The Great Quail Cook Off

These are tasty little birds. My next door neighbor, Dave Miller, is a chef and restaurateur–for those of you who have lived in Harrisonburg for a while, you may remember him as the owner of Dave’s Taverna. He’s been a foodie fixture in Harrisonburg since the 1980’s. He agreed to cook up some of my quail using one if his secret recipes.

This was exciting, to have a real chef prepare MY quail for a taste test! I’m not much of a foodie myself, not yet anyway, and I have about four emergency recipes that I rotate on the supper menu. I’m one of those people who looks at the clock at 4 pm and says, Oh shit! What are we having for supper! It’s usually spaghetti, or beans and rice, or a big salad, or something with potatoes. Very rarely something from a recipe. Bruce does a better job in the kitchen, generally, than I do. And here I was, going head-to-head with a CHEF in a cooking competition!

I started looking up recipes for quail on the internet and found one that had two ingredients: bacon and pesto. That was it. That was my recipe. How could bacon and pesto let you down?

I was having a dinner party of 9, and only had five of my own quail, so I added another level of complexity to the taste test by buying a package of six commercial quail from the local Foodmaxx. Now we could compare my own home raised and butchered quail with commercially processed quail, and compare two different recipes.

I was cooking two of my quail and three from the store. Dave had three of mine and three from the store.

My recipe was pretty easy. I wrapped each bird in two pieces of bacon, smeared it all with pesto and butter, and cooked it at 450 for 20 minutes or until the bacon was nice and crispy.

The thing was, my quail didn’t LOOK like delicate little quail on the plate. The looked like little drumsticks wrapped in bacon and drizzled with pesto.

Dave’s recipe was a bit more sophisticated, and his birds were beautiful and delicate. (Except for the one with the torn-off leg, which had been mangled in the commercial packaging. Dave said he wouldn’t even serve that one in a restaurant, but we were hard up for quail that night, so it got eaten.)

He soaked the quail overnight in a marinade of olive oil, lemon juice, water, oregano, garlic, salt, pepper, parsley, onion powder, and sugar. Let the quail sit at room temperature then broil on high heat until internal temperature is 165º.

Come on now, I’m not going to reveal all of Dave’s secrets by giving you the exact amounts and timing! You’ll have to experiment! And wait a bit of you want all the details. The complete recipe, with proportions, will be available with the purchase of a double brace of quail from HomeAgain Farm at the Harrisonburg Friendly City Coop in the near future.

Results? Delectable. The bacon and pesto birds were indeed delicious, but really what you were tasting was, well, bacon and pesto.

The marinaded birds were a much more delicate flavor. And there is more meat on a quail than I was expecting!

All the dinner guests agreed that the locally raised, non-GMO fed quail that grew up in our garage were more richly flavored and delicately textured than the store-bought ones. And no mangled birds with torn-off legs or feathers still sticking. Let’s just say it was a completely objective as well as appreciative crowd.