Recipe: Rabbit in Mustard Sauce: Conejo al Mostaza: Lapin à la Moutarde
Bunny for lunch yesterday.
Rabbits are farm-bred for consumption, similar to the way chickens are raised. So there ought not be any trepidation in eating them.
This is a traditional, simple, French recipe for a tasty braised rabbit. Yes, you could use pork or chicken or any more or less white meat (try snake, lizard or alligator maybe). It's a one-pan dish.
I first learned this recipe during the cuisine course at Le Cordon Bleu. The same thing can be found, more or less, in Le Cordon Bleu: At Home.
Rabbit in Mustard Sauce
Serves: 2 (or 5 in the nouvel cuisine style)Ingredients
- 600 gr Rabbit thighs (boneless, rolled & tied with string)
- salt
- pepper
- olive oil
- 1 T Dijon mustard (or grainy mustard)
- ¼ onion (or 4 shallots) very fine brunoise [dice]
- ½ C white wine (dry)
- ¾ C cream (heavy, whipping)
Procedure
- Preheat oven to 200C [392F]
- Season meat with salt & pepper
- Oil into an oven proof frying pan (no plastic handles)
- Pan fry for color (10 minutes or so. Get it good and brown)
- Paint the meat with mustard
- Into the oven for 20 minutes
- Turn the meat and add the onion (there will be meat juices in the bottom of the pan)
- 10 minutes more
- Turn meat and add wine
- 10 minutes more
- Degrease the juices in the pan
- Add cream and stir around a bit
- You might as well turn off the oven
- 5 minutes more
- Taste for seasoning (adding salt and pepper if needed)
- If there's any grease or oil left floating in the sauce you ought to degrease it again
Notes
- The technique in this recipe is called braising which is about cooking with moist heat. Often done in a covered pot - but this one's not.
- Roasting is done with dry heat. So actually this recipe has three techniques: frying (for color), roasting (to cook the meat through) and braising (for flavour)
- Double the amount of meat if you like. Or use whole rabbit cut up into pieces. Or a whole, deboned, rabbit would be good
- Good with any white meat (muskrat, alligator or pork maybe)
- Rabbit should be cooked all the way through - no pink. This is true for most white meats - except probably pork.
- If you don't have an oven-proof frying pan transfer the meat and juices to any old oven-proof dish after browning it. Then deglaze the frying pan with a little bit of white wine and put that juice in with the meat too
- To degrease use the edge of a large spoon to skim off any fats
- Do not cover when cooking; many dishes lose color when covered
- Use a cloth when grabbing the handle of the frying pan. And if you do, make sure that it's a dry cloth. I forgot, and used a damp towel. The heat from the 200 degree handle of the pan soaked through that thing in about a quarter of a second but by then it was too late.
Then, I made the same mistake again the second time I turned the meat. Grrr.
