When you’ve been given two rabbits, as I mentioned in the recipe for rabbit pâté, you can’t stop at just one dish, can you? So my parents also made roast rabbit. A particularly interesting dish. Even Ninka ate it, thinking it was chicken. I suspect that if she’d found out it was rabbit, she would never have eaten it. As it was, the saddle meat, neatly cut away from the bone, passed for chicken breast.
As for me, I have to admit that the best parts of a rabbit are its hind legs. It’s funny, really, because until I wrote down this recipe from my parents, a rabbit simply had four paws as far as I was concerned. But — yes, I know, I was probably taught this at school, though that was a long time ago — a rabbit doesn’t have four paws. It has what Polish calls “skoki”: hind legs, but also “jumps”. At least two jumps.
That must be why roast rabbit is definitely a Polish Małysz — oops… dish. I recommend it!
Recipe details:
Preparation time: 20 minutes
Marinating time: 1 day
Baking time: 2 hours and 10 minutes
Baking temperature: 200 degrees Celsius
Serves: enough for about 4 people; for the holidays, prepare at least two rabbits. Besides, ours was home-reared, so it was definitely bigger than a shop-bought one. A shop-bought rabbit will serve 3 people at most.
Calories: it has some, but they immediately make you want to do cross-training with jumps. So you’ll jump off all the calories straight away
Ingredients for a festive dish:
- 1 rabbit (front legs, hind legs, saddle)
- 10 dekagrams pork back fat
- 4 medium carrots
- 1 medium celeriac
- half a bottle of dry white wine
- half a glass of olive oil
- 4 cloves of garlic
- salt
- ground black pepper
- dried herbes de Provence
- dried lovage
- dried thyme
Recipe for roast rabbit:
Wash the rabbit, pat it dry with paper towels and cut it into pieces (separating the front legs, saddle and hind legs).
Make a marinade from the herbs and olive oil (not all of it): mix a tablespoon of each herb, a teaspoon each of pepper and salt, and finely chopped pork back fat with 3/4 glass of olive oil. Rub it over the rabbit pieces, place them in a roasting tin, cover with aluminium foil and refrigerate for one day.
After a day, take the roasting tin out of the fridge and pour the remaining olive oil over the rabbit. Add the carrots and celeriac, cut into chunky pieces.
Preheat the oven to 200 degrees Celsius and put in the rabbit in its roasting tin, covered with aluminium foil or a lid. Roast for 15 minutes, then take out the tin and turn the rabbit over. Put it back in the oven, pour in half a glass of wine and roast for an hour.
After an hour, add more dry white wine, lower the temperature to 180 degrees Celsius and roast for about another hour. If the rabbit gets too dry, you can pour wine or simply water over it.
The roast rabbit is ready. Enjoy!
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