How to Pluck and Gut a Pheasant | TA Outdoors

Description

There is nothing more satisfying than cooking what you have just shot. Here George Goddard shows the traditional way of plucking and preparing a Pheasant for the oven, giving you all the best tips. Prepared in this manner the skin retains natural fats to give the meat a better flavour. Subscribe for more Shooting, Bushcraft, DIY and Fishing videos!

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Tags: bird,pheasant,how to,pluck,prepare,game,meat,hunting,shooting,wilderness,wild,animal,fur,tanning,cooking,stew,game pie,outdoors,ta outdoors

Video Transcription

so me and Mike and Graham went shooting a couple of days ago something we've left a couple of the birds bracelet birds to hang for a few days to let the meat sort of mature that's why I'm gonna do is take you through and how to pluck a pheasant so first of all do as you start with the tail so you pull out the tail feathers and it can be in there quite deep so you've got to grab them quite firm and just work your way around the back

and once that's been done what we're eventually going to do is we're going to cut the legs and the wings off at two joints the joint on the wing is just in here and you can fill it if you pull the wing out it kind of goes in I'm going to cuts that points where you don't need to pluck past this point because we're going to this is going to be discarded so what I do is then take out this sort of longer wing feathers it's always useful to have a bucketing extra sense it is quite messy and feathers do get everywhere the other things be really careful with doing pheasants is they've been shot some will have been then there's going to be rips in the skin and when you start to pull the feathers out if you try and take too many a time you end up ripping the skin and I'm sure you'll see that as we go through so I'm going to try and avoid doing that as little as possible because what we're trying to do here is pluck the birds opposed to skin it the violence you're plucking the bird is all the fat you look at this one that was done earlier and the fat is under the skin so if you take away that you take quite a fact and if we're roasting bird that doesn't do it quite as well so often if you have a huge amount to do then skinning is the way to go because it's quite a bit quicker and less fiddly clip so you hang the meat to make it game you problem we've got it's quite a mild year like like this one you can't really afford to hang the bird for too long depending on the weather and you have to rewatch it it could only be a couple of days but eh let's keep an eye out try and use some common sense and think about if it's warm how quickly it's going to break down if there's gonna be flies getting at it if you don't have a sort of a secure room and what I'm doing now is I've sort of move the main feathers from sort of under the wing here and just before I'm going to cut it and I'm going to start doing the back you can begin to go against the grain as it were and you can start to grab a few at a time but you still gonna be very careful when you're doing this not to rip the skin and you will hear as we go through some unfortunate you see here where the birds been shot or picked up

the skins already ripped so if we'll be very careful when I'm picking right here so they've put a large amount of skin off so for hanging the bird it's best to hang it by the head up like this have your own piece of string or something well off the floor in a dry sort of if you've got a cool dry enclosed place would be best and that we're going to stop the flies getting on it now this is a cock bird you can tell by the lovely plumage the hen birds are sort of just a sort of a brown color that have any of this sort of coloring on them at all some people say that the the cock birds actually tastes better than the hen birds I can't really say my palate is at that point where I could tell the difference

it's a little muscle bands and we got here we're just talking about spurs muscle peaking it's all about spurs on the on the pheasant you can see this in this year's pheasant it's got very small spurs Birds get older their Spurs grow out and cock Birds and you can see Harold's got a mighty set dug into you see on this one was a young bird cuz the Spurs are very very small compared to the chicken that we had monster Spurs we're getting towards the back of the burden as you can see this one's pretty tattered anyway from where he's been shot but go to try and pull the skin tight and that helps prevent ripping do you take out the feathers slowly get in there

we're doing now as we've removed the majority feathers just thought about tidying up today but what I'm gonna do now is remove the wings and the feet as you see the wings I've plucked them to the point where I'm going to cut them so that joint I was talking about in there so what I'm gonna do is take a knife walks you this knife isn't particularly sharp and I'm going to cut down to the joint just on the joint round it and then I'm just trying to get the joint to come out

sock it like that so once that's done you think I've in from behind and remove the wing like that that's one wing done this next one down to the joint just there round the joint and we're just popping join you have it sock it I'm just cutting it off swings done so just worth remembering obviously using sharp knives and if you especially have done this before you have quite big risk of cutting yourself so just be careful what we can do now is to take the leg and similar to what we did with the with the wing we're going to the joint cutting on the joint and just pushing it forward like that you see that's broken you get the knife in behind and cut this off so the next one into the joint cutting around the joint you see shot damage here obviously pretty catastrophic for the pheasant but you do fortune this isn't that a nice spurt it is has been through it a bit but yeah you do have to be careful swishing your pluck here that you don't rip into the holes that the shop put into the bird and that's very key who you'll pull away more of the skin the next thing I'm going to do is you feeling here's as presents keep all their food and all birds will have a crop you can actually see can you see that can you see the wheat in there that's your grains of it so we're do is make a little incision up here just where the crop meets the breast we want to take that crop out in there

just tease it forward like that you want to break the crop because then you get grain everywhere just teasing it forward I'll just show you what's in the crop so I'll store some food so more than likely this this feed sin the crop would have come from the bird feeders we put out across the farm just try and hold the birds on the farm when they're released and obviously they're free to wander anywhere when a bird wanders onto your land it's your bird regardless if you regardless of who raised it so the next job is removing the head so as I said we remove the crop and the way to do this is pretty much as you'd probably imagine it should go up to the neck base of the meats the body cut the flesh and then you got to break the spine there you go one last thing obviously you've got to go around tidying up your bird now for all your loose feathers push your legs in makes it look a lot more presentable now I'm gonna remove the innards so we can do here is if you grab the breast just together there's a bone and you want to cut from the bone down to his bum

don't um

and then you put your hand inside vert two fingers let me fit in and keep your fingers running on the top of the rib cage and you just want to pull everything that's inside out make sure it's nice and clean does smell a bit this bit

because that forward it's a clean bird now it's just a job of her going around and tidying it up so what you're going to want to do now is obviously tidy up these birds wash them out and then pop them in the fridge pop them in the freezer make them into a stew have them in a pie or a traditional roast pheasant there's many ways in which you can joy it's a fantastic meat so of course to get this to get your dinner you've got to go shooting first so go online have a read find out what your local shooters go down have a speech the guys find out what it's all about most importantly get out there enjoy yourself in the countryside

you