Spit Roasting Rabbits

Im sure there are endless exquisite ways to cook a rabbit with different herbs, spices and flavours but that wasn't what we were after. My friend and I planned to spit roast two rabbits over our campfire, one each for our evening meal accompanied by nothing else. We thought it'd be good to experience the meat in its plain form and cooked in a simple way. This primitive way of cooking is no doubt following the same methods that generations of people have done for millennium; so worth a try!

As our stay was relatively short we didn't have time to hunt our own, so we purchased our rabbits from our local Trevilley farm-shop.

We cleaned out the rabbits and then planned to put a nice smooth sapling through the neck of the rabbit, using a small stick to hold the hind legs together and create somewhere for the sapling to go through. The main sapling we used was cleaned by just striping the bark off with a knife and then slid through the two rabbits.

Often people seem to think its hard to cook on a camp-fire; as if you have no control and everything is so much harder, I really don't think it is, if you know how to manage a fire your in business and if you don't, well you shouldn't really be having a fire! No seriously in this case when spit-roasting some rabbits all it takes is careful fire-management and constant attention, its not to hard.

For the spit we had two Y-shaped poles either side of the fire and a straight sapling to reach across the full width of the fire and more, on one end I had a slight kink in the sapling which acted as a bit of a turning handle. This design is also generally handy for camp, it can also be easily used to suspend billy-cans of water above the fire as you can see we did (photo below).

We spent about an hour and a half cooking the rabbits on this occasion, although im sure you could cook them quicker.

When the rabbits were cooked it was relatively easy to slide them off and we soon learnt that this wasn't really the meal for cutlery, the best approach was hands on! They were hansom!

Video

This camping trip was also documented by the following video;