Are doves good eatin’? Just curious.
Yes.
I cook them in a slow cooker with soy sauce, garlic, onion salt, celery salt, a small amount of Tabasco, some oregano, a bit of red wine, if handy. Make sure the dove breasts are covered with water. After cooking overnight, the meat falls off the bones, and it is easy to remove the bones.
I usually serve them mixed with rice. Add the dove meat to the rice, break up the breast meat into smaller bits that will easily fit on a fork. This year I added some roasted garlic Balsamic dressing to the rice and doves, and it was delicious!
I prefer them cooked then chilled..and eaten cold. But that's just me......
My bro in law shoots them in his back yard, and breads and fries the breasts.
Flour, salt. pepper.
Simple and tasty.
“Are doves good eatin’?”
As others have posted, yes, they certainly are. I used to go dove hunting every season, very much enjoying the challenge of their erratic flight paths, but due to various circumstances haven’t had the chance to go the past couple years. I’ve tried preparing them many different ways, and in the more recent years opted to just save the breast meat, that is, until the last ‘hunt’ I was on...
I was building a house for a guy a couple years ago. It was just the homeowner and I doing 90% of the work. We’d gotten all the rough framing done when a collared dove built a nest on top of an interior wall and proceeded to lay eggs in it. I’d rob the eggs (good eating!) and remove the nest one day, and a couple days later the nest would be back with more eggs in it. The homeowner got quite tired of the droppings and mess the doves were making, so I volunteered to get rid of them. I brought my Franchi over the following day and waited until just before leaving for lunch, planning on eating the doves for lunch. There was three of them that kept coming back, I’m guessing probably the one hen and two males. Why they decided to nest inside, with all our activity and the racket from our saws and nail guns is strange, but they did.
So I went outside with the Franchi to wait as the homeowner climbed up on the ceiling joists to flush them out. All three came out at once, and I managed to get two with the first shot and the third on a longer distance second shot. I picked them up and hurried home to prepare them, planning on eating (tough) dove breast and eggs for lunch.
As I was cleaning them, they remained warm since the ambient temperature was just over 100 degrees here in the high desert. I’m not sure what inspired me to do such, but when I split the breast on the first one and saw it’s little heart, about the size of a quarter, I pulled it out and popped it into my mouth. Perhaps it was some ancient carnivore/hunter instinct of going straight for the bloody organ meat, but I’ll tell you this, that warm and raw recently beating heart was absolutely the very best taste of dove I’ve ever eaten! As I cleaned the other two, I ate the hearts in the same manner, very tender and perfectly salted with the little remaining blood left inside.
After ‘discovering’ that special treat, the cooked breast and egg meal almost seemed like a let down. I haven’t had the opportunity to go dove hunting again since that last time, but having tasted that fresh, warm, and raw organ meat, and how exquisitely good it tasted, it’s a treat I’ll be looking forward to that cannot be duplicated or found anywhere else!