Cooking Crocodile – Best Cooking Temperature for Crocodile Meat

Cooking in a water bath in vacuum sealed bags is called sous vide.

The advantages include:

• all of the meat is cooked to the desired temperature, and no higher, so you get 'perfect' doneness.
• The fibres of he meat don't contract due to the high temperatures and squeeze out the moisture, so the meat stays very tender
• if you have the right setup, you can put it on an leave it
• you can include flavourings in the vacuum bag so your meat steeps in the flavouring whilst it cooks.

Disadvantages include:

• it can be expensive to set up (though not always, as work arounds exist)
• it can be difficult to keep at a constant temperature if you don't have an expensive set up
• the meat does not have any outer crust (although this is easily remedied after the cooking)
• takes a lot longer to cook.

I think it will be difficult to do in an oven as it is not often that ovens go as low as this type of cooking requires.

In the food safety section of Modernist Cuisine (1-138) it says that all wild rabbit must be cooked through:

Wild rabbit must be cooked well done to kill any tularemia bacteria; for rare or medium cooked rabbit dishes, chefs can substitute farm-raised rabbits that have been kept segregated from their wild relatives by trustworthy breeders.

The section on meat (3-96) recommends bringing rabbit loin to an internal temperature of 59C (138F) and going by the section I've just quoted this is obviously only for farmed meat. The recommendation for the legs is to cook sous vide for 1 hour @ 66C (151F) which again obviously refers to farmed because that's definitely not long enough to tenderise wild rabbit meat.

I would really recommend cooking the leg meat and loin separately as I find that the loin dries out long before the legs are cooked through. The legs are much nicer braised too.