Subtly playful, tender and succulent, well-cooked pheasant is a taste to savor. Do you want to know how? Just follow our expert advice!
Pheasant is a wonderfully versatile meat that can be used in place of chicken or turkey in a wide range of recipes, as long as you follow a few simple rules.
Active life,
leaner meat A chicken or turkey raised indoors will not have moved much in his life. Unless you choose slow-raised free-range chicken, chances are the chicken in your supermarket has lived its life in a shed with thousands of other birds, without venturing away from the feeder. A pheasant, on the other hand, will have spent its days in forests and fields, searching for seeds, grains, berries and insects, and fleeing or flying away from any signs of predators. This is why the meat of a pheasant is leaner and denser than that of an indoor-bred broiler bird, and why care must be taken to prevent it from drying out during cooking. It’s also why older pheasant legs are best simmered or homemade. Pheasants develop strong leg muscles when running: slow cooking breaks down these muscle fibers to get tender meat that melts in the mouth.
Our Top Tips for
Cooking
Pheasant
If you’re grilling an early season bird or cooking pheasant breast fillets, our top tips are to add a lot of fat and make sure you don’t cook them for too long. Follow the guidelines below and invest in a digital kitchen thermometer to check when meat is cooked to perfection. End-of-season birds, meanwhile, are best cooked slowly, so our third tip is to cook them over slow, simmer heat.
How to Grill a
Pheasant Brace Pheasant season
begins Oct. 1 and early-season pheasants are delicious roasted and served with game chips (thinly sliced fries), bread sauce, and salsa. We recommend taking the bird out of the fridge for an hour before cooking. Preheat the oven to 200ºC, gas mark 6 and then heat the fat of your choice in a large oven-proof skillet over medium heat. Raymond Blanc recommends 50ml of rapeseed oil with 20g of unsalted butter, while Tim Maddams prefers pork, goose or duck fat. When the fat is hot, place the pheasants in the pan with the side of the spine facing down to brown for 3-5 minutes before turning it over to brown the side of the breast for 2-3 minutes. Season with salt and pepper before transferring to the oven for 15 minutes. When time runs out, use your kitchen thermometer to check that it is well cooked. The leg should read 80-82ºC and the breast 63ºC – cook them a little more if they have not reached these temperatures. If they have, cover them and let them sit for about 30 minutes before serving.
If you want to skip the browning stage, rub a lot of fat directly on your bird and extend the roasting time to 25-30 minutes, sprinkling during cooking. You may also want to wrap your bird in striped bacon to keep the succulent breast.
Boneless pheasant, ballotines, roasts and roasts of three
birds
Along with whole birds, our butchers prepare boneless and stuffed pheasants for easy cooking and carving. We recommend roasting them in oil or fat for an hour at 180ºC. Specific cooking instructions for our three-bird roasts, ballotines and roulades can be found on our culinary orientation page.
As
the season draws to a close on February 1, there’s nothing better than a full-flavor pheasant cooked slowly in a casserole. One-pot pheasant dishes are ideal winter warmers that you can leave in a low oven or slow cooker while braving the cold outside. Try our Jean-Francois Mallet pheasant and red cabbage recipe, BBC Good Food’s pot-roasted pheasant or Good Housekeeping’s slow-cooker pheasant casserole. Onions or shallots, vegetables, herbs and cider or wine are key features in all these recipes. Brown whole or quartered pheasants in a pan with their base ingredients before adding their liquid and herbs and transferring them to an oven or slow cooker.
Cooking pheasant breast
fillets
For a quick and tasty weekday meal, we love fried pheasant breasts. Serve with celery puree and a sauce made from the juices for a seasonal treat or warm up by marinating pheasant breasts in spices and serving in curry or with green sauce and a hot saffron puree. Pheasant breasts only need a few minutes in a pan, so keep a close eye on the watch to make sure you don’t overcook them. If you haven’t marinated them yet or aren’t using our marinated pheasant breast fillets, season on both sides while heating some oil and/or butter in a pan over high heat. Add the steaks and cook for 2-3 minutes on each side or until well cooked, then cover and rest for 5 minutes before serving. To fry pheasant breasts, cut them into strips and cook in a hot wok with oil for about 3 minutes until cooked. Set aside on a hot covered plate while cooking vegetables and other ingredients before returning the pheasant and stirring.
To
ensure that lean pheasants
remain perfectly plump and moist during cooking, many restaurants cook pheasants with the sous vide method. This involves vacuum-sealing the pheasant breasts or portions in a bag and cooking them at a precise low temperature in a water bath. Anova, the manufacturers of a sous vide machine, recommend 62 ° C for 45 minutes. If you don’t have a machine, instructions or DIY sous vide water baths can also be found online!
Pheasant
recipes For more recipe ideas, take a look at our pheasant recipe collection or blog archive or head straight to our pheasant range.
