Guinea hen recipes

So in a brief online buying spree this morning, I bit on D'Artagnan's freezer sale email and will be getting a bunch of quail and guinea hen tomorrow.

My usual prep for guinea hen's very, very simple - marinate for a few hours in a mix of lemon juice, olive oil, basil, thyme and freshly ground peppercorns, then roast.

Was wondering if anyone here could throw out more options/suggestions for things to do with whole guinea fowl, as well as just guinea hen legs?

I've done quail a variety of ways but I've never tried guinea hen. I'll be curious to hear how people cook these.

I'm a huge fan of guinea fowl legs, and usually keep it simple. I steam small new potatoes or ratte potatoes (skins on usually), then toss them with a bit of olive oil, salt and pepper. Those go into a baking dish with a few sprigs of fresh rosemary or thyme. I wrap the guinea fowl in bacon slices (usually one slice per leg; the idea is flavor and to keep them moist while roasting), set those on top of the bed of potatoes, and sprinkle with more salt and pepper. Then roast for 25 - 30 minutes at 200 deg C (length of roasting depends on the size of the legs). It's easy and really good tasting, basic fall and winter faire. I usually pair with braised red cabbage and a Belgian endive gratin. cheers, Bonnie

I like this one. My adaptation of a recipe from a collection of very old, very formal English recipes.

Guinea Fowl with Apple

1 Guinea Fowl
170ml (6fl oz) Double Cream
3-4 Rashers Streaky Bacon
3 Dessert Apples
85g (3oz) Butter
85ml (3fl oz) Apple Brandy (Calvados) [optional]
Salt and Pepper

Directions:

Pre-heat oven to 190°C: 375°F: Gas 5.

Season the bird well and wrap with bacon.

Heat 55g (2oz) of butter and fry the thinly sliced apples for 2 to 3 minutes.

Grease a casserole dish with the remaining butter, add the bird and arrange the apple slices around, pour over half of the cream.

Roast, basting from time to time for 45 minutes or until cooked.

Remove the bird to a serving dish and keep warm.

Stir in the remaining cream (and apple brandy - if use) to the apples, reheat gently.

Serve with the sauce.

[Jenise]

I adore guinea fowl! It's like chicken, but richer and finer in texture. I splurge on one every now and then (can buy them at Whole Foods Market in Seattle) and usually cut them in half, stuff a compound butter involving tarragon and black pepper under the skin, and broil.

Thanks for the tips, all. A package full of quail and guinea hen just landed from D'Artagnan this afternoon.

Sounds like bacon-wrapped guinea hen will have to be on the menu soon...

[David M. Bueker]

Quail and Guinea hens - two birds that taste like chicken but take a hell of a lot of extra work to eat...and you end up hungry.

I look at my noisy, squawking flock of nine guinea fowl mingled with the chickens, and sometimes threaten them with the frying pan if they keep up the racket, but in truth, I'm too fond of them in the garden (they are hell on bugs, and especially ticks) to kill one for supper, even if I am curious as to what they taste like.

Quail and Guinea hens - two birds that taste like chicken but take a hell of a lot of extra work to eat...and you end up hungry.

David,
If your quail taste like chicken, something is quite wrong. Quail are all dark meat and to me taste closer to squab or duck. It's true that one quail isn't going to fill you up, which is why I usually make appetizers from them. OTOH, two quail stuffed with a blue corn bread-chorizo stuffing from an old Mark Miller recipe have proved to satiate even fairly big appetites when I've made them.

Mark Lipton

I'm a big guinea hen fan (and I love quail). We usually either bard it or use moist method, dries out easily. The D'Artagnan cookbook has a lot of recipes, my favorite for whole hens is a fricasee with shallots and cream, I'd be happy to photocopy for you today if you want.

[Jenise]

So how cool is this. After Salil's query yesterday morning I find myself at a grocery store in a ritzier part of town thinking I might buy a fresh Skagit chicken to roast for dinner if they had them. And they didn't have local chickens, they had local-something-smaller that the sign merely called "game hens", implying 'Rock Cornish' to help those who don't understand poultry well think what they might do with it. But I knew what I was looking at: guinea fowl! Fresh! And $1.69 a pound!!!!! So for a mere $3.90, I cut her in half and stuffed tarragon butter under the skin just like I described. With an 06 Chapoutier Crozes Hermitage, heavenly!!

We just got into Palm Dessert a few hours ago and my wife happened to walk by while I was reading this thread and she exclaimed after reading David's comments on guinea fowl "he never had one prepared by someone who knew what the hell they were doing". Basically quartered, salt, pepper, sauted in olive oil served in a red wine wild mushroom sauce. Fabulous, if I don't say so myself.

[Jenise]

I look at my noisy, squawking flock of nine guinea fowl mingled with the chickens, and sometimes threaten them with the frying pan if they keep up the racket, but in truth, I'm too fond of them in the garden (they are hell on bugs, and especially ticks) to kill one for supper, even if I am curious as to what they taste like.

Leave those birds alone! And buy one next time you're in a Whole Foods. Maybe, though, you--and THEY!--are better off with your not knowing.

Was wondering if anyone here could throw out more options/suggestions for things to do with whole guinea fowl, as well as just guinea hen legs?

Many years ago...like 60 when I was a child my mother roasted/baked a guinea hen we were gifted from the farm renter. She baked it as she would a chicken in a closed roasting pan with some vegetables. She took it directly from the oven to the table. when she took the top off the first thing we all saw was the skeleton on the hen. It was so tender that all the meat had fallen off the bones. Rather delicious as I recall.

With the legs, I would treat them perhaps as I do pheasant and chukar legs. I bake them off with plenty of liquid. Then I bone them setting aside the meat. Then I take the scraps with some vegetables, herbs and and wine and make a stock. Sweat off some vegetables. Use the stock for some wild rice and add in the meat and veggies for the last five minutes. But don't use that god awful commercially grown paddy rice. Get the real stuff. There is a new magazine out called "Cooking Wild". It is in it's second year. It is about cooking all things wild. It is a quarterly magazine. I think in one of the next two issues they will be carrying an article I wrote about real wild rice and the difference.
I really hate to have people think that grocery store commercial machine harvested stuff is the real deal!

I have a kind of dumb story about guinea hens. Several years ago -- Tom was small so it was more than 20 years back, we decided to drive up to the French speaking part of Canada and exercise our French. Louise had family living in Vermont so we had nice visits on the way up and then got to Montréal, and enjoyed that (we went to an Expos game). Then we drove over to Québec where we had rooms right in the very old part of town, in the shadow of the beautiful old Frontenac hotel. Of course we were eating at nice places and we went to one memorable restaurant where the (English) menu offered "leg of Pintade." I asked the waiter what Pintade was and we had a baffling conversation where he insisted that Pintade was a perfectly good English word (and thus I should already know what it meant). My vocabulary is not all that small but I had never run across "pintade." Well, from the context here you can guess that that is the French word for guinea fowl. And it tasted really good. At the end I paid for the meal with a credit card, and the young waitress came running to our table saying "il était refusée!" I gave her another card which worked fine. Then I had to get on the phone and find out what had gone wrong -- in an excess of caution, Chase Visa (or whatever card it was) thought some nefarious person had stolen my card and run off to Québec. I had never thought of informing my credit card company that I planned to travel. They released the hold on my card but -- here I was in a phone booth in a park between the Frontenac and the place we were staying, and the skies opened up and there was a gigantic downpour, one of those hard rains where every second it is like someone dumped a bucket of water over your head. If I hadn't had to use the pay phone we would have gotten back to our rooms perfectly dry.

So, the moral of the story is "PINTADE" -- you might find better recipes if you Google that word.