Name: Roast Pheasant with Bread Sauce, Beurre Noisette & Beetroot & Witloof Salad
Yield: Serves 6
Cuisine: French
Ingredients: salt and freshly ground white pepper; 1 small onion, peeled and studded with 3 cloves; 4 tablespoons walnut kernels, broken into small pieces and lightly toasted; 20 ml olive oil; verjuice to taste; 500 ml milk; a tiny pinch ground ginger; 20 ml walnut oil; 3 heads witloof, using only 5cm of the leaf tips; freshly grated nutmeg; ½ lemon; 1 knife-tip cayenne pepper; 3 x 800 g-1.1 kg pheasant; 250 g unsalted butter, cut into small dice; 2 tablespoons olive oil; 100 g fresh light sourdough breadcrumbs; salt; 100 g clarified butter; 50 g unsalted butter or 50 ml double cream [45% fat]; 4-5 small cooked beetroots, cut into 2cm dice; 20 ml roasting juices from the pheasants

Preparation info

Serves
6

Difficulty
Medium

Appears in

French

By Damien Pignolet

Published 2005

About

I like roast pheasant accompanied with a bread sauce and finished with nut-brown butter. The drumsticks tend to be tough and so are not used in this dish, but the rich thigh meat is used to advantage in a salad served on the side, and the vinaigrette is flavoured with some of the roasting juices.

The pheasants should be taken from their packaging and left uncovered on a cake rack in the fridge for about 12 hours to dry out the skin. This will help to avoid the skin sticking when the