Slow-Cooked Rabbit in Red Wine

This is a favourite recipe of ours, adapted from Matt and Lentil’s Grown & Gathered. We like to cook ours in our bakers’ wood oven over winter, so we can cook it at a lower temperature over a longer time. We love the range of herbs and the resulting flavour is amazing.

Ingredients:

• 3-4 bacon rashers, diced
• 2 celery stalks (with tops), diced
• 2 carrots, diced
• 2 tablespoons garlic infused olive oil (slice some garlic and infuse in olive oil overnight)
• 1 teaspoon dried chili flakes
• 2 cups tomato passata
• 2 cups red wine
• 3 thyme sprigs, leaves removed
• 5 rosemary sprigs, leaves removed and finely chopped
• 1 large bunch of parsley, finely chopped
• 100g pitted olives
• 1 tablespoon butter
• 1 rabbit, quartered
• Salt and pepper to season

Method:

1. Preheat oven to 150 degrees. In a large frying pan, sauté the bacon in the garlic oil. Add the celery and carrot and sauté until just browned.
2. Add passata, wine, herbs, olives and 1-2 cups of water and simmer for 5-10 minutes.
3. In a Dutch oven, melt the butter and brown the rabbit on each side.
4. Pour the sauce over the rabbit, season with salt and pepper, cover and cook in the oven for 2.5 hours. Turn the oven off and leave to continue slow cooking for 2-4 hours.

We like to serve ours with creamy mashed potatoes, but it’s also great with soft polenta, or even pasta. We remove the rabbit bones from the pot so that it becomes more like a ragu. And of course, we enjoy it with a glass of Billy Button red wine – Shiraz or Nebbiolo works particularly well.