Dry, tough pheasant? You're cooking it wrong, Aberdeen chef says (2024)

Many people find pheasant dry, tough and gamey.

Jason Hill thinks they’re just cooking it wrong.

“If you look at old, old recipes for pheasant dating back hundreds of years ago, it’s a very low flame and slowly cooked,” Hill said.

He won the home chef category of the inaugural Pheasant Sandwich Shootout last year with his pheasant salad melt sandwich. This year, he’s competing in the professional chef division.

Hill is now the head chef at Mavericks Steak & co*cktails in Aberdeen.

“I’ll be on the professional side this time, so the (home chef) title is up for grabs,” he said.

Pheasant isn’t as forgiving as chicken or turkey — birds that most people have some experience cooking by the time they’re college-aged — but that doesn’t mean it’s hard to cook, Hill said.

“You have to be very subtle with your cooking temps with pheasant,” he said. “A lot of times people will overcook pheasant just because they are thinking the time and temp needs to be the same as chicken when it doesn’t.”

Many people use heat that’s too high or cook pheasant too long, Hill said. A slow cooker is a great way to help avoid that trap.

Another method: marination. For his award-winning sandwich, Hill marinated his pheasant in Burgundy for about two days before cooking.

“When you marinate it, whatever acid you’re putting it into is going to break down that meat and make it a lot more tender,” he said. “If you do tend to overcook it a little bit, that meat’s going to be broken down from the marinating.”

He said he stole the technique from a classic French dish, coq au vin. Translated, it means “rooster with wine.” It was a way to cook old roosters.

“Pheasant is a very common food in Europe, so I kind of thought of how pheasant is cooked in other parts of the world on a regular basis,” Hill said.

Another reason pheasant gets dry is a lack of fat, Hill said. Wild pheasant doesn’t have the fat content a farm-raised chicken or turkey would, so it’s important that the cook not cut back on fat.

He recommends butter or olive oil, which add flavor.

“I’m always a big fan of sticking butter underneath the skin,” Hill said.

He said he has been eating pheasant since he was a kid, hunting the birds in his home state of Michigan and now in South Dakota.

“I always hear people say, ‘Oh, it’s too gamey,’” Hill said. “But to me, I think the gameyness is the nicer part of it.”