How to Cook Pheasant Over Fire - The Bird Everyone Overcooks, Done Right

On the first of October the pheasant season opens, and for the next four months there is more cheap, wild, free-range meat available in this country than at any other time of year. A brace of pheasants from a game dealer costs less than a supermarket chicken. And most of them will be ruined.

The problem is that pheasant looks like a chicken, so people cook it like one. A whole bird in the oven for an hour and a half. What comes out is a breast like cardboard and legs that are still tough, because a pheasant is a lean, athletic wild bird with almost no fat, and its breast and legs want completely different cooking.

Over a fire, you can give them exactly that. This is how.

Choosing and Preparing the Bird

• Young birds are for roasting, old birds are for the pot. A young cock pheasant has short, rounded spurs and a flexible breastbone. An old one has long sharp spurs and will not roast well whatever you do. Ask your game dealer which you are buying
• Hens are smaller and more tender than cocks. For a quick cook over fire, I would choose a hen every time
• Hang time matters. A pheasant that has hung for a few days in the cold is more tender and more flavoured than one shot yesterday. A week is plenty; the old tradition of hanging until it drops is not something anyone needs to repeat
• Check for shot. Run your fingers over the breast and legs and pull out any pellets you find. Nobody enjoys finding them with a tooth
• Brine it if you have the time. Two hours in a solution of 50g salt to a litre of water, then patted dry, makes a real difference to a lean bird

The Whole Bird: Spatchcocked and Barded

If you want the whole bird on the fire, take the backbone out and flatten it, as I describe for chicken. Then lay strips of streaky bacon over the breast. This is not decoration. Pheasant has no fat of its own, and the bacon bastes it as it cooks.

• Two-zone fire: a good bed of embers at one end, almost nothing at the other
• Start skin side up in the cool zone, with the bacon on, for about 25 minutes
• Move it over the embers, skin side down, for four or five minutes to crisp. Lift the bacon off for the last two minutes if you want the skin to colour
• Pull the bird when the thickest part of the breast reads 62C. It will rest to 65C, which is pink and juicy. Anything beyond 70C is where pheasant goes to die
• Rest for ten minutes under a cloth

The legs will be a little undercooked at this point, which is honest: they always are when a pheasant is roasted whole. Either accept it and pull the leg meat for a stew tomorrow, or cook the parts separately, which is what I do at events.

The Breasts: Fast and Pink

Pheasant breast over a fire is a three-minute job, and it is the best way to eat the bird.

• Take the breasts off the bone, skin on if the bird was plucked, and brush them with oil and salt
• Over hot embers, skin side down, for two minutes, until it colours
• Flip for ninety seconds
• Pull at 60C. Rest three minutes. Slice on the angle

Pink in the middle, like a good duck breast. If you have been told pheasant must be cooked through, you have been told wrong; it is a wild bird in excellent health and it is cooked at 65C like any other poultry. Overcooking it is the mistake, not undercooking.

The Legs: Slow

Pheasant legs are full of sinew and will never be tender from a quick cook. They want an hour and a half in a covered cast iron pot at the cool edge of the fire, with a glass of cider, a few juniper berries, some thyme and a halved onion. Then take the lid off and let the fire reduce the liquid to a glaze for the last twenty minutes. The meat pulls off the bone.

At a wedding I will serve the pink breast and the slow leg on the same board, and guests assume they are two different birds.

The single thing that would improve British pheasant cookery overnight is a probe thermometer. Sixty-two degrees. Not a minute per gram, not until the juices run clear, not an hour at 180. Sixty-two degrees and out.
- Cai

What to Serve With It

Pheasant is mild, so it wants things with a bit of sweetness and a bit of bitterness. Ember-roasted celeriac. Braised red cabbage with apple. A bread sauce if you are feeling traditional, which I usually am. Game chips, which are just very thin crisps fried in dripping. Blackberries or sloes in the sauce from the legs.

To drink, a lighter red. I have written about what goes with fire-cooked game, and pheasant is the bird that gives you the most choice.

Where to Get It

Any game dealer, most good butchers from October, and increasingly the better farm shops. Ask for young birds, ask how long they have hung, and ask whether they have been plucked or skinned. A plucked bird with its skin on is worth paying more for. If you want to go further than that, my beginners guide to stalking is where the self-sufficient path starts, and we cook pheasant at every autumn workshop.