Remember this recipe? Yesterday, I tried it with Thumper instead of a chunk of cow. Honestly, it turned out better than I expected, but it wasn’t perfect.
Since rabbit is all white meat, and is much leaner than beef, I added the strained drippings from the last time I made the recipe with beef (about a cup and a half) to make sure there was enough liquid. That was a good idea.
I need a crock pot with more temperature settings. Mine only has “keep warm”, “low”, and “high”. I ran it on low, which works very well when using beef. However, the outer layer of the rabbit, both bottom and top, toughened up to near jerky consistency. I think that a lower setting would have had less of a drying/toughening effect on the meat. I only lost a couple ounces, and I probably could have finished drying it into jerky, but I didn’t think of that until just now.
The flavor was very good. It is by far the best rabbit dish I’ve made to date. It could have done with a smaller quantity of spices, since Thumper was only a little over two pounds without his bones, and I usually buy three to four pound slices of Bessie. Also, the drippings had leftover spices in them. I probably would have been fine with two cups of water and a bullion cube or two, which is what I will try next time. Trying it with no extra liquid would have definitely been a mistake.
All in all, the experiment was a success. I’ll keep tweaking until I get it right. Fortunately I have several of Thumper’s relatives in the freezer.
Grumpy Bastard 