British · Main

Jugged Hare

Advanced
50 min
roughly 3 of 4 for cost

bright · rich · smoky · warm-spiced Leads with acid holding everything up to the light, richness that coats and comforts, fading in warm spice.

Ingredients

1 hare, about 2.5 kg, jointed into 8 pieces
150 ml hare's blood, reserved from the butcher
15 ml red wine vinegar
60 g beef dripping
200 g smoked streaky bacon, in 1 cm lardons
300 g onion, half of it studded with 6 cloves, the rest sliced
30 g plain flour
500 ml full bodied red wine
600 ml beef or game stock
100 ml port
6 juniper berries, crushed
3 bay leaves
3 sprigs thyme
1 strip pared lemon zest
20 g redcurrant jelly
10 g fine salt

Equipment

Grater / zester

The skills inside

Braising Straining & passing through a sieve Skimming: foam, fat and a clear broth Keeping the cooking liquid

The words inside

Redcurrant

Allergen screen

Found: gluten · alcohol

Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.

Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.

Method

Stir the vinegar into the blood and refrigerate it, so it stays fluid instead of setting into a clot.
Dry and salt the joints, dust them with the flour and brown them hard in the dripping with the bacon, in batches, until the pan floor is mahogany.
Add the onion, wine, stock, port, juniper, bay, thyme and lemon zest, cover, and braise at 150C (300F) for 3 hours, until the meat slides from the bone, though with a young hare lift the saddle pieces out after 2 hours and return them at the end. 180 min
Lift out the meat, strain the liquor, skim the fat and reduce it to about 600 ml, then melt in the redcurrant jelly.
Off the heat, slacken the blood with a ladle of the hot liquor, stir it back into the pan and hold it at 70C (158F) until it thickens and turns glossy, then return the hare.

How to tell it is going right

This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.

Braising 39 recipes

The pieces went into the liquid already deep brown on their faces, and the pot floor gave up its fond to that liquid rather than keeping it.
The liquid comes partway up the pieces and stays there for the whole cook (not submerged, not run dry), and it never boils: the surface trembles and no more.
It went long enough for the collagen to convert: a fork twists in it with almost no resistance, and the piece still lifts out whole rather than falling into shreds.
The liquid has become a sauce: it has body, it coats the back of a spoon, and it tastes concentrated rather than thin and washed out.
The meat is moist and seasoned through to its centre, not dry fibres sitting inside a good sauce.

Where it goes wrong The oven or the burner ran too hot and the liquid boiled, so the fibres tightened and squeezed their moisture out: it shreds dry into a thin greasy liquid, and more time makes it worse rather than better.

Keeping the cooking liquid 60 recipes

It was actually kept: the liquid went into a container rather than down the drain, and the volume saved is enough to be worth using.
It is clean: strained of solids and grit, and not clouded with the debris of whatever broke up in it.
It tastes of what it cooked and tastes concentrated rather than washed out, and it is not so salty or so bitter that the only honest use is the bin.
It was cooled quickly and stored cold, not left standing warm on the stove to be dealt with later.
Used, it does the job the dish gives it (carrying flavour into a sauce, loosening the dish, or setting when chilled) rather than merely adding water back.

Where it goes wrong The pot was left to cool slowly on the stove and only strained the next day, so it soured overnight: what should have been the best ingredient in the dish goes in the bin, and the recipe gets water instead.

At the Table

The Pour: Zinfandel (old-vine)
Also Right: Shiraz or Malbec
From the Taps: Smoked porter
Zero-Proof: Cherry cola, honestly

Barbecue’s sweet-smoke wants jammy fruit that shakes hands with the sauce; dry austere reds argue with sugar and lose.

Family notes

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Film school

This dish, cooked on camera Search films of Jugged Hare Technique: BraisingThe skill inside this recipe Search YouTube: Gordon Ramsay on Jugged Hare A YouTube search for Gordon Ramsay and this dish. No affiliation.