Roasted Pheasant with IPA Pear Sauce
What I decided on was a Roasted Pheasant with a Persimmon glaze and an Arugula salad. Armed with my new grocery list, I returned to the store to purchase the items needed to make this dish, however, all the Persimmons were gone!! With the Persimmons MIA, I needed to pivot to another fall produce item. I searched the aisle looking for something I could turn into a glaze. What I found were these wonderful Bartlett Pears. I purchased a half dozen of these pears not sure what I would be able to do with them.
Now it was time to come up with a brine. I've been brewing my own beer in the garage for 7 or 8 years now and I love to find ways to work it into recipes. In fact, I have several Chinook hop vines that I grow in my back yard. I'll collect the hops once a year, in the fall, then try to use them in the brewing process. I'm obsessed with the smell of hops! And I love a good IPA. The Chinook hops have a pine-like aroma that I love. I think they work well together with Juniper berries, which also have a pine-like taste. Juniper berries are often used in wild game brines to help mask or hide some of that wild game flavor. Because poultry can become dry during the cooking process, it's always a good idea to brine your birds, it helps protect the meat from being overcooked while also flavoring the meat. Knowing that I was going to brine this bird, I combined the beer and berries, to make this IPA Beer and Juniper Berry brine. For good measure, I sliced up one of my Bartlett Pears and threw in a few peppercorns, some salt and sugar, then heated it on the stove just to dissolve the sugar.
The aroma from the brine was divine, you could really smell the flora notes from the pears and the IPA! It gave me the idea of trying to make a sauce out of it. Admittedly, the first few attempts at making my IPA Pear sauce failed miserably. The only IPA that I currently had kegged in the garage turned out a little on the malty side (either that or I grabbed the wrong beer). When I added it to my pear sauce the taste was off-putting and overly bitter. About ready to give up and only a few pears left, I decided to give it another try, only this time with a store-bought Sweet Water IPA. It turned out perfect! Even my daughter, one of the most finicky eaters I know, proclaimed "That taste really good!".
I found that Apple Butter Roasted Chicken is a popular dish, so I decided to play off that and use my new IPA Pear sauce as an Apple Butter substitute on the Roasted Pheasant. Needing some additional supplies, I headed back to the store ... and wouldn't you know it, they now had Persimmons back in stock. I knew it was too late to change my dish, but I purchased a few Persimmons anyway and with the wife's help we made this Persimmon & Pomegranate Arugula salad as side dish.
While the Persimmons didn't turn out to be the focus of this dish, the Pear Roasted Pheasant turned out really good and all plates were cleaned!
About the Author : Jeff Davis
Visit authors website | View more articlesYou may think cooking and recipes don’t have much to do with a website dedicated to hunting dogs ... but really, why do we hunt? Sure, we enjoy watching our dogs work in the field and being outdoors, but ultimately, hunting is about survival and feeding our families. We might as well try to do it well. I'm not a chef and definitely no food authority ... but I do like to eat and enjoy cooking. After searching for people willing to share their recipes on Gundog Central, without much success, I decided to try to do a few on my own, with my wife Tami's help. The recipes I share here are things I like to eat and have made here at home. I've tried to include step-by-step instructions with each meal describing exactly how I did it, but my method may not be best, if you decide to try a recipe posted here, please use whatever technique you think works best, I'm simply sharing how I did it. You'll see a lot of recipes where I've tried to make things from starch, when I could have just used store bought ingredients, simply because I wanted to learn how something was done. My goal is to continually update these recipes as I learn new things and techniques. These are my attempts at creating good, home cooked food, that I would like to eat! If I'm sharing it here, my family and I enjoyed it and I believe you will too.
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