Hi, my name is Ian. I’m with MassWildlife, and today we’re going to show you how to breast out a pheasant.
You have the option to pluck your pheasant, but today we’re going to show you the easiest and most popular way to process your bird. This method works for any upland game bird or waterfowl.
Start by locating the breastbone, and you’re going to make a cut with your knife on each side of the breastbone.
Now that we’re inside, we’re going to try to get under the skin here and slowly peel it away to reveal all the breast meat that we’ll be trying to carve out. Sometimes you can just pull it away like that, and it reveals all the meat we’re looking for.
Now that we’ve pulled our skin back, we can see all the breast meat we’re looking for. We’re just going to run our knife down the breastbone and start to peel this meat away.
You’re going to repeat this on the other side of the breastbone, carving away the other breast.
Next, we’re going to remove the legs. The skin should already be peeled back pretty far from pulling the breasts out. You just need to poke your finger through the skin and pull, working it all the way down to the joint.
We’re going to put pressure down on the leg so that we pop it out at the socket, then cut through. After that, snap down at the joint and pull everything else off. Clear any remaining feathers, and you have your pheasant leg.
Repeat that process for the other side.
And here we’re finished. We have our four portions ready for cooking. These can be put in the freezer for use at a later time.