What could be tastier and more elegant than quail! The recipes for its preparation at all times have enjoyed tremendous success. And dishes from small birds were served on the tables of aristocrats, kings and gourmets. Not so long ago, our quail was a curiosity and a deficit, now almost every citizen can treat himself to a delicacy, since it is absolutely not difficult to buy a product. There would be a quail, and recipes with photos will help culinary specialists create a true masterpiece from it. And in the process of creativity, our article will come in handy.
Nuances and Tricks
Whatever culinary plans you make regarding quail, recipes - all without exception - are advised to observe some traditional tricks. Firstly, the bird, plucked and gutted, should be kept in the refrigerator for about an hour - this will make it more tender and juicy in the future. Secondly, if the quail is fried or baked, they must be marinated. There are a lot of options for marinade.
If you do not want to fool your head too much, you can limit yourself to onions with seasonings; its juice is enough for a small carcass. Thirdly, the paws of the bird must be tied before cooking. Such a step, again, will provide a more juicy result. And fourthly, if the recipes for preparing quail in the oven do not offer an alternative, go over the carcass with a brush soaked in ghee or your favorite sauce. This technique prevents the meat from drying out.
Baked quail in the oven: recipe with photo
Let's start with simple options. Of all the recipes for making quail, the following is considered the most primitive. The carcasses are cut along the sternum, lightly beaten off, rubbed with pepper and salt and aged for at least two hours in a dry wine marinade with honey (a spoonful of beekeeping product per bottle of winemakers' products). After marinating, the carcasses are fried to a crust in a frying pan, transferred to a mold, poured with the remnants of the marinade and aged in the oven until final readiness.
Very tasty!
If you do not mind getting a little more, we suggest using this recipe. Cut quails are rubbed both inside and outside with a mixture of salt, sugar and pepper (select the ratio to your liking). You need to marinate the birds for about five hours. A sufficient amount of mushrooms is chopped together with onions, fried almost until ready, mixed with chopped thyme (you can take dried) and grated processed cheese. The quail abdomen is filled with this composition, the edges are fixed with culinary thread or toothpicks, and the birds are put into the oven for about half an hour. Do not forget to water them with allocated juices, gravy from mushrooms or ghee.
Up the sleeve
A unique case when marinating birds is not expected. They should be pierced with a fork several times from the inside, but so that the skin is not damaged. A piece of oil (50 grams per 2-3 carcasses) needs to be slightly softened, and then mixed with steamed raisins and some sour berry - cranberries or cranberries. The abdomen of each quail begins with this composition, the carcasses are folded into a sleeve, it is tied and sent for forty minutes to a hot oven. If you want a tan on the skin, cut the packaging about ten minutes before extracting the quail.
With prunes and apple
How else can I cook a quail? Recipes involving the use of the sleeve are very diverse. One of the universal, which will appeal to everyone without exception, is considered such. For marinade, olive oil (half a cup), sugar (two tablespoons), half a spoon of salt, two chopped garlic cloves and Provence herbs are combined. Smeared with a mixture of 6-7 carcasses quietly lie in the refrigerator for about five hours, or better, night. Three chopped apples of sweet and sour varieties are mixed with five large prunes, cut into strips. This stuffing is filled with carcasses, folded into a sleeve and cooked for half an hour in the oven at 180 Celsius. Then the sleeve is opened, the temperature in the oven rises to two hundred - and after ten minutes you can call home gourmets to the table. The ideal "company" for the dish is rice with vegetables. Or bulgur cooked with fresh bell peppers.
Quail wrapped quails
To cope with some dry quail, recipes are often advised to pack the birds in something juicy and fatty, for example, in bacon. And a dish made in accordance with such recommendations is really worthy of respect and attention. A piece of eight carcasses are salted, peppered, sprinkled with white wine vinegar and lemon juice, taken in equal parts, in which they are pickled for about an hour. Then they are slightly dried with napkins and wrapped in wide thin layers of bacon. Before this, a couple of spoons of plum jam is put inside the carcass - it will give the dish a special piquancy. The legs are connected, the quail is laid out on a baking sheet parchment (or simply greased with oil) and placed in the oven for 40 minutes. Serving of the served food should also correspond to its level: the dish is covered with salad leaves, and asparagus beans, young carrots, and peas - fresh or canned, and boiled rice can serve as a side dish.
How to cook quail: recipe with cabbage
Here, carcasses are marinated in white dry wine (half a glass for three birds), mixed with Provencal herbs and a 50-gram stack of fresh lemon juice. Then the quail is fried to a crust in olive oil, placed on a baking sheet, covered with foil and baked for a quarter of an hour on an air grill, heated to 200 degrees.
Cabbage is chopped, mixed with finely chopped onions and stewed until cooked. Quail served on a large plate with a slide of side dish. According to home tasters, a dish is best revealed in the richness of taste, if its consumption is accompanied by drinking a glass of dry white wine.
Minced tangerines and rice
We already have several ways to cook stuffed quail. There are many recipes, as you yourself could see, but not all interesting options were voiced. Let us turn to the fantasy results of inspired culinary specialists and start the birds with other compositions. This time it’s supposed to marinate carcasses in a mixture of a spoonful of honey with the same amount of balsamic vinegar, three tablespoons of soy sauce, two olive oil, a pile of good cognac and seasoning (pepper and salt at least). The specified number of ingredients is enough for six quails. Birds should be kept for 30-40 minutes. There is just enough time to cook rice, steam raisins, peel and cut two large tangerines. Citruses, by the way, need to be removed from the films covering the slices. All of these components are combined, assigned; if desired, they can be supplemented with fried bacon. Carcasses are stuffed with filling, laid out in a form and baked a little longer than half an hour. This recipe allows you to get by with a minimum of side dishes: a salad or just fresh / pickled vegetables will be enough.
With potato
We left the very successful combination of exotic with everyday life in the end. In addition to quail, for the dish you will need potatoes and quinces. The bird, they say, can not be pickled - due to the quince juice, it should turn out tender. The fruit is washed in running water intensively so that the fleecy layer comes off. Seed boxes are removed from it, and the flesh is cut into medium-sized slices. These pieces are embedded inside washed, dried and salted carcasses; the upper parts of the wings and lower legs are cut off - they are quickly charred. However, you can generously lubricate these parts of the body with oil. Quails are placed in a smeared form and lined with medium slices of salted potatoes. If quince fragments remain, they also spill out into the total mass. From above, the “still life” is peppered (you can use other seasonings), covered with foil or parchment - and the form is hidden for 25 minutes in the oven. Then the container is removed; the bird will certainly be ready, but potatoes are not a fact.
In this case, it will have to be baked separately so as not to overdry the quail. Serve this charm on a large dish, and berries (including frozen), small pickled onions, greens or canned corn and peas are suitable for decorating it. Garnish - any, although most prefer to eat quail separately, and think about accompaniment of food later.
At the very end, it is worth recalling that quail can be cooked in different ways, a great many ways. And they are fertile ground for culinary experiments - unless you forget that the meat of the birds is lean and can quickly go into the category of too dry. But the quail goes well with almost all the side dishes and fillings, so a real culinary artist will find where to deploy his talent.