The dove breast is a special piece of wild game meat. Its specialty comes from the process of acquiring these delicacies. They’re not on your everyday grocery shelf and I have yet to come across the specialty market where they’re easily and readily available. You have to hunt them yourself. 

The road to the popper runs through the shotgun. 

I am going to assume you have already acquired your dove meat. If you haven’t, you can check out what you might need here.
Or check out how to fillet your dove off the bone here. 

I feel the best way to prepare dove breasts is the most traditional way.

The Dove Popper

A delicious piece of culinary dark meat paired with cream cheese & jalapeños.
All wrapped in a beautiful cocoon of bacon. Excuse the drool. Here’s how I create my most coveted wild game dish.

Ingredients

15 Dove Breasts

Chive & Onion Cream Cheese – Chive & Onion cream cheese adds more flavor

Jalapeños

Thick-Cut Pepper Bacon – I like pepper and pepper bacon adds another flavor element

Nature’s Seasoning

Toothpicks

Prep Work

Let your cream cheese soften on the counter.

Slice your Jalapeños. I find vertical slices are easier to roll.

Take 8 pieces of bacon and cut them in half. I find a whole piece of bacon is a bit too much for a dove breast.

Optional: Marinating your dove breasts overnight in a teriyaki marinade or Dale’s adds a nice flavor.

Go Extra: Marinate your toothpicks in Bourbon, teriyaki, dales, etc… Another additional element of flavor, and keep the toothpicks from burning during cooking.

Step 1

Lay a piece of bacon on a flat surface.

Step 2

Take a dove breast and smear one side with the cream cheese.

Step 3

Take 2 or 3 jalapeño slices and lay them length-wise across the cream cheese.

The cream cheese will act like glue for the peppers.

Step 4

Place the dove breast on one end of the bacon and roll. Dove is a lean piece of meat, so I try and make sure all surface area is covered with bacon. I find placing your dove vertically on the bacon strip creates a more efficient role. It gives a slightly better bacon coverage to the fillet. I also discovered that vertical wrapping eliminated the ends from hanging out from some of the bigger pieces. No overdone edges. There’s no meat exposed to direct heat because it’s totally wrapped in bacon.

Step 5

I take two toothpicks and secure the bacon with an X. I have found using 1 toothpick causes some of the fatter poppers to come apart when cooking.

Step 6

Determine how you want to cook your poppers. They’re all delicious.

Fry

This is my preferred way of cooking poppers. I like it because I get the crunchy crispy bacon outer shell on my poppers. It’s wonderful to bite through the crunch and get a taste of the warm gooey cream cheese. Be careful though. Cream cheese and frying oil don’t play well together. Watch out for splatters and burns. A splatter guard works wonders here. Ask me how I know.

Grill

Grilling adds that little extra flavor of smoke and char to your poppers. The downside is that once the bacon gets cooking, flare-ups can get pretty bad. Also, the ends of the toothpicks usually burn away when grilling, so if someone doesn’t know, they could bite down on a hidden toothpick. But c’mon, how hard is it to see a toothpick before you eat?

Oven Broiler

The broiler is just an upside-down grill in your kitchen. It works for cold rainy days when you don’t want to fire up the outside grill. 

I line a cooking sheet with aluminum foil for easy clean-up. I then place a cooling rack on top of the baking sheet. Then the poppers go on top of that. It creates a make-shift drip tray so my poppers don’t just continually sit in grease while cooking. The downside is, that this does smoke up my kitchen pretty bad because I kept opening the oven to check on them. Worth it though.