Finally! A Recipe For Tender Crockpot Pheasant

When I traded bunny chasing with beagles for bird chasing with flushing spaniels 25 years ago, I was certain that grouse would forever be my number one target, with woodcock filling in the occasional gap. After all, we were never surprised to flush a partridge or two by accident when hunting snowshoe hares on my father-in-law’s and others’ private land near Malone, NY.

This accounts for my unrealistically hopeful expectation that I’d be finding just as many grouse forevermore on public land south of Buffalo.

After driving 80 white-knuckled miles to and then from slim partridge pickin’s in Lake Effect Blizzard country for several years, I determined to find a safer and more productive place where I’d be able to run my dog on birds in January and February. This explains how and why I wound up joining a pheasant release club.

It also explains why, shortly thereafter, I began looking for a way to cook up pheasants that didn’t plate up as dry as a tick on a Bravecto-ed dog. My wife and I tried all sorts of preparations. We soaked breasts in buttermilk. We found a butcher who would accept boneless breasts and mix with secret herbs and spices — read “schmaltz,” or chicken fat — to make Pheasant Sausage. I tried grinding pheasants on my own, with half a pound of bacon being my secret sauce. Most recently I diced the breasts, sautéed them with a generous half stick of butter, then buried them in a cheesy quesadilla. All these attempts were palatable but not exceptional.

After seeing a video on cleaning desert quail recently,

http://uplandjournal.ipbhost.com/topic/62010-quail-cleaning-video/?tab=comments#comment-1096913

I decided to try the same technique on a pheasant, with appropriate tweaks for the birds’ different sizes. In particular, I thought that cooking the pheasant whole, bones and all, might add some flavor. So I began dreaming up a brand-new low-and-slow crockpot recipe for pheasants. It so happened that while I was thinking this over, Matt A. — my wife’s niece’s husband from North Dakota — showed up for our family’s Thanksgiving holiday celebration. We fell to talking about cooking up pheasants, and Matt offered his family’s favored technique. It was darn close to what I had envisioned, and so with just a minor adjustment or two — my vision contained no Cream of Something soup — I gave my new recipe a try.

And it was terrific! I bet it’ll work great with a rabbit or a mallard as well. Your comments and suggestions are welcome and solicited. Without further prologue, here’s my Tender Crockpot Pheasant recipe.

Ingredients

1 onion, coarsely chopped

2 stalks celery, into 1/4” dice

3 carrots, peeled and sliced on a bias into 1/8” coins

2 medium potatoes, unpeeled, and cut into 1/2” dice

2 large garlic cloves, smashed

1 oz. dried porcini mushrooms, rehydrated and diced

1 pkg. onion soup mix

2 healthy dashes soy sauce (don’t doubt me)
a sprig or two of thyme
2 Bay leaves
1/2 tsp black peppercorns
2 whole cloves
1 squirt @ anchovy- and tomato-paste

light splashes of a dry light white wine, as in Sauvignon Blanc

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3 strips of bacon, cut in half

1 rooster pheasant, skinned and eviscerated (a quite naked bird ;-)

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1+ tbsp. cornstarch and cold water slurry

Technique

1. Skin and eviscerate the pheasant so it looks like a naked Perdue roaster;

2. Cut and put into the crockpot the first 9 ingredients;

3. Put the rooster on top of your vegetable pile. Drape the 6 half-strips over the pheasant’s breast and legs;

4. Cover the crockpot and set on low for 8 hours;

5. At 7 hours (or 15 minutes less to allow for cooling time), remove the pheasant and pull the best meat off the breast and legs. Reintroduce the “pulled pheasant” into the crockpot. Reserve the bacon and less pleasing looking hunks of meat for the doggie who got you the pheasant;

6. With about 30 minutes to go, mix a hearty soupspoon of corn starch and a bit of cold water in a mixing bowl. When smooth, introduce back into the crockpot and give a good stir; and

7. Eat and be happy. A sprinkling of either Sriracha or, going the other way, some Pecorino Romano, may make you smile. Maybe have some hot biscuits with butter and the rest of the Sauv Blanc, too. God wants you to be happy.

This Neighborhood’s Going to the Dogs.

Actually, hunting dogs will very soon be gone from this emerging neighborhood.

I’ve been hunting on a particular piece of ground since shortly after I was married in 1978. In the 1980s, I hunted rabbits there behind my first dog beagle Jupp. Since 1994, I’ve hunted woodcock there behind flushing spaniels. One day last fall while woodcocking behind Gordie, I noticed earth moving equipment on the far side of our best hunting spots. It has not taken the developers long to bring the land to this point:

Now I have no legitimate *right* to bitch about this. First and last, I’ve never owned this land. Its owners heretofore had simply benignly neglected those of us geezers who still head out in the autumn with dog and gun hoping to bag maybe a bird or two. Further, the road in the picture, and the lots that will spring off it at 90°, is on land I haven’t hunted in years, as it’s too close to older houses that have always been sited along the main road. But the end of this road, very near a tiny flow sometimes glorified as a “creek,” will necessarily move my hunting areas 500’ back from some really good, and historically precious, thickets. So, although I have no legal basis to complain, still I’m bummed.

Best Woodcock Hunting Dates in Western New York in the Last 25 Years

After this year’s woodcock hunting started slowly, I decided to seek some historical perspective by checking the log I’ve faithfully kept since 1993, the year I started hunting birds instead of bunnies. All the woodcock counted are from the single ZIPcode that is my home hunting ground.

“Slow hunting” to me means small numbers of birds flushed rather than a low number of birds killed. There’s lots of reasons why the number of birds killed over one hunter’s dogs on a given date is not a perfect indicator of birds flushed. Local coverts become overgrown and thus tougher to gun over 25 years. When I am hunting alone, I am less likely to pull a trigger these days unless the bird will be reasonably easy for my dog to retrieve — did I mention that it’s crazy overgrown here? — and unless my shot charge is not directed at the new houses that have erupted like sores on my good old hunting grounds. I could go on, but there’s no need. My point remains that birds in bag are not a perfect indicator of birds flushed.

But since birds in bag is the only data I’ve kept, I’m going to run with it while at the same time acknowledging its imperfection.

When I looked at the aggregated data, two things jumped out at me.

First, the median date for shooting my dogs’ woodcock here is October 22, which is exactly the median day of NY’s current 45-day season. This comes as a mild surprise to me, the halfway mathematical “precision” notwithstanding. I would have bet the date would have been a bit later simply because shooting is easier after all the leaves have fallen.

Second, the days between 10/6 and 11/4 account for almost 94% of all the woodcock my dogs have flushed and retrieved. Starting next year, I’ll look for something better to pursue in the “tail” dates of the season. Maybe trout. Maybe pheasants. Heck, maybe golf if the temps are well into the 70s.

Habitat loss due to human encroachment, I fear, seriously threatens my next spaniel pup from doing as well locally as did my first two. Even so, I’ll keep looking for new spots that may become available to try.