basil
Distinguished Member
Can I use this on my site please?As promised this morning, here’s the recipe for Hasepfeffer, a traditional dish from my region of Alsace. I must warn you, you will use up ALL your kitchenware and ALL your horizontal surfaces making this, so plan accordingly. It is absolutely wonderful though. And importantly, if you can, make sure you have the hare’s blood and liver (with the bile sack removed).
2016-01-04_11-35-54 by pinemarten, on Flickr
Ingredients:
- 1 hare
- 2 large onions
- Some small/baby onions
- Oil of some description (I use olive, because I have it)
- 50cl Cognac
- Thyme and bay leaves
- Crushed garlic
- Cloves
- About two bottles of red wine, not too robust
- Butter
- A bit of flour
- About 200g diced bacon
- Mushrooms (Can’t have two many as far as I’m concerned, but as you like)
First of all, you need to marinate the hare overnight. Cut the hare into six pieces (legs, saddle and the front end of the thorax, rib cage) and put the pieces in a large terracotta dish. Pour on some oil, the cognac, add the crushed garlic, salt, pepper, herbs, one of the onions sliced, mix it all up and cover in the wine. Cover it and leave it until the next day.
The next day, remove the pieces of hare from the marinade and lay them out to dry. Then brown the diced bacon in one of those enamelled cast-iron pots (e.g. Le Creusot) in the butter until they’re browned and a lot of the fat has rendered, then remove the bacon. In the bacon fat, brown the hare in batches with the other sliced onion. When they’re all browned, sprinkle some flour on them and brown that. Then cover with the liquid from the marinade after filtering it through a fine colander, add a bouquet garni, put the lid on and leave to simmer on a low heat for an hour and a half.
While that’s going on, brown the small onions in another pan (I’m on six or seven different cooking vessels now if you work it out, we’re running out of space). Then add the mushrooms and fry them in the same pan, then set aside.
After an hour and a half, remove the pieces of hare from the pot and put them in another dish (8!) in a low oven to keep warm. Add the onions, mushrooms, and fried diced bacon (yes, you have some, look two paragraphs above, it's in a bowl or on a plate on one of your packed surfaces, maybe behind the remaining marinade).
Now attend to your sauce: back to the pot that you removed the meat from. Chop up the liver finely and mix it with the blood in a bowl (9!). Taste the sauce and season/reduce if needed, and add the blood mix, which will thicken the sauce. If it’s still not quite thick enough, try whisking in some cornflour, or just plain flour, but corn works best for this bit.
When ready, place the hare, onions, bacon and mushrooms on a warm serving dish (10!), pour the sauce over it, and serve with pasta of some kind, ideally Spaetzle but you don’t have to go full Alsatian. This needs quite a powerful red wine to go with it.
Oh, and by now your kitchen is a total mess.
