over. One friend hemmed and hawed because, it being a Saturday in June, she had three other parties to go to. I finally convinced her to come under false pretenses of homemade mead, but she was happy with pheasant and wine.

Pheasant is a dark meat bird with considerably less breast meat than a chicken. I looked at lots of recipes for roast pheasant and all of them called for wrapping the breast in bacon before cooking. Everything is better with bacon, isn't it? In the end, fearing a dried out, tough bird I opted to braise the pheasant instead of roast it. The recipe I used was a simple one and everyone loved the flavor. I added a split chicken breast in on top of the pheasant fearing there wouldn't be enough meat for all three of us, and though it wasn't necessary it was nice to have the leftovers. I would certainly use this reciepe again, with modifications found below.

Braised Pheasant

1 pheasant (plus a chicken breast or a few chicken thighs)

3 tbs flour

salt and black pepper

2 tsp dried rosemary

2 bay leaves

5 peppercorns

bacon fat and/or goose grease

1/4 cup red wine

1 1/2 chicken broth

1/2 a medium onion, sliced

4 cloves of garlic, smashed or cut in half

1 tablespoon flour

1/2 tsp ground dried rosemary

1) Cut the pheasant into pieces. I cut the leg/thigh pieces off, cut out the backbone and hacked the breast apart into two pieces. I saved the backbone, wingtips and trimmed neck and tail skin/fat for stock later. Preheat oven to 300 degrees.

2) Combine the flour with salt and pepper making sure the flour tastes seasoned. Rub the flour all over the pieces of pheasant. Heat the bacon fat and/or goose grease (lard or coconut oil if that's all you have) in a cast iron skillet. Brown the meat skin side down first until it is nice and golden brown. Do it in batches, making sure not to crowd the pan.

3) Place the browned pieces in the bottom of an enameled cast iron dutch oven (or other heavy pot with a well fitting lid). Be sure to keep chicken pieces on top of the pheasant as it doesn't need to cook as much. Tie the peppercorns, bay leaves and rosemary in a cheesecloth bundle and tuck in between the pheasant pieces. Add onion and garlic on top of the meat. Deglaze the pan with the red wine and pour that over the meat. Add the chicken broth and place in the hot oven.

4) Allow pheasant to cook for AT LEAST 2 1/2 hours. Probably more. When the pheasant is cooked through and the wing and leg joints move freely remove the meat to a platter and cover with foil to keep warm. Remove the onion and garlic either with a slotted spoon or by pouring all the sauce through a sieve and catching the liquid in a measuring cup, gravy separator or small saucepan.

5) Make the pan liquid into a gravy by cooking flour and ground rosemary in an equal amount of either fat that rises to the top of the pan sauce or more bacon grease. When the flour is cooked and starting to brown add the pan liquid into the roux and stir over medium high heat until flour is incorporated and the gravy is starting to thicken. Stir constantly and reduce heat to low when it is bubbling and thick.

6) Serve pheasant over wild rice, Israeli cous cous, orzo or mashed potatoes making sure to pass the gravy.

The cook is always most critical of their meal and my guests really enjoyed the experience. I found the pheasant to have a really pleasant flavor but it was tough. I braised mine for just over two hours and think another hour in the pot would have done wonders. A dry roasted hunk or meat or bird needs to reach the proper temperature but not go much above. A braised hunk of bird or meat needs to stay at the proper temperature long enough to melt connective tissue. I didn't give my pheasant enough time and it was pretty tough. I'll also add more rosemary next time. It was a lovely flavor and the original recipe called for branches of rosemary to be placed over the meat and liquid in the pot. I think that is a fantastic idea.

In the end, my guests enjoyed themselves. The gravy helped a lot (my trick to good gravy is to season the flour for the roux well with rosemary, basil, oregano or whatever other herb might fit the situation) and a couple bottles of wine with dinner helped even more. I didn't get any photos of the cooked meal, we were too busy eating it. Here is the lovely flower bouquet that was on the table.

I wonder what's next on my exotic bird cooking tour? Duck? Pigeon? Pastured turkey? Bring it on!

For more great blogs about cooking real food and why it's important check out this week's Real Food Wednesday!

Goose Deux - Apple Chestnut Stuffing

After carving this is how much meat one goose gives. It certainly isn't a turkey. I heeded the advice of food writers and made sure to make lots of stuffing and lots of gravy to fill up my guests' plates. Many of the recipes I read also said to actually stuff the stuffing into the goose. I know people have been doing it for forever, and geese are not as prone to nasties as chickens, but I just couldn't bring myself to do it. In the end, I'm glad I didn't because the stuffing wasn't completely full of goose fat so was a relatively decent foil to the greasy meat.
This recipe made 8 or 10 cups of stuffing but that turned out to be a goodly amount for the meal. It meant that we had lots to offer dinner guests that evening, and plenty of leftovers as well. Next time around I might even increase the bread cubes, add some more onion and just make a little more.

Of course, use sourdough or soaked flour bread if that is important to you. I used white bread, which is lower in phytates than whole wheat, and figured the whole meal was nutritious enough to call it good :)

Apple Chestnut Stuffing for a Goose
Serves 6-8

*7 cups cubed rosemary bread (or good quality white bread, but then add rosemary along with the other herbs)
*1 onion, diced
*3 celery ribs, chopped
*heart and liver from one goose, optional, or use chicken giblets. (I chose not to use the gizzard because it was so tough, but you might)
*1/2 cup butter
*1 tbs dried, ground sage, or 3 tbs chopped fresh sage
*1 tsp or so salt and pepper
*1 tsp dried thyme or 2 tsp fresh thyme
*1 tsp dried rosemary if you didn't use rosemary bread, or more fresh.
*2 granny smith apples, diced (recipe called for 2 cups, I just used two apples)
*1 can of chestnuts, rinsed and broken (can was probably 13 or 14 oz, or maybe 2 1/2 cups chestnuts. It was an odd sized can but the recipe could absorb considerbly more or less chestnuts depending on what you have avaliable)
*1/2 cup or so goose steaming liquid or chicken broth

Either dry the bread cubes over night or toast them in a low oven until quite dry and slightly golden.
Sautee the onions and celery in the butter until soft, 7 to 10 minutes. Add the chopped giblets, sage, thyme and salt and pepper and cook another three to five minutes or until the giblets are cooked through. Add the apple and the chestnuts and cook another 3 minutes or until the apple is just starting to get soft.
Combine the vegetables with the bread and mix thoroughly. Moisten the mixture with a little goose juice and pack into a crock pot or large casserole dish. I cooked mine in the crock pot on high for about two hours, but suspect it would take just around an hour in the oven to make sure everything is hot and the edges are starting to get a bit crispy. Some recipes used an egg to bind everything together but I found that occasional mashing and stirring of the stuffing the crock pot allowed it to bind a bit so it wasn't just bread cubes mixed with vegetables.

My Goose is Cooked

I finally did it. I've been talking about it for years. I finally cooked my Christmas Goose. Never mind that I didn't get around to it until January 11, he was still my Christmas Goose.

I bought a 10 pound Schlitz goose from a local meat market. Turns out Goosey is not local at all but they claim they are free range. Schlitz does offer a no-antibiotics brand of goose, indicating that their "plain" geese are treated but I still suspect that geese are a bit more humanely treated than most other fowl. I paid six dollars a pound, but I found the same damn bird at another market for a dollar a pound less two days after I bought Goosey.

I did a lot of reading over the last few months to figure out how to cook a goose. I read this article in the New York Times from December 2008, and this one from NPR in December of 2007 and this one from the Schlitz people themselves. In the end I decided to use Julia Child's method from The Way to Cook. It's a steam-roast method that sounded like the best way to get the fat out in a useable form and still have a tasty bird to eat. Speaking of fat... the first step when wishing to prepare a goose is to buy a new bottle of dish soap. Holy dear lord are they greasy lil buggers! :) From the moment I opened the plastic bag until well into the clean up and leftover-eating process I was up to my elbows in goose grease. On the upside, my hands have never been so soft ;)

Here is Goosey right out of the bag. I removed close to two cups of fat pods from inside the cavity and from extra trimmed skin as well as the liver, heart, neck and gizzards. I trimmed the wing ends off (look at those long wings! This ain't no chicken - he can fly!) and used those and the neck to make some stock. The giblets went into the stuffing. I do think he's a handsome little, er, big bird.

The first step was getting Goosey ready for his steam bath. I pricked his skin, rubbed him with lemon and salt and then put him breast up in the roaster with a couple inches of water. I put the roaster on the stovetop, brought the water to a boil and let him steam for an hour. This method allows the fat to render out and both not drown the meat and still be useable. After the steaming I drained out the liquid from the roaster and got THREE CUPS of fat!!



After the steaming I cleaned out the roaster and strewed some vegetables in the bottom. Goosey went back in, breast down, along with a cup of goose steaming liquid and a goodly splash of wine to spend two hours roasting in the oven at 350. Then the lid came off, the goose got flipped and another half hour to brown, with a little basting for good measure. More fat and liquid came out during the roasting ready to made one heck of a tasty gravy.

I used goose fat and butter to make a roux and then used the liquid from the roasting, seasoned with garlic powder and onion powder to make a gravy. Along with the meat and gravy I served an amazing Apple-Chestnut stuffing and some of my apple-cranberry sauerkraut. The consensus among the dinner guests was that goose is darn tasty, but very fatty. You really don't get much meat off a goose, but what meat you do get is very flavorful.

The real bonus of cooking a goose is the amount of "extra" food I have. Three cups of fat, plus maybe five cups of cooking liquid and another half cup of fat from that, all the fat from the cavity to be rendered and the carcass for more stock and probably more fat. Wow! Oh, right, and all the fat I wiped up off my counter and knives and hands and cutting board... haha. Did I mention they are greasy little buggers?

And for the rest of my life I get to tell the story of cooking my goose ;)