Cooking Rabbit

Ever since my post on rabbit meat I have had several readers ask about cooking rabbit and also wondering if rabbit meat was ok long term to include on your diet. The first thing that needs to be discussed is the difference between domestic rabbits and native rabbits.

A domestic rabbit is descended from European descent and distantly related to the native rabbits found in the United States. The native rabbit will tend to be leaner as it tends to be more active due to the nature of being a prey animal. The domestic rabbit will have fat, but the majority is stored in places that is easily separated in the processing stage. Cooking rabbit will not differ much if it is native or domestic.

The simplest way to think about cooking rabbit is that any recipe that utilizes chicken can have rabbit substituted in place of it. While there are som rabbit recipes out there and we have tried them with great delight the options are limitless when you think about substituting rabbit meat for chicken. I do have to warn some people that there is not as much white meat on a rabbit as a chicken. This also is true with pastured poultry as well, but if you do not care about white or dark meat you should be fine. Cooking rabbit can be as simple as you need it to be and easy.

One thing that people tend to over complicate when cooking rabbit is the fat content of rabbit meat. I have not gotten any of my rabbits tested to determine the fat content of the meat, but I would be surprised if it does not have enough fat in it to survive. While cooking rabbit the majority of time we add some fat to it via butter or olive oil.

These are good times and we can add stuff to it, but I could never imagine a time when there would be meat available and not any other fat to add to it. The truth is that humans subsisted on  lot less food back when they were hunter/gatherers. If we see a return to those type of times cooking rabbit will be the least of our concerns.