Hi there, I’m Matt from the Underground Cookery School. Lovely dish today. It’s a salad of pigeon with rocket. Crispy parma ham and purple sprouts and broccoli.
I’ve got a lovely dish, and it’s very light. Not everyone likes pigeon, so you could do this with say a chicken poussant. I’ve got the pigeon here and the first thing I’m going to do is just prep it. So, a little bit of salt and pepper goes in there. You can use thyme, any woody herb is fine, but I’m just going to put some rosemary in there. I think when you do cook birds of this size, it’s always good just to wrap them up in some sort of bacon product. This is just a nice bit of parma ham. So that just protects it, stops it from — if you overcook it, it dries out, obviously, so this just protects it a bit. Goes on there, just a little bit of olive oil and what I’m going to do now is, that’s going to go in the oven for, I reckon about 30 minutes and then obviously, you let it rest for a good five minutes after that. Then we’ll carve it out and make the salad, which is going to be with rocket and purple spouting broccoli. So in the oven it goes.
So that has been out of the oven for four or five minutes. What I’m going to do — this is quite a cute little thing, take the parma ham and I’m just going to cut them into what are effectively lard ons. And that just becomes part of the salad, which I think is quite cool. And I’m not going to do a traditional dressing, I’m going to use those pan juices, you’ve got to be careful if you’ve got a stainless steel pan. I’m just going to turn that out and I’ve got a bit of stock here, and that’s going to form the basis of the salad dressing. So I’m just going to heat that through for not terribly long and in the meantime what I want to do is just show you how to bone out this bird.
So you take the legs off first. That’s the leg and the thigh and you can actually just snap those off. Same thing there. Snap that out the joint. That sauce is now probably done so I’m going to take that off. I’m not going to put these in the salad, I’m just going to put the breast of the pigeon in and I’m working quite close to the bone, an inflexible, long, thin knife. And, look, you can see what I’ve done there. And that just sort of peels away, like so. So that’s one breast. And now I’m going to do the other one here. The wing is still on, but we’ll take that off in a sec. Keep going round. There we go. And, I’m just going to take that off now. So there we have our two breasts. We’ve got our stock reduction here. I’m still going to use the pan juices and the stock just to make that dressing. That goes in.
We cooked off some purple spouting broccoli, that was just blanched in boiling water for about three minutes. And I’ve got some rocket here. So I’m going to put the rocket in, the purple spouting broccoli in. For those that haven’t seen other videos, for me, this is how you make a salad. You put the dressing in first, then the leaves, then the veg, and then finish it off with the meat at the very end, but just to give everything a nice little glaze. I’m just going to cut those into nice little slices, which is going to garnish the salad. So that goes in like so. And then, the breast of pigeon goes on like that. And I’m just going to garnish that with a little bit of that bacon, certainly on the top and then just drizzle it with a few more of those pan juices. But it’s just, you know, a really simple dish. You can actually just add a tiny little bit of olive oil and there you have breast of pigeon with purple spouting broccoli, rocket and parma ham. There you go.
So you’ve only been watching because of the competition, haven’t you? Because someone’s going to win a pasta machine. How will they win it? Well, if they leave a nice review on either Google, Facebook, or even like me on Facebook, their name goes in here. This week, that person is, Lee Orange. Well done, Lee, a pasta machine will be on its way to you very soon.
Next time, tune in because I’m going to be doing a really lovely spring dish. It’s going to be rump end of lamb with spring onion and spinach. Hope to see you then, and thanks for watching.
