Camp Cooking: Roasting Pheasant over a Fire

Description

A simple method of preparing a Pheasant and roasting over a camp fire. Easy but tasty!

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Video Transcription

hi guys Smike from MC ki bushcraft here and a few days ago I did a little bit of shooting and got myself some pheasants I've got one of those pheasants with me today and this is a cock bird so it's a male doesn't and it's in very good condition

nice and big and this one's been hanging for about four or five days I don't like to hang them too long because I'm not overly keen on a very gamy taste but in cool weather you can hang them for quite some time without getting too much of that I've also got myself a fire going using hardwoods like ash and the aim is to get a good bed of embers going because what I'm going to show you today is a method that I use when I'm cooking pheasant out in the field and just happens to be my favorite way of cooking pheasant when I'm acting in camping or bushcraft and that's stick roasting over a fire before we get this bird cooking we obviously have to dress it first by the time we've done that hopefully the fire will be ready to cook on so that's what I'm going to do next I'm plucking the bird in this case because it has a lot of fat on it I want to keep that fat because that's obviously a very good source of energy it's going to add flavor it's going to stop it drying actors so much by keeping the skin on and pheasant skin is very fragile so plucking them can be difficult especially on a cold bird like this you can see I just tore it then as I was talking so you do have to be careful and it's not always going to be a perfect job but preserving that skin will improve it if you're cooking it over a fire and it's far easier to pluck a fresh bird the places where the skin is most likely to rip areas where there's trauma to the skin where pieces of shot have come out this has got some pretty heavy trauma on the right wing so the skin is really tearing around there but that's not a problem as I say you've just got to work with what you've got sometimes you can support the skin with your fingers as well just tighten it up so the feathers come out a bit easier so I've plucked this bird as best I can you can see I've lost a little bit of skin around the neck which I'm not so worried about but unfortunately where it's taken the main majority the impact as it's been hanging this is kind of retracted back and exposed a lot of the meat it's not really a problem and there's no issue with hygiene it's just a bit of a shame because that will obviously continue to retract when it's on the heat and a lot of that fat will escape and drip away and the skin will start to split that it shouldn't dry out too much I've had skinned pheasant over the fire many a time and it's always been really moist and quite nice it has never been particularly dry I think it just depends how long you really cook it but all I'm going to do now is get my ax take the head off take the wings off and the feet and then obviously get the guts out

so I've just gutted this bird my slicing straight underneath and tearing everything out removed the entire back end which is what I normally do when I'm stick roasting over a fire or cooking outdoors I generally just get rid of the abdomen altogether and everything comes out so I've got a stick here it's sharpened at one end and I've actually put a split in it with my axe by putting wax on top of the Hazel and splitting down the grain and there's a reason for that because when we get this running through it obviously don't want it to spin around on the fire so I usually pop a piece of wood through there a small piece of hazel and now that should turn and you shouldn't really have to worry about things kind of falling all over the place but let's get this on the fire and get it cooking so if you look at this why here that I've got the spit in it actually acts as a wedge and it's gripping the spit and it won't let it turn ideally that's what I look for when I make spits like this I just look for a very tight piece of Hazel if that's available if not you can make this spit into a square and lock it in or even use a piece of cool there are many clever ways of doing it you can even use the Y on the end and actually sort of unhook it and hook it back in but it's just easier to find a piece of hazel that acts a bit like a wedge and will grip it this clean water has cooled down there I'm gonna use it on my hands it's nice and warm just to get the blood and debris off from the pheasant oh here I've got a plaster on my finger by the way and I've got a bliss an unpopped blister on my finger where I got burnt some time ago obviously I didn't want it to pop and then be exposed to whatever I was doing so I put a plaster on it to protect it just to probably get picked up in the comments section at some point let's mention it as a disclaimer so if you're having trouble getting some of the stuff off Moss is very very useful it's like a woodland pan scrubber just make sure you let your hands dry out afterwards

if you have a knife as well it's worth cleaning under your nails like a little neck knife or something you can clean under your nails and keep them clean there's always dirt under there do that at the moment and then give it another rinse let's get this back in the fire keep it warm I've had to stake up the fire a little bit just dying out you can see there's quite a lot of flames now and we don't really want that so we can just take the pheasant off just drop it up a bit further away from the flames or take it off completely because the outter will just cook too quickly it'll start to just tear away and the inside won't cook the outside will be burnt you know you can always move it to the side I'm using the thermal wall that's the other side of the actual fork for the spit I'm just going to get this out the way and up there it should get a little bit of heat but not get burnt I'll just get him over there actually so wait for this to die down again to coals just putting out a lot of heat that no flame and then we can get him back on but when waters almost boiled for me to clean my knives should also mention that you want to rotate the pheasant sort of every 10 15 minutes just keep an eye on it check it out have a look inside outside it's just really judging by eye I've wiped most of the debris away with some moss and I'll continue to do that but I'm just gonna get a bit of boiling water on there there we go this has been cooking for about an hour and a half now it's looking pretty good fires obviously kicking out a nice amount of heat I think they're ready to just have a look so I'm just going to take my neck knife here just cut into the brass and just check what it's like yes looking pretty good okay that is nice and cooked should be cooked through as well you can always leave it on there for you know longer than you mean to with a cold fire cooks very very slowly it sort of blasting things on flame and that way you can just ensure that things are well cooked because I always make sure things are cooked through and through on I'm outside eating food like this it will just take a piece of that mmm

that is really good Wow keeping that skin on just makes all the difference even when it's a bit burnt like this I quite like things a little bit burnt sometimes that's amazing right take that round a bit that bit of breast meat there is absolutely delicious and the fat complements it fantastically it really does crisp up and it gives it a lot of flavor and not only that it provides your body with a hell of a lot of energy an energy that it can use far more efficiently than just lean meats and vegetation if anybody out there has ever done a few weeks out in the wilderness and you lived off of vegetation so wild edibles and in a small game for example that doesn't generally have a lot of fat on it you'll notice your energy levels will plummet and you'll get very hungry and it takes a long time for your body to adjust to getting used to using those types of nutrition that you put in it efficiently because in the modern world we're quite used to simple and complex carbohydrates and getting a lot of fats which our body can use very very efficiently as energy protein alone you've probably heard of meat starvation or rabbit starvation it's not an exact science but I think it's just a term used to say that if you're eating lean meats they don't have all the nutrition you need in them and just surviving off nice alone you get a lot of urea in the bloodstream a lot of toxicity and you really do need wild edibles and fats to go alongside lean meats to actually keep you energized and healthy out in the wilderness but I'm going to tuck into the rest of this and I thought I'd just put this on video I'd normally cook this at home but I'm cooking out in the woods today just to show you what I do if I was out here camping I was cooking that pheasant and also a little bit on hygiene just a bit of boiling water keeping things clean and dry don't need to be too OCD with it but it just requires a little bit of common sense so thanks again for watching guys and I hope you enjoyed the video and I'll see you very soon in a take care