Step by step guide to cooking a pheasant: Part I

Forget chickens, forget ducks, even forget turkeys – if you want the king of roast fowl you need to get yourself a pheasant. The taste is rich and gamey and cooked well is the undisputed king of birds you can eat.

Today I am going to show you how to make a roast pheasant with pear and plum sauce.

Step one is to get yourself a pheasant, if you are in Wellington: Meat on Tory is a good place to start. They are more expensive than other birds so expect to pay between $22 - $35 dollars for a decent one.

Step two is to get it out of the wrapping and give it a wash – as pheasants are not farmed industrially you may have to pull a feather or two off but at least now you will be able to say you are a mother pheasant plucker.

Note the significantly longer legs on pheasants than chickens or ducks, the meat is also noticeably redder.

For the stuffing you will need to go shopping for things, particularly if you don’t already have anything in the cupboard. You will need to cut these into smaller pieces.

For the base of the stuffing I used Red Anjou Pears, but you can use apples, or apricots, or anything you want. Don’t be afraid experimenting with stronger flavours than you would with a chicken as pheasants run around in the sun all day and have a stronger taste.

Originally I was thinking of making an anchovy and red wine sauce for the pheasant; settling on plums when I remembered I drank all the wine.

Another pro-tip is remembering the relatively smaller volume of a pheasant’s interior, especially compared with a turkey so you need less stuffing than you think. My stuffing ready for stuffing looked like this.

The next step is to get the fingers in there and stuff that pheasant, I made the mistake of stuffing it in the neck so when I was nearly finished and having to really jam it in there, it kept coming out the other end. Try to avoid this if possible.

You should always make sure your roast meat is fully rested, I advise resting before the oven - not just after.

The final step is wrapping the pheasant in tin foil, heating the oven to a little over 100c and slow roasting for a couple of hours.