So if any of you are like me you remember watching Bugs Bunny during Saturday morning cartoons. In one of my favorite vignettes, Yosemite Sam is the cook for a king who has a hankering for hasenpfeffer. Sam, of course, is out of rabbit and spends the cartoon trying to capture Bugs Bunny in order to give the king what he wants. And, of course, comedy ensues resulting in the king eating carrots and being told it was hasenpfeffer.
Well, as a kid I never knew if hasenpfeffer was a real thing or just some fun word the Loony Tune writers came up with. I also thought that if it was real, then it must be great since a king desired it so strongly. Such is the mind of a 6 year old.
For some reason I was reminded of that cartoon recently and wondered how the dish would taste. As it happened, this past weekend was Easter and friends of mine wanted to have a potluck during our weekly meetup. I thought that it was finally time to try to make the dish myself. I mean the Easter bunny would have already delivered me my Starburst Jelly beans so I saw nothing to lose.
I learned a lot with this cooking experiment. First, Hasenpfeffer is a very very German dish. I knew it was German in origin, but to me the taste of the sauce declares the dish to be unabashedly German. I think if you want, in one bite, to have and idea what traditional German cooking tastes like...Hasenpfeffer sauce will show you. It is a thick and creamy sauce that, far from the mildness of white gravy one might run across in a standard American stew, has a bite to it from the use of vinegar and sour cream; I don't usually expect that sort of tang from such a friendly looking light brown gravy. This tang, arrived at both due to the gravy and the 2 days of marinating, helped off set any gaminess the rabbit might have had. For me the dish really woke up my taste-buds with a great big "GutenTag"!
Rabbit is an interesting meat to prepare and while my skills at taking apart a chicken did help, a rabbit is, obviously, a whole different beast. The tenderloins were especially hard to clean as a rabbits backbone is very complex as opposed to a chicken and one has to deal with "silverskin" removal which is not something you run into with a chicken. If you do not have much practice breaking down a chicken, or don't feel adventurous I would recommend getting a butcher to take care of breaking down your rabbit. If you don't feel like rabbit is quite your thing, i think this dish could be made quite well with chicken, though i would probably stick to legs and thighs as the breast meat would not have the strength of flavor to hold up against the sauce.
There is one step in the recipe that you may be tempted to skip, but i would recommend against that. You will be making a roux in order to thicken your stew and you are told to take the roux out of the pan and let it cool. You may think that this is a silly thing to do as you will turn around in a few minutes and add the roux to the hot stew. But this cooling down time is important. In order to maximize the thickening power of a roux, the proteins will need to relax a little in order to better disperse in your cooking liquid. Yes, a hot roux will thicken a stew, but a cooled roux will incorporate easier and therefore tighten the sauce more efficiently. Ain't science weird and cool?
Hasenpfeffer Ingredients
5-6 lbs of rabbit
2 tablespoons butter
four tablespoons AP flour
3 cups red wine (I used a Sangiovesse)
1/2 cup red wine vinegar
1 whole onion (roughly chopped)
4 whole cloves
6 bay leaves
10 peppercorns (lightly crushed)
4 Juniper Berries (lightly crushed)
2 tsp salt
1/2 cup sour cream
Hasenpfeffer Procedure
Mix red wine, red wine vinegar, onion, cloves, bay leaves, peppercorns, and juniper berries into a sauce pan and bring up to a simmer for 5 minutes. Take marinade off the heat and let cool to room temperature. Meanwhile, breakdown your rabbits. I break mine down into two back leg/thighs and two front legs both on the bone and the four tenderloins off the bone and cleaned of silver skin.
Once marinade has cooled, place both it and your rabbit pieces into a non metal
bowl and place in the refrigerator for 36 to 48 hours. Reposition you pieces of rabbit in the marinade twice a day in order to ensure all pieces get to soak.
Once rabbit has finished marinating, place a 5 quart dutch over on a burner and saute the bacon till it renders its fat. Remove and reserve the crispy bacon. Add butter to bacon fat and still till it melts. Meanwhile remove rabbit pieces from the marinade and pat all the pieces dry. Salt and pepper the rabbit. Once the butter has melted into the bacon fat, brown all sides of your rabbit meat in the dutch oven. This is best done in batches with the browned pieces of meat placed on its own plate to help collect any runoff juices that may come from the meat.
Once all the meat has browned, all the four to the remaining fat and stir to make a roux. After flour has lightly browned, remove roux from dutch oven and allow to cool. Immediately strain your marinade into the dutch and place the browned rabbit meat plus any accumulated juices into the marinade. Bring up to a light simmer. This will cook for around 30-45 minutes or until the meat is tender. Around 5-10 minutes into the simmering your roux should be cooled. Add the roux into the meat marinade mixture at this point and stir till it is incorporated.
After the 30-45 min cook time, stir in the sour cream (if using) and the reserved bacon then let the stew warm for a 2 minutes on the burner being careful to not let it boil. Serve immediately.
