I’m off to my usual slow start in the earliest weeks of hunting season. Upland birds opened in many states on Sept. 1, but I don’t usually hunt much early in the season.
My day job is teaching, and September is the busiest month of the year. Also, I’ve lived the majority of my life in buzzworm-friendly states — California, Wyoming, Arizona — and when you hunt in places rattlesnakes favor, you look to the weather report rather than the calendar to decide when it’s time to start hunting.
It takes a hard frost or two to put those snakes away for the season. Your dog’s life may depend on it, and yours too, though with leather boots and brush pants, human hunters are better protected than our dogs.
If I was in Kalispell this weekend, I’d be thinking about a trip over the mountains to the Sweet Grass Hills to hunt sharptails and maybe, hopefully, Huns. The small partridges are present in the Hills, though not in the numbers you’ll find sharpies. Still, a mixed bag is always a fine reward, especially if you’re just making a day of it.
Sharptail have a less-than-stellar culinary reputation, one which isn’t completely undeserved. These grouse are good fliers, as anyone who has flushed a bird or covey a second time can attest. All that flying requires lots of blood vessels, oxygen-storing myoglobin and slow-twitch muscle fibers.
This is also why domestic chickens have dark meat, but only their legs. In farm-raised birds, this results in the tastiest, most culinarily forgiving meat on the chicken. It’s dang hard to overcook chicken thighs, for instance. But on grouse, that dark breast meat requires careful attention from the cook.
What I learned cooking sharp-tailed grouse is that if you kill a young-of-the-year bird — pin feathers are the giveaway — you’ve got a fine candidate for pan searing. Pluck and quarter the young grouse. I usually sear, then finish in a 425-degree oven, though a young bird is nearly finished by the time you’ve seared it. If you put it in the oven don’t leave it there long.
No more than two to three minutes, frequently checking the thickest part of the breast with a meat thermometer.
Once the temp hits 130 get the breasts out of the oven. You want them pink and medium rare. I leave these on the bone so carryover heat will continue cooking the birds after they’re out of the oven. The legs can survive a little longer, but they’re not indestructible like chicken thighs.
If you don’t have an instant-read thermometer, use your knife to cut into the meat to check doneness. Remember, you can always put your bird back in the oven if it’s undercooked for your tastes.
If you insist on cooking your grouse beyond medium, or you have an older, tougher bird, I suggest an alternative technique. I’ve only ever made coq au vin with pheasant, but a long stew in deeply flavored sauce might be the cure for sharptail funk.
You can also confit older grouse, though you won’t get enough fat off a wild bird for the job. I’ve used olive oil for this slow, low temperature poach with good results.
The sharptail’s poor culinary reputation is mostly the result of overcooking.
I haven’t hunted or cooked a grouse for some time, so I checked Hank Shaw’s Hunt-Gather-Cook website and he has a recipe for pan-seared grouse that doesn’t involve finishing in the oven. I’ve never tried it, but I’ve used quite a few of Shaw’s recipes and they are always good, and often great.
I think small-game hunters should be required to show proof of purchase of Shaw’s upland cookbook, “Pheasant, Quail, Cottontail,” as a condition before being allowed to purchase a small-game hunting license.
Challenging game birds like sharptail would be so much better on the plate if this were the case.