Pheasant soup

If you are lucky enough to have some pheasant in the freezer, try making homemade pheasant soup.  Pheasant noodle soup is tasty, good for you and easy to make.  If you like chicken noodle soup, you will be sure to like this recipe.

Not only is pheasant noodle soup a tasty way to eat pheasant it is also a smart way to prepare it.  One of the negatives (probably the only) of eating any wild bird is the unwanted lead that you sometimes encounter.

For those of you that don't know.  When you go hunting for wild birds, you shoot shells that are loaded with little bee-bees.  These bee-bees can sometimes make their way into your cooking as "unwanted spices".  Cooking pheasant noodle soup solves this issue because you can usually spot the bee-bees while making the soup.

Homemade pheasant noodle soup

One whole pheasant

To start the pheasant soup, you have to start with the bird.  The pheasant should be rinsed and feather free.  Also, all the bad meat should be trimmed off.  This is mainly the meat where the bird was shot.  Do not trim off the fat at this point or you will lose a lot of flavor in the soup.  The fat will be discarded later on in the process.  Another source of flavor is the skin.  Try to keep the skin on if you can.  The pheasant I used in this demonstration was cleaned by a game farm so they unfortunately removed the skin.

The start of the broth

Now that the pheasant is cleaned, it is time to make the broth.  To make the broth, put the whole bird in a big stew pot along with four quarts of water plus four or five carrots, one sliced onion, one sliced apple, one tablespoon of basil (always better if you grew it), four or five peppercorns (or plain pepper) plus a teaspoon of salt.

Straining the broth

Once all the ingredients are in the pot, bring everything to a boil and then simmer for two hours.  This should be plenty of time for the pheasant to cook but make sure to check the internal temp of the bird to make sure it is cooked before you continue to the next step.

cooked pheasant

The next step in the process is to stain the broth to separate it from everything else.  Once this is done, put the broth back into the original pan and throw everything else out except the pheasant.  Put the pheasant into a separate container throwing out anything you don't want to go back in the soup.  Once the bones and junk meat have been thrown out, cut the pheasant into bite sized pieces.

noodles that were on sale

Now that the broth and pheasant are separated, add new veggies plus the spices of your choice back in with the broth.  Once the veggies have cooked for about ten minutes, add noodles to the soup.  Once the noodles are cooked to your liking, add the pheasant meat back in and cook for another five minutes.

tasty!

Once the meat cooks for a couple of minutes, test the soup to make sure it doesn't need anything else.  Sometimes you have to add a little more salt or pepper but it depends on how you like your soup. 

Enjoy!

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