Braised Rabbit Cacciatore – Delicious Italian Wild Game Recipe

The most succulent and savory wild rabbit recipe! Slow braised in a sauce of tomatoes, peppers, and fresh herbs until tender and amazing.

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Stuff used in this video:

Deep Cast Iron Skillet with Lid
https://amzn.to/3JJLcFz

Victorinox Boning Knife
https://amzn.to/4oWhNXM

Heavy Meat Cleaver
https://amzn.to/3LoZDiV
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See my full Rabbit Cacciatore recipe here:
https://www.greatlakescountry.com/recipes-cooking/italian-rabbit-cacciatore-recipe/
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00:00 – Intro
01:23 – Rabbit Thighs
03:37 – Roasting Peppers
05:17 – Vegetable Prep
07:49 – Searing Meat
09:25 – Making Sauce
11:22 – Braising
12:51 – Tasting
14:01 – Conclusion
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Tender, juicy wild rabbit thighs brazed in the most flavorful sauce of tomato, peppers, onions, and herbs served to top a bed of creamy parmesan palenta to become the most delicious and rustic dish of Italian cuisine known as rabbit catchuri. Rabbit hunting this season was particularly fruitful. So, naturally, I’m going to have a handful of wild rabbit cooking videos to share. A little while back, we did some ridiculous smoked rabbit jalapeno poppers, which were the best jalapeno poppers I’ve ever had. In a couple weeks, we’re going to be doing some crispy breaded fried rabbit tenderloins with some homemade dipping sauces. But right now, it’s Italian day here at Great Lakes Country, and we’re making an absolute mainstay of rustic Italian cuisine. You’ve probably heard of chicken catchuri. Maybe you’ve heard of rabbit catchuri. Both are incredibly common per the classic recipe to use in a catchuri. There’s a few steps, but it all comes together pretty easily. We got to chop some vegetables. We have to make this wonderful sauce. We got to season and brown and braze the rabbit meat. But then we just got to let it cook for a little while. Then we’re serving it up, digging in, and having ourselves an amazing meal. So, let’s get right into it and take a look at the wild rabbits we’re going to be using for this dish. And here are the three wild rabbits that we’re going to be using today for our catchator recipe. Or more specifically, we’re going to be using the thighs from these rabbits. I’m making a couple more recipes in the coming days that are going to use the other cuts from these rabbits. But for this catch, the thighs are really going to be the I guess prime cut to use for that. So, I just need to go through and separate the thighs off of these three wild cottontail rabbits. And it’s pretty simple and not that unlike taking the thighs off of a chicken. Maybe a little easier cuz you can definitely see what you’re dealing with on a rabbit. So, all I’m going to do is start slicing some of the meat around where the thigh connects to the rest of them. Kind of at the hip joint here. Just slice around so I can expose that ball socket. Basically, if your knife can find its way into that little joint right where the socket connects and then just slice through the little bit of meat still holding it in place and we’ve got ourselves a perfect little bunny thigh. Of course, if you don’t have the patience to locate that little ball socket and pop through it with your knife, there is an alternate method that’s a little less delicate, but works nonetheless. And that’s to slice through like we started the other side. Make sure you know what you’re looking for here with the little joint. And then get out a massive meat cleaver and let it do all of the heavy lifting. And that’s another way to do it. A little less precise, a little less delicate, but it works nonetheless. As for the rest of this guy, I got some other trimming to do for the other rabbit recipes I’m going to be making. So, I’ll set him aside for now. Then I just got to go through these other two rabbits. remove the thigh just like I did on the first one and then we’ll be ready to move on. Start putting together this catchuri. So there’s our six thighs that we’re going to be using for this catchuri. Obviously these bunny thighs are a bit smaller than a chicken thigh, so you need a few more of them to make a nice size meal for uh two or three people. Next, we need to get some bell peppers roasting. For this, we’re going to be using one red bell pepper and one yellow bell pepper. Well, this red bell pepper is kind of small, so let’s go two red bell peppers. And to roast these peppers, it’s really quite simple. First, we’ll just slice them in half. We’ll slice out the stem and all the seeds and the membrane and stuff. And we’ll just get them all arranged on a baking sheet lined with a piece of parchment paper. Just lay them cut side down just like that. And now we’ll pop these into an oven that’s been preheated to 450° for the next 30 or 40 minutes or until the skin is looking lightly charred all over. Okay, our bell peppers have roasted and they’re coming out of the oven. H a little uneven on the the charring here, but that’s going to be just fine. They’ve been out of the oven for just a minute. They’re already starting to kind of shrivel up. And just to make it a little easier to get the charred skins off of these things, I’ll just cover this whole thing up with another baking sheet or you could use plastic wrap or cover them all in an upside down bowl or whatever you want to do. Just leave them in here about 20 minutes, something like that. It’s going to make those skins come off super easy. All right, let’s get these bell peppers skins removed. And there’s not a real science to it. We’re just going to kind of slough them off any which way we can with our knife. Peel them, scrape them. A little bit of the skin stays on. That’s fine. Once we’ve got that skin removed, we’re just slicing these things up into some, I don’t know, mediumsized strips. Something about like that. And these are ready for our dish. I’ll go through and get the rest of these skins off of here, slice them up, and we’ll be ready to move on. And we need to do just a little bit of vegetable prep. Starting with two mediumsized yellow onions. Actually, these are also looking really small. So, let’s go with three not so mediumsized onions. I don’t know what it is with these tiny vegetables I’ve been finding lately. Anyway, nothing too fancy we need to do with these onions. Just get them chopped up. Get the skins off of there and give them a pretty standard chop just like you would with any onion for just about any recipe. And of course, we need some garlic. Let’s call that eight or 10 cloves depending on their size. Of course, these are all kind of on the small side. And we’ll just get those minced or crushed in the press or however you like to do it. Next, we need a whole bunch of cremeni mushrooms. Also sometimes called baby bella mushrooms. And it’s going to be really important that we wash all these because these things came with a ton of dirt all over them. And as I’m washing them, I am going to pop the stem out of each one. We can definitely save these stems for something. Chop them up and throw them in a little stir fry or something. But for the assembly and presentation of this kachaturi, I don’t really want them in there. So pop each stem out. Give each one a wash. Then we’re going to take each one of those washed cremeni mushrooms and simply cut it into quarters. That’s all there is to it. All right. 16 oz of quartered cremeni mushrooms. all ready to go. And we’re going to need some herbs. Some fresh rosemary, some fresh thyme, and some fresh parsley. For our rosemary, we’re just picking the leaves off of that stem and chopping these up into little itty bitty pieces so we don’t have any pine needles poking at us when we’re trying to eat this thing. Next, about four sprigs of some good fresh thyme. And I’ve said it before, but I absolutely hate picking the leaves off of fresh time. It’s one of my least favorite things to do. And this time here that I bought is particularly wispy and sort of floppy. So that should make it even more annoying, but whatever. Do the best we can. And if we got a couple little tiny little bits of stem in there, that’s okay. We’ll just give everything a little rough chop. It’s going to be fine. That’s looking pretty good to me. As for our parsley, we just need to chop up a little bit of it for garnish at the end. We don’t need a whole lot. Probably something about like that. stems out of there. Next, we got to get these rabbit thighs seasoned up. So, I will coat each one in a pretty generous sprinkling of kosher salt and black pepper, making sure to flip them over. Get all the different sides and surfaces, just like when you’re seasoning any kind of meat. Then the next thing we’re going to do is dust them in a little bit of allpurpose flour. We don’t have to go crazy and completely have them caked with flour on every side, but we do want to get a nice little dusting on there. So, just do that however you want. You can just fully dredge them if you like, but we’re not really trying to coat these like you would a piece of deep fried chicken. Just something about like that is going to do just fine. All right, I’ve got my largest, deepest cast iron skillet heating up on the stove. And I really do recommend making this dish in a very large or deep skillet or a Dutch oven of pretty much any sort would work very nicely as well. Anyway, I’m going to get some olive oil in this pan. Pretty much just enough to cover the bottom of it. And when that oil’s good and hot, in go my rabbit thighs. What I want to do is get a medium sear on each one. Just a couple minutes. Then flip them over and give the other side a bit of a sear. And I’ll have to brown these thighs in two separate batches because they won’t all lay flat in the bottom of that skillet and I don’t want to overcrowd everything, drop the temperature of that oil too much. So when that first batch is done, I’ll pull them out of the skillet, do the second batch. And once those are looking nicely browned and lightly seared, I’m pulling those out. And then in go the mushrooms. I’ll add a big pinch of salt on top of those cremeni mushrooms. and just sauté them in that oil for about 3 four 5 minutes. And once those mushrooms have softened a bit but aren’t completely mush, I’ll use a slotted spoon and remove them all from that skillet. And if there’s a bunch of liquid left over in your pan that released from those mushrooms, use a couple paper towels and some tongs and just give that skillet a wipe. Get the majority of that excess liquid out of there cuz we have a little more sautéing we need to do. So, I’ll throw a little more olive oil into the skillet. And then in go my chopped onions. And once those are just starting to get softened, maybe about 3 to 5 minutes, I’m tossing in those roasted bell pepper strips, the minced garlic, 3 tablesp of tomato paste, and a half teaspoon of crushed red pepper. Stir that all in, and let all of that cook for about 2 minutes. Now, we’re deglazing with one cup of dry white wine. Any kind will do. Make sure to scrape the bottom of that pan with a wooden spoon. Loosen up all that delicious fond stuck to the bottom of the pan. Now, we’re going to let that wine reduce and cook most of the way off. We don’t want a completely bone dry pan. We just want to cook it down until there’s only a little bit of that wine left in the pan. At that time, we’re adding those mushrooms back in along with 16 ounces of canned crushed San Marzano tomatoes and our fresh thyme and rosemary. I’ll get that all stirred together. And then I’m adding somewhere between one and two cups of chicken stock just to bring the level in that pan up high enough for when I bring those rabbit thighs back in. How much stock exactly you use will depend a bit on the shape and size of your pan. In the case of my skillet here, I’m already kind of pretty near the top. So, I am only going to add about one cup of the stock. I’ll get that stock stirred in. And now, finally, I’m bringing back those rabbit thighs. And I’m going to set them into my mixture. Not fully submerged, but just so the very tops are peeking out a little bit. Just get them in there any which way you can. And that’s looking about perfect to me. Now, I’m putting on the lid. And we need to simmer this on pretty low heat for about an hour or until that rabbit meat is incredibly tender. And let me mention as I’m doing this that the smell in this kitchen is indescribably amazing, delicious, and it’s making me very, very hungry. And at long last, our amazing rabbit catchuri is finished. It looks great. It smells outstanding. And I think we’re just about ready to plate some of this up. But first, just for an extra pretty thumbnail picture, I think we need a little bit of that fresh chopped parsley sprinkled all over top. As for serving, the traditional ways to serve a catchuri are either over a bed of pasta or a bed of mashed potatoes or in the case of what we’re doing today, a bed of beautiful creamy parmesan palenta. And no, we didn’t go through the recipe for making this palenta today, though I did make it from scratch. But there’s a lot of great recipes out there, and of course, I’m more than happy to share mine if anyone’s interested. We’ll just lay that palenta out nice and even to create the perfect foundation for this delicious ketchuri. Next, we’re going to get some of that sauce on there. We got the mushrooms and the bell peppers and the onion and all of those amazing flavors. of course, our San Marzano tomatoes, followed by a couple of those beautifully cooked rabbit thighs. We’ll just get those nestled right there on top. Maybe just a little more parsley just for good measure. And now we’re finally ready to dig in and give this homemade wild rabbit catchuri a try. And you know I’m going right for some of that rabbit meat. Little palenta on there. Absolutely delicious, which isn’t any surprise because how can you go wrong with so many great flavors all coming together in a single pan? Those bell peppers are shining through and definitely separate this from just another sort of ordinary Italian tomato sauce. those herbs, all that onion, that little bit of wine, and of course, simmering those beautiful seasoned rabbit thighs in that sauce for a good while creates an absolutely tender and amazing bite of meat. But, as I say with a lot of my wild game cooking videos, if you don’t want to eat rabbit or venison or whatever it is that I’m talking about, you can pretty much always substitute it with one of the more ordinary commercially available meats like chicken. If you’re a fan of bell peppers or sort of Italian style tomato sauces of any sort, you really do need to try this recipe. Even if you just replace that rabbit with something like chicken thighs, do everything the exact same way. Season the thighs, brown them in the skillet with some oil, nestle them in that sauce, and braze them for a while. As for what to serve it all with, well, that’s completely up to you. Pasta, potatoes, palenta, or nothing at all. And as always, if you’d like to see the full writtenout recipe for this entire rabbit catchuri dish that I made here, I will put a link in the video description below. In the meantime, be sure to like and subscribe and stay up to date with all our latest stuff, including future wild game cooking videos. Thanks for watching and until next time, I’m John and this is Great Lakes Country.