Peaks and Places | Travel and Adventure Blog

New Zealand has many non-native animals which are now considered pests. Some of these include the Australian possum, rats, turkeys, and peacocks. For many of these there is no designated hunting season, but with landowner approval you can hunt them how and when you like.

Taylor and I recently WWOOFed with a couple who owned around 700 hectares of farm land. WOOFing is when you work for four hours a day, typically 6 days a week, in return for food and a bed. Their land had animals everywhere, both farm animals, sheep and cattle, and wild animals, turkeys and peacock. Towards the end of our stay, our host offered to take us hunting for some peacocks. We went out one evening and were able to get a one young male and one female. Our host told us they were horrible to eat and he usually doesn’t bother, regardless, we wanted to give it a try. Afterall, how many people can say they’ve gotten to eat peacock.

I decided to just take the breast meat from the younger male. We have limited space in our fridge, and if it was really as bad as we’d been told, I didn’t want a year supply of it. Processing the peacock was very similar to that of a turkey, so it was pretty easy to get the meat removed and cleaned up.

Fast forward a couple days and Taylor and I had decided we wanted to try the peacock in a farmhouse chowder. This was a recipe I had used before with chicken breast and it always turned out very good. The hope was the chowder would have enough flavor and moisture to make up for the supposedly horrible peacock.

The Chowder is pretty easy to make and it has bacon so what’s not to love. Start by cooking some chopped up bacon in a large pot and remove (we opted to leave the bacon in). Next, add some diced onion and red pepper and cook through and remove. Next step was to cook the peacock, we cubed the meat into bit size pieces and seasoned with all purpose and garlic. We were carful not to overcook the meat and removed once it was done. Then we made our broth, with some chicken bullion and water. Once the broth was hot, we added some chopped potatoes, the bacon, onions and peppers, and some corn. We let this simmer until the potatoes were cooked through. We then added the peacock back in, along with some heavy cream to make the soup into chowder. After a few more minutes it was done and ready to eat.

The chowder turned out pretty good, the peacock had good flavor but was quite tough. It reminded me a lot of wild turkey, good flavor but just tougher than you’d like. Overall, we were both pleasantly surprised, impressed with it and would try it again. However, I do think I would just stick to the breast meat because I bet the legs/thighs would be a little too tough.

Farmhouse Chowder Recipe (Peacock Edition)

2 Peacock Breast – cubed
1 lb of potatoes – cubed
1/2 pound of bacon – chopped
1 can of whole kernel corn (make sure to drain it)
1 half of an onion – diced
1 red pepper – diced
1/2 cup of cream
4 cups of chicken broth
All purpose and garlic seasoning as needed, we went a little overboard with the salt.