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Photo by Holly A. Heyser
If there were a classic hare recipe, a dish that everyone has eaten, you could make a case for this one: Tuscan hare ragu with fresh pappardelle pasta. The dish is well within the canon of Tuscan cuisine, just as the equally famous civet de lievre is in French cooking. Never heard of that dish? We English speakers call it jugged hare.
Hare is not often eaten in the United States. In fact, with the exception of the snowshoe hare in the north country, we don’t even call our native hares by that name: We call them jackrabbits. But make no mistake, a jackrabbit is a hare. What’s the difference? Quite a bit, actually.
Photo courtesy Arizona Game & Fish Dept.
This is the jackrabbit I made this pasta sauce from. It’s an antelope jackrabbit from the Sonoran Desert south of Tucson, Arizona. The first thing you notice are the ears; way longer than a rabbit’s. Hares also give birth to “precocious” young, meaning they can hop away from danger minutes after birth. Rabbits give birth to helpless little pink things. Hares are larger, smarter, faster — and in the kitchen, tougher — than are any species of rabbit. Jacks are to cottontails what pigeons are to doves, geese are to ducks, elk are to deer.
Oh, and one more thing, especially important to a cook: Hare meat is rich and dark, like beef or venison. Rabbit meat is white and subtle, like chicken.
There are a lot of reasons why Americans don’t eat jackrabbits very much; I wrote about this in detail in 2010. Suffice to say we are still in a Depression hangover, and jackrabbits remain stigmatized as poor people’s food. There is also the issue of parasites, which is real. Botfly larvae in the skin and the occasional tapeworm infestation make cleaning a jackrabbit a bit more of an adventure than cleaning a chicken. But when hunted in cold weather, these problems are rare.
So what do you do with a mess of jackrabbit meat? I have plenty of plans in the works for the jacks I brought back from Arizona, but I knew right off that I would make this pasta sauce using the front legs. Front legs are tricky to work with on any animal. They are made up of lots of small muscles, and all those little muscles mean lots of connective tissue, which, in a jackrabbit that can run 50+ miles per hour, can be pretty stout stuff.
Braising or stewing is the only way to deal with this. This is precisely why the Italians make this ragu. It is an easy way to deal with little bones and tough muscles. Time and moisture are your friends.
Most classic recipes for hare ragu will have you marinate the meat for up to 2 days in wine, vinegar and herbs. I altered this step by marinating the jackrabbit in buttermilk for 24 hours. Why? The meat smelled strongly of sage, and not in a good way. Buttermilk both tenderizes the meat (it’s the acid) and pulls out a lot of “off” aromas. If your jackrabbit doesn’t smell sagey, you can skip this step. And if you buy a hare, which to my knowledge you can only do online through D’Artagnan, you can just marinate it in wine and herbs as normal.
What does this taste like? Well, honestly it tastes a lot like a Bolognese sauce: Meaty, rich, tomatoey without being a true tomato sauce. The hare tastes a lot like well braised lamb and a little of the sauce goes a long way. If you’ve never eaten hare before, this would be a good way to start.
Photo by Holly A. Heyser
tuscan hare ragu with pasta
This is a pasta sauce specifically designed for hare, or jackrabbit. If you don’t have one lying around, don’t substitute rabbit — use a piece of lamb, venison or beef instead. It’s a red meat ragu. Nothing else in this recipe is hard to find.
As for pasta, I made my own papparelle pasta, and you can use any one of my pasta recipes to make your own. Or you can buy fresh pappardelle or just use dried spaghetti.
This sauce keeps well in the fridge for a week or so, and can be frozen.
Serves 6-8.
Prep Time: 20 minutes, not including overnight soak
Cook Time: 4 hours
- 3 tablespoons olive oil
- 2-3 pounds hare legs (or lamb or beef stew meat)
- Salt
- 2 cups chopped onion
- 1 cup minced carrot
- 1 cup minced celery
- 2 tablespoons sage leaves, chopped
- 2 tablespoons rosemary, chopped
- 2 bay leaves
- 1 handful dried porcini mushrooms, chopped (about 1 ounce)
- 2 tablespoons tomato paste
- 2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
- 1 28-ounce can crushed tomatoes
- 1 cup red wine
- Parsley and grated cheese to garnish
__________
- If you need to soak the jackrabbit pieces, submerge them in buttermilk overnight. The next day, hack them into large pieces with a cleaver or kitchen shears. This will make them cook faster and fall off the bone easier. Rinse the hare under cold water and pat dry with paper towels.
- Heat the olive oil in a large Dutch oven over medium-high heat. Brown the hare pieces well. Take your time and do this in batches. Don’t let the pieces touch each other as they brown. Salt them as they cook. When browned, set aside.
- When the meat has been browned, add the onion, carrot and celery and cook, stirring occasionally, until the veggies begin to brown. Add the meat back to the pot, then the sage, rosemary, bay leaves and dried mushrooms. Mix well and allow to cook for a minute.
- Whisk together the tomato paste and wine and add that to the pot. Add the vinegar. Turn the heat to high to bring everything to a boil, then add the can of crushed tomatoes. Mix well, drop the heat to a bare simmer — only a few bubbles coming up to the surface — cover and let this cook until the hare meat wants to fall off the bone, up to 3 1/2 hours.
- When the meat is tender, fish out the bay leaves and discard. Remove the hare pieces and pull the meat from the bones. Return it to the pot. Ladle out about 1/3 to 1/2 of the sauce and put it into a food mill with a medium grate attached. Alternately, put it into a food processor or blender. Puree, meat and all. If you use a food mill you will have some dry, stringy hare meat left in the mill; discard or feed to your pets. Return the puree to the pot.
- Serve with pasta of your choice. I serve by putting the pasta in a large bowl, tossing it with a ladle of the sauce, then plating. I top each plate with some more sauce, then some parsley and some grated pecorino cheese.
I saw a few jackrabbits while hunting in Wyoming last fall. Thinking I should bring my .22 along on the next trip.
Haha Marcus! Being from Wyoming there are a few jackrabbits and people do do a lot of cooking with rabbit, deer, antelope. I am going to print this receipe off for a coworker who I am sure will be trying this receipe!
Delicious! There are a lot of Jack Rabbit up here where I live as well. Been contemplating a small game license for the upcoming season. Would be nice to take advantage of delicious recipes like this one.
My great grandmother homesteaded in Northwest Kansas and she commented that she was a little sick of eating jackrabbit all the time growing up. They used to drive them in herds and whack them by hand. I doubt she had this “exotic” recipe in the early 1900′s in rural KS. Since she made it to 103 years, maybe a little jackrabbit does the body good!
The last black-tailed jackrabbit I shot in KS was long enough that his front feet touched the ground when holding his rear feet near my belt. That was some time ago, and my mother pressure cooked it. I think she did it because she wanted it dealt with and gone with haste. She warned of the gamey flavor, yet topped with BBQ sauce it was quite tasty, dark meat. Tender too, thanks to the pressure cooker. This dish looks good, so I think another jackrabbit is in order next time I visit the plains.
I’ll be making this one soon, probably this weekend. Do you think one whole blacktail will be enough?
This looks delicious. Think this would work with wild boar meat?
Tom: Yep, one black-tailed jackrabbit should be enough.
Viicky: I think wild boar would work pretty well, actually. Give it a go and let me know how it turns out.
I am currently making this recipe… I have it in my crock pot right now, hour and a half to go! Smells delicious and the few tastes tests I had so far were fantastic.
The results are in……. this recipe is AMAZING!!!!! Firstly, I used beef stew for the meat, otherwise I would be eating alone. I did not have sage or mushrooms on hand so that was omitted and I used maybe have the amount of Rosemary because I find it to be a very dominating spice. I did soak the meat overnight in buttermilk. I used standard red cooking wine found at any food store. As for cooking, I used a large frying pan to start the sauce, and then transferred the sauce and seared meat into my electric crock pot on high for 3.5 hours. By the 3rd hour, the meat was falling apart. Lastly, I put the sauce and meat into my food processor, just a pulse or two was all that was needed to make the meat fall apart. I served this over papperdelle which is the perfect pasta to serve this with.
This recipe will be used repeatedly, the entire family devoured it! Thank you for sharing this recipe!!
A quick comment regarding the meat…. you could use any red meat for this sauce. I was actually thinking of trying pork next time.
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This is excellent with Nevada desert hare. Tried your Sardinian hare stew recipe last week which was clean and light. That was good, but this one is lusty and rich. I’ll take lusty and rich. Well done, Hank. Thanks for sharing this.