14 people gathered at the Brookings Public Library last Thursday to learn how to prepare and cook wild pheasant.
Every year after the shotguns are put away and freezers are full, hunters ask the same question: “What am I going to do with all this meat?”
Mikayla Neubauer, a librarian, hoped to answer this question by showing them how to cook it.
Class participants watched the meals being prepared and then tasted the dishes. The cooking class consisted of three dishes–a pheasant salad, a pheasant butternut squash pasta, and a pheasant enchilada.
Neubauer is an avid outdoors woman and enjoys cooking, so putting this event together was a no-brainer for her. While cooking, Neubauer gave helpful tips on how to cook the bird.
Pheasant is a very lean meat and needs a type of fat to keep it moist. For simplicity, Neubauer prepared the pheasants the night before by boiling them. She said because it was being added to other recipes, boiling wouldn’t ruin the meat. This was the first time she ever cooked pheasant. This helped show everyone just how simple it was to cook with the bird.
Attendees seemed to enjoy themselves. Neubauer kept their attention by commenting on each step she was taking while putting each meal together. This was also the first time Neubauer had done a cooking-style show in front of an audience.
The event was put together in collaboration with SDSU’s Pheasants Forever chapter. Tyler Geltmacher, the graduate adviser for Pheasants Forever, said this event was brought to his attention by Neubauer.
“I was pretty excited about it,” Geltmacher said. “We’re just trying to find other ways to get our name out there.” Geltmacher said the organization’s No. 1 goal was to increase student engagement and get people excited about the outdoors.
Geltmacher also played a part in this event by collecting all of the wild pheasants through hunting. This ensured that what the participants were tasting was true to what was in their freezer.
In the 2022-2023 season, according to South Dakota Game Fish and Parks, hunters harvested an estimated 1,158,000 birds. With the average male weighing roughly three pounds, South Dakotans harvested a whopping 3,476,148 pounds of pheasant.
“Pheasant is such a South Dakotan staple,” Neubauer mentioned. “We have a whole tourist economy around pheasant hunting. People go out and have a great time hunting pheasants, but don’t know what to do with it now that they have it. Instead of wasting the bird or letting it sit in your freezer forever because you don’t know what to do with it, you can make it into something delightful.”
Neubauer hopes to have this event again in the fall and thinks it could become a yearly event where she comes up with new dishes every year.