Ok I cooked cuy a second time. In my current living situation, I don't have much in the way of cookware. So I went back to the tried-n-true steamed cuy. However, I branched out a bit and made some gravy this time. more on that later.
Now that I joined a forum, I decided when eating cuy, I needed to come up with a good description of what cuy tasted like. It's funny the first time I eat it, my mind was racing to compare the flavor to something I had eaten before. This time when eating it, my mind was, "oh yeah, that's cuy.", not informative to the uninitiated. I would describe the cuy meat texture like that of chicken, however it did not taste like chicken. The flavor was much like pork chop with perhaps a hint of rabbit. The texture/flavor combination was most evident when eating the shoulders. Even though I was making shredded meat, I love to break off the shoulder blades and scrape the meat off with my teeth.
I also found the liver quite pleasant to eat. Coming from me, this is QUITE A THING, because I generally HATE liver. I can not stand calf's liver, I find the pungent flavor extremely unbearable. Also when I lived with my mother, she would fry chicken liver and a would run from the stench. So even if you are not a fan of liver, give the GP liver a chance, you might be pleasantly surprised. I even found the kidneys good to eat. I never tried rabbit liver but now I feel I should have.
Using the open-skinning technique (detailed in my other post), I was able to remove the skin and leave a nice fat layer around the animal. Actually I think the GP I butchered might qualify as obese. For people out there that might be interested in raising some animals to get a bit of fat, GPs might be the answer if your living in a location where hogs are impractical due to zoning or space requirements. I would hazard to guess that the individual that I killed had an excessive amount of fat. I don't think I could have eaten her skin-on. My guess is that, she would have tasted like eating a grease ball. I had to remove much excess fat. Unfortunately with my micro-refrigerator, I was not able to save the fat (I would have preferred to store it for later use). What I did like about the fat, was that it was excellent for cooking and it had a feel (both mouth-feel and on my fingers) like that of pork chop fat. I had a hard time making gravy in the past, but I found that cuy fat has outstanding qualities that make it easy for gravy making. I consider REAL gravy to be just fat and flour with meat drippings for flavor. I consider the addition of corn starch to be cheating that corrupts the flavor of gravy. In the past, I admit to cheating in my gravy by adding starch, just because I am unskilled at gravy making. Using the fat from boiled cuy lard, I was totally amazed how well the gravy constancy matched my expectation of REAL gravy. I also added cooked and shredded guinea pig liver to the gravy for extra flavor.
Because of the fat, I would imagine that skin-off cuy seared on a grill pan
https://www.house.com.au/images/hires/SAH-19557.jpg would make an excellent meal. I haven't tried cooking cuy in this way. but I think the layer of fat on the carcass would prevent burning and yet provide grill marks promoting the maillard reaction
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maillard_reaction. I would imagine that as the meat was cooking it would have a nice bacon-ey smell (licking my lips).
Another hypothetical recipe that I feel that the cuy fat would work well is "cream of cuy". In the ARBA cookbook
https://www.arba.net/store/store.php?ac=viewProduct&id=8&cid=0 there is a recipe called cream of rabbit. I love cream of chicken and chicken pot pie, because it matches my motto, "If you've gotta kill an animal to make food, make the food taste like the animal that died.". To me cream of chicken is the best way to get that chicken taste. So after I killed Bandit the rabbit, I wanted to make "cream of rabbit", so I could really enjoy his flavor. To the best of my recollection (The book is at the back of the my shed so I don't have the exact recipe at my disposal) the recipe calls for a large amount of fat, primarily dairy butter and heavy cream. As I remember, I was able to render Bandit's kidney fat to replace some of the butter. I cooked to the best of my skill. The soup tasted good, but I could never get the consistency right. In canned "cream of ..." soups seam to have a sauce that stays homogenize. The sauce in my cream of rabbit would separate rather than stay homogeneous. From my gravy experience, I think that cuy lard would help maintain consistency.
