Now that the Fall and Hunting season is here, we’re going to cook something that doesn’t swim for once. Having gotten enough mourning doves during the opening day at Berry College WMA to make an appetizer this year. I decided to breast out my share of the birds and make the tried and true mourning dove recipe of dove poppers. The breasts on a dove make up the majority of what you can eat and are some of the most tender and succulent pieces of wild meat you can eat. So here’s me making grilled dove poppers with three types of cheeses.
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Grilled Dove Popper Ingredients
- Skinless Boneless Dove Breasts
- Bacon
- Jalapenos
- Cheese – Cream Cheese, Pepperjack, and Pimento Cheese
- Creole Seasoning
- Toothpicks
Making Dove Poppers is a very easy way to cook up dove breasts, and it does not take very long to prep. So the first you should do for the grilled dove poppers is get the grill ready. I recommend cooking over charcoal or hardwood, but if you only have a propane grill see if you can throw in a lump of applewood or other fruitwood to get that nice smoke flavor. Once the coals are going, start prepping the dove breasts. Even though you have already breasted out the doves, go over them once more to make sure there are no bone fragments on the backside of the breasts. Also, make sure to pick off any stray feathers, and trim any little bits of gristle and connective tissue. After that, season them on both sides with whatever seasoning you prefer with your meat, I went with my go-to of creole seasoning. Put the breast aside in the fridge while we work on the next step.
With the dove breast ready and seasoned, it is time to prep all the jalapenos.
First cut them in half lengthwise, even through the base of the stem. Then carefully trim the stem off the jalapeno. Don’t just cut the top off the pepper, you want to keep the pepper intact to hold the cheese in better as it cooks. Once you have all the stems off the pepper, take a small spoon and scoop out all of the seeds and ribs from inside the jalapenos. Once that’s done you’re ready to start assembling.
Get your cheese and start stuffing the cavity of the jalapeno peppers. I went with three cheeses here, pepper jack, cream cheese, and pimento cheese. Pepperjack and cream cheese are regularly used for dove poppers, and pimento cheese was a bit of an experiment here. Fill the jalapeno halves almost full of the cheese, leaving a bit of a cavity left to put the dove breasts into.
Now with all the cheese in the jalapeno halves, take you dove breast and press them snuggly into the cavity of the peppers.
With the breast in the jalapeno halves, it’s time to wrap them in the bacon. I chose to cut the bacon strips in half to not have too much bacon on each popper. While bacon is very delicious, you still want the doves to be the star of the show here. But it’s up to you, you can use whole strips of bacon for each popper. The big thing here though is to try and keep the wrappings tight. Once you wrap a popper, if you got toothpicks use them to hold the bacon in place by skewering the dove poppers with a toothpick. I didn’t have any so I had to skip this step. So mine came out a bit messier after grilling. So I really recommend you use toothpicks, do as I say not as I do.
Now you got all the poppers ready, take them to the grill. I like to grill mine not directly over the hot coals. Instead, I cook them adjacent so the fat dripping off the bacon doesn’t flare up as you are cooking the dove poppers. You can grill the poppers directly over the coals, but you will have to babysit them. Constantly moving and turning them so the bacon doesn’t burn and blacken before the dove breast finishes coming to temp. Once I got all the dove poppers placed on the grill, I close the lid and let it just cook. Letting it go about 10-15 minutes before checking the internal temp on one of the dove breasts.
Either way you decide to grill them, make sure the dove breasts are reading at least 145f in the center before pulling them off the grill. You can cook them up to 165f to be safe, but I’ve always pulled them at 145 and let the holdover heat finish them off for perfectly moist dove breasts. Once they’re done enjoy, hopefully, you bag enough doves that you get more than an appetizer. But if you don’t I recommend throwing a chunk of pork belly on the grill before you start the doves to have as the main course. Lastly, while I experimented with pimento cheese here, I don’t recommend it in the poppers. The consistency wasn’t great and most of it just melted out of the popper before the dove was done cooking.
