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
NZ Hunting & Wildlife 196 - Autumn 2017 45