After soaking and drying the marinade is spread on liberally
chicken, but wild rabbit is usually leaner and a little drier. I have cooked it several ways over the years and even fooled a mate into thinking he was eating curried chicken. But one of my favourite methods is smoking the whole rabbit on the barbecue.
Smoking will dry it out, so I like to brine my rabbits for 24 hours before smoking them. This infuses the meat with a little extra moisture. Place your skinned, gutted and cleaned rabbits for 24 hours in a brine solution made from ¼ cup salt and 5 litres of cold water. This is my preferred mixture but you will find other solutions online that use everything from vinegar to wine and a multitude of spices and herbs. I like to keep it simple, but by all means experiment. Ensure your rabbits are completely submerged and covered. I keep mine in the beer fridge.
Next, I dry my rabbits thoroughly with paper towels and flatten them out for cooking. You could cut them into portions, but they’ re easier to deal with whole on the barbecue.
There are many commercially available glazes in our supermarkets and I have chosen two to recommend here: Culley’ s Hot Buffalo Wing Sauce and MasterFoods Teriyaki Marinade. Again, you can go wild here and try other flavours – remember that if it works for chicken it will probably work for rabbit. I coat the rabbits with a good drizzle and leave for an hour, turning and re-coating once.
Then I fire up the barbecue, which is just a standard Kiwi hooded gas barbie with a thermometer. When smoking, I like to cover the drip areas with tinfoil as the process can be quite messy.
First I put on to the heat a foil tray of manuka chips and a stainless-steel tray of water to make steam to mix with the smoke. Then I lay out the rabbit on the warming rack, close the lid down and cook at a temperature of about 140 ° C. The smoking process will take 2 – 4 hours depending on smoke /
Ready to smoke: wood chips at left; water for steam at right, and rabbits on the rack
heat loss from your barbecue and the accuracy of your thermometer. You will need to turn and move the meat, as the parts closer to the smoke tend to cook faster. I re-coat the meat with glaze using a large pastry brush during the cooking process.
A word of warning here: watch your barbecue closely! Flare-ups can incinerate your rabbits quickly, not to mention start unwanted fires.
Check your rabbit is cooked all the way through, with no blood at the bone. The crucial thing is that the meat must reach an internal temperature of 72 ° C before it can be considered safe from harmful bacteria. Buy a thermometer if necessary – they’ re cheap … cheaper than a week off work from gastro!
I normally serve the rabbit with a green salad and new potatoes( Jersey Bennes are a good choice). But I also sometimes chop the meat down to finger-food-sized morsels and them served on a plate as snacks.
Cooked, golden brown and ready to eat – but remember to check thst they’ re cooked right through
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