October 9 – Marsha Cooks a Mutton Bird

            

            The Maori eat the titi or mutton bird.  A titi is a sooty shearwater, a sea bird that nests on certain islands off shore of New Zealand, known as Titi Islands.  Maori are permitted to harvest the shearwater chicks, which are considered a delicacy, and the birds can be bought at certain grocery stores.  

  I had eaten titi on our trip here in 2005 when we were on Stewart Island.  I recall that it tasted like fishy chicken.  I saw one for sale at the grocery store so I decided I would try it again, cooking it the New Zealand way, just to see if that was right.  I looked up recipes for cooking mutton bird, as the white New Zealanders call it.  They all seemed to be pretty similar, so I picked one and then riffed on it.  

            There are a few issues with mutton bird.  First it is a very oily bird, much like duck.  Second, it is also a very salty bird.  The salt comes, not from the ocean, but from the fact that the Maori harvesting the birds do not have refrigeration on their small boats.  So they salt the birds to preserve them.  This means the preparation of the bird is primarily about getting rid of the salt and fat.

            The first step is to boil the crap out of the bird.  Put it in a large pot, cover it with water, add a bay leaf, and boil.  Boiling this bird is a challenge largely because they stink to high heaven.  If you can boil it outside, that would be ideal.  Absent that, open every window in the house.  After an hour, there will be a mound of fat on the water.  Drain it off taking the salt with it.  Start again.  Fresh water covers the bird.  Boil it for another hour.  More fat, more salt.  Drain it again.  By this time, it should be completely tender and while not completely salt and fat free, at least edible.  

            

The next step is to broil the bird.  The idea here is to crisp up the skin.  

Once it is broiled, the bird is ready to eat.  Some people stop right there and eat it.  That did not seem right to me. First, the bird was so tiny, it was not enough for two people.  Second, after all that effort, my feeling was that it needed to be given some special treatment.  

            So I made a titi bird risotto with shredded titi, watercress and feta cheese.  It was actually quite good.  I used a standard risotto recipe and mixed in the watercress and bird at the end, topping with feta. The titi is a strong flavor and it is called a mutton bird because it supposedly tastes like mutton. Not having ever eaten mutton, I have idea if that comparison is true. I do know that the way I prepared it did cook most of the fishiness out of it.  But like any strongly flavored food, it is only for the adventurous.