I’ve hunted doves, but it was many years ago and I’m not planning to again anytime soon. I’m not a huge fan of dove meat, but not hunting them mostly has to do with my proximity to good flights of mourning doves. There aren’t many around here, and dove is not the sort of destination hunt I’ll travel for.
Dove breast is dark and filled with the flavor of muscles that push those birds to migrate hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles. Not everyone is a fan of that slow-twitch, myoglobin-rich meat. Dove can be tasty, but it requires a cook with a deft touch and eaters who don’t shy away from pink meat, oozing red, protein-saturated fluid (not blood).
One way hunters get around the culinary challenge of dove meat is bacon-wrapped poppers. A typical popper includes jalapeño, sliced or halved, often filled with cream cheese, and a spiral of bacon encasing it all. They’re usually cooked on a grill, often a makeshift setup next to the pool at some cheap motel in the California-Arizona border region.
I’m not a huge fan of jalapeños, however, or most green chilies for that matter (Hatch is an exception). It’s not the heat. I’m not a capsaicin junkie, but I enjoy spicy food. It’s that in most instances, I prefer the sweet, more rounded flavor of a ripe, red chili. Especially a red jalapeño. Green jalapeños have a tart, unripe taste I don’t care for.
The same goes for green bell peppers. I can’t think of a bell pepper recipe that isn’t improved by leaving the pepper on the vine long enough to ripen.
This time of year, I start rummaging around stores looking for red jalapeños. I find them at the farmer’s market or at a small, local produce store in town. I’ll also see a few mixed in with the green fruit at big-box grocery stores. If I see a few red jalapeños in the bin, I fish them out and save them until I have enough for a quick pickle.
There is an endless list of quick pickle recipes online, but the 1:1 formula is a great place to start. That’s a cup each of water and vinegar along with a tablespoon of kosher salt and another of sugar. White distilled vinegar works just fine, but you can experiment with the fancy stuff if you like. I generally follow the 1:1 formula, though I do like my pickles sweet, so I add some extra sugar.
I think you can see where I’m going with this. I pickle sliced red jalapeños in the fall, mostly to add them to pepperoni pizzas I bake in my pizza oven. A drizzle of honey once the pie is done creates a lovely, spicy-sweet pizza only people who don’t love pizza won’t love. And I don’t hang around with that sort of person.
However you make your poppers, try subbing a pickled red jalapeño. You can pickle them sliced, halved or whole. And if you don’t have ready access to dove breasts, consider subbing in slices of grouse breast, sharpies or the forest kind. Goose or duck would also work well.
Not everyone likes a sweet pickle, but sweet is an especially effective counter for the sometimes-gamey taste of birds with dark meat.
Author Hank Shaw, whose cookbook “Pheasant, Quail, Cottontail” demands space on every small-game hunter’s bookshelf, has an intriguing recipe for dove poppers that replaces the jalapeño with a date. Shaw also recommends par-cooking the bacon so that it cooks more quickly on the grill. That way, you don’t overcook the dove breast while getting the bacon all the way to crispy. And the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation Department website has another popper recipe that includes figs.
I can’t see how a sliced, pickled red jalapeño could do anything other than make either recipe more delicious.