We have been slowly trying to clear things from the freezer and came across some frozen pheasant breasts.  A little out of season for the UK, but that doesn’t take away from the beauty of the produce or its free range pedigree!  Hunting round for a different way to prepare pheasant breasts we came across a recipe from “Wild and Game” in the UK.  The was for pheasant breast served with pasta – not something I wanted to do, but I did like the look of the sauce.

As a sauce (without the pheasant) I could imaging it would work tossed through pasta.  Here it serves as a vegetable, a sauce and also as a poaching liquid for the pheasant.  The other nice thing is that you can partially pre-make the sauce and bring it together with the pheasant at the last moment.

This was all cooked on the EGG set up for direct cooking.   It would also work well in a domestic kitchen on the hob too.  We used our Tefal Ingenio pans as they work so well on the EGG.  Once the temperature had stabilised out at around 180C the sauté pan was heated and the lardon/pancetta pieces were added and cooked until they took on some colour.  At this point the chopped onion was added and cooked till translucent. This was followed by the mushrooms which were cooked for another 5 minutes or so until softening.  The chopped garlic was then added and cooked through for a further minute or so.  That is the majority of the work completed.

The wine is then added to the pan.  This adds its own character to the sauce and also deglazes the pan.  This was cooked through for a few minutes to cook off all the alcohol and to reduce the volume a little.  At this point the 200ml of chicken stock was added (This was a concentrated mix made from one whole commercial stock pot added to  200 ml of water). Finally, a large handful of frozen peas were tossed in and cooked for 2-3 minutes before taking the pan off the heat.   If you are going on to cook the Pheasant straight away,once off the heat stir in  the creme fraiche and the parmesan and keep the pan warm.  If you are delaying cooking the Pheasant breasts then add the creme fraiche and parmesan after putting the pan back on the heat  and bringing the temperature up a little.

The Pheasant breasts were cooked in a separate pan in a mixture of butter and olive oil and a stalk of rosemary until they took on a good colour.  Their core temperature at this point was around 56-58C. The air vents were closed on the EGG and the remaining cooking was done with the residual heat. Pheasant breasts have a tendency to be a little dry even when cooked on the BGE if cooked at too high a temperature. Because of this we always aim to serve them a little pink.  The breasts were sat on the finished cream sauce and the 2 were cooked together in the BGE for 5 minutes or so till their core temperature approached 63-64C (American sites tend to suggest a finished temperature for any fowl as 74C but these have been at or above 60C for more than 12 minutes and so we are very comfortable with them being lower – see here for the explanation)

They were served simply with tray roasted root vegetables – these were also cooked on the MiniMax.  It may have been easier to cook this on the large BGE but we cooked all this on the  MiniMax simply to see if we could!  The vegetables were sautéed in a separate Tefal pan.  They were started off first in a separate pan and taken to the point when nearly cooked.  The pan was set to one side and kept warm.  The sauce was then made, up to the point of adding the Creme Fraiche and the parmesan.  This was also put to one side and kept warm whilst the pheasant breasts were sautéed in a 3rd pan.  The cream and the parmesan was stirred through the sauce which was gently warmed and the  pheasant breasts were put on top of the sauce.  The combination was cooked on the MiniMax for a few minutes.  This was set to one side, letting the pheasant rest whilst the vegetables were put back on the heat to finish off.

If you cook this on a larger Egg, then you can do it without all the pan swapping – but where is the fun in that!!?

All that was left to do was to plate up ……………….

…………… do give it a go!!

Footnote:

• If you don’t fancy or can’t get hold of pheasant breasts – this works really well with chicken!
• No pheasant or chicken breast?  The sauce works as a great pasta sauce by itself, just stir though some cooked pasta! – see here

by Heston Blumenthal.  

According to talk in the media recently, up to 70% of our Christmas turkeys will carry salmonella and/or campylobacter, so there’ll be a lot of upset tummies around unless we cook the bird properly. And I don’t mean roasting it until all the juices and flavour have disappeared; the poor old turkey deserves better than that.

I’ve written about this before, but it seems worth repeating. All pathogens (those nasty bugs of which salmonella and campylobacter are just two) are killed if you hold the internal temperature of the turkey at 60C for a minimum of 12 minutes. You can achieve the same effect at a lower temperature, though you’d need to maintain the internal temperature for longer. (By the same token, at a higher internal temperature, it takes less time.)

What is essential is that the whole turkey is brought to that temperature and held there for at least 12 minutes. To make sure of this, you’ll need a meat thermometer to test the temperature at certain critical spots. I know I keep wittering on about meat thermometers, but I really believe them to be important. Many people rely on the gauges on their ovens, but these are unreliable; even if they are accurate, they don’t tell you what’s really important – the internal temperature.

So here are five rules to make sure you have a bug-free Christmas:

1. If your turkey has been frozen, it must be defrosted all the way through before you start cooking.

2. Invest in a meat thermometer.

3. Check your turkey at the points where the heat takes longest to penetrate (ie, the breast at the bone; where the leg meets the thigh; and the carcass covered by the thigh, where the leg is tied in against the body).

4. Make sure the internal temperature reaches 60C.

5. Hold it at 60C for at least 12 minutes.

Reproduced from the Guardian December 11th 2004

On our wanderings we came across a butcher selling ‘home reared’ turkey and turkey breasts.  Well for 2 of us even a 1kg turkey breast seemed quite a lot of meat and even that was going to be a bit of a ‘tight squeeze’ on the Mini BGE.  But the challenge was set!  The question was how to cook it? Well we were (more…)