Pheasant Madeira
- Total Time
- 2 hours 15 minutes
- Rating
- Comments
- Read comments
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Ingredients
- 2pheasants, about 2½ pounds each, cut into serving pieces like a chicken
- Salt and pepper to taste
- 2medium onions, sliced thin
- ½cup fresh mushrooms, sliced thin
- 1cup Madeira wine
- 1egg yolk, beaten
Preparation
- Step 1
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
- Step 2
Salt and pepper the pheasant pieces, then brown in a Dutch oven over medium-high heat, a few at a time, in the butter. Remove browned pieces and set aside as they are ready.
- Step 3
Saute onions and mushrooms in drippings until onions turn clear. Place pheasant pieces on top of the vegetables, pour wine over, cover and place in preheated oven. Cook until tender - about 90 minutes (see note). Remove birds to warmed serving platter.
- Step 4
Place Dutch oven on top of the stove and raise temperature to boiling. Reduce sauce by almost half.
- Step 5
Beat the egg yolk in a cup. Using a tablespoon, begin spooning hot sauce into egg yolk, stirring all the time, until you have a cupful of hot egg yolk and sauce. (If the egg yolk strings, you have added the hot sauce too fast. You'll have to throw out the cupful and start again.) When you have a well-blended cup of hot egg yolk and sauce, pour it back into the boiling sauce, stirring vigorously. Cook and stir until it thickens like gravy. Place in a gravy boat and serve with the birds.
- The cooking time for this recipe assumes that the pheasants are domestic. If they are wild, you may find the cooking time should be two hours. Any chicken recipe can be adapted by adjusting the time upward a little to allow for the pheasant's tendency to be a little leaner and perhaps drier than its domestic plain plumed cousin. Conversely, you may use this recipe for chicken, reducing the cooking time accordingly.
Private Notes
Comments
Always looking for new ways to fix the pheasants my husband brings home. I think I will put juniper berries and sliced onion inside the birds. I plan to brown onion/celery/carrot in the pot before returning the birds to roast on top. And to use mushroom-soaking water to create a wild rice pilaf in the pot after roasting the pheasant.