Oven-Baked Rabbit

Name: Oven-Baked Rabbit with Rosemary and Thyme
Prep time: 1 h 15 min
Cook time: 45 min
Total time: 2 h
Cuisine: European
Ingredients: Rabbit 1; Rosemary (fresh) 2-3 sprigs; Thyme (fresh) 5-6 sprigs; Dry white wine 150 ml; Olive oil 2 tbsp; Salt, mustard seeds, bay leaf, dried Provencal herbs to taste

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2 h

Oven-baked rabbit with herbs is probably the simplest rabbit dish, although there are plenty of dishes made from rabbit meat.

The first thing that always comes to mind is rabbit stifado, a Greek rabbit stew cooked with lots of onions, usually shallots, in a tomato sauce with plenty of spices. The classic Hungarian dishes known as pörkölt are especially good made with rabbit. It is a wonderful dish that can serve as a soup or a main course. The essence of pörkölt is small pieces of meat stewed with onion and paprika. Add sour cream and it is called paprikash: rabbit in sour cream. Still, these dishes differ in how the meat is cut.

Rabbits, or rather domestic rabbits, which are most often used for home cooking, can be quite large. And not just 3-4 kg, as the two comedians used to say, but much more. I have seen rabbits weighing, I think, up to 10 kg, and they say there are even bigger ones.

Rabbit meat is considered “healthy food” thanks to its flavor and nutritional qualities. When the two comedians spoke of dietary, easily digestible meat, they were right. Compared with pork and veal, rabbit has a high protein content, which makes it very good for you. Rabbit is also fairly low in calories and contains very little salt and cholesterol.

At home we most often cook rabbit with rosemary. It is a wonderful dish, and we make it for the New Year table. Rosemary is an evergreen shrub that grows in the Mediterranean and Europe. I have seen it growing wild only once, in Bulgaria, and recognized it by its smell rather than its look. It is a very aromatic plant, and literally one sprig of rosemary can change the whole dish.

Oven-baked rabbit is not difficult to cook. Besides rosemary, thyme goes very well with baked rabbit. People often confuse thyme and savory. Although these plants belong to the same family, Lamiaceae, they are of different genera. Thyme belongs to the genus Thymus, and savory to Satureja.

The vast majority of rabbit recipes recommend soaking the meat in acidulated water first, to remove a characteristic smell. I confess I still do not understand what that is about. The meat of a domestic rabbit has no smell at all. Perhaps recipe authors write this phrase out of habit. Wild rabbits or hares, however, do have a fairly strong smell, and in that case you cannot do without soaking. But in our case, for oven-baked rabbit, we will soak the meat for an entirely different purpose.

6 ingredientsTo the recipe

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Ingredients

4 servings

Rabbit 1
Rosemary (fresh) 2-3 sprigs
Thyme (fresh) 5-6 sprigs
Dry white wine 150 ml
Olive oil 2 tbsp
Salt, mustard seeds, bay leaf, dried Provencal herbs to taste

Step-by-step recipe

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There were times when it was not easy to buy a rabbit in a shop. Mostly rabbits came from grandma in season, or were bought at the market. Now buying a rabbit is no problem. It is very convenient when shops sell not whole carcasses but so-called cuts: legs, hind legs and other parts, already portioned. In any case, the rabbit carcass should be cut into portion pieces of about 100 grams.
Wash the fresh thyme and strip the small leaves from the stems. You can leave one or two sprigs of thyme as they are and use them to garnish the dish. Use the rosemary as sprigs.
Wash the rabbit pieces and put them in a deep ceramic or glass dish. Sprinkle the meat with the thyme leaves.
Add a scant teaspoon each of mustard seeds (3 g) and the mix of dried Provencal herbs. Do not add salt. Add 3-4 bay leaves. Stir the meat so the spices are evenly distributed.
Pour dry white wine over the meat. Put the dish with the rabbit in the refrigerator for 1-1.5 hours. If the wine does not completely cover the meat, that is fine. In that case turn the meat in the marinade 1-2 times while it marinates. The purpose of marinating is to make the meat juicy and, if you think so, to get rid of that unpleasant smell.
After marinating, take the rabbit meat out of the marinade and pat it dry with a napkin. If you like, add just a little salt, but remember that rabbit contains practically no sodium, which is one of its virtues. So I, for example, did not salt the dish. Brush the rabbit pieces with a little olive oil. Put the prepared rabbit pieces in a ceramic or glass baking dish, add 1-2 sprigs of fresh rosemary and the thyme and bay leaf left in the marinade.
Pour 3-5 tbsp of the marinade over the meat and cover the baking dish with foil. Put the rabbit in an oven preheated to 220°C. Given the high protein content of the meat, oven-baked rabbit does not take very long. It needs some time to heat up, so count the cooking time from the moment the liquid in the dish starts to boil. Rabbit under foil cooks for 20 minutes from the moment the liquid boils. Then remove the foil and keep baking for another 15 minutes. Rabbit can bake longer to form a golden crust, but keep in mind that it may turn out “dry.” Also, there is little liquid in the dish, and the rabbit may stick to the bottom.
Put the finished oven-baked rabbit on plates, drizzle with a little of the liquid left after baking and, if you like, garnish with a sprig of fresh thyme.
Mashed potatoes make an exceptionally good side dish.