I've eaten plenty of goose, mostly farm raised, but some wild. My grandmother was a Czech immigrant and knew how to cook a goose, much more common than turkey in Europe (at least back in the day). I don't recall the details of her method, but I know she cooked it longer and at a higher temperature than turkey (she'd dry out a turkey when she cooked one). They are all dark meat and juicier than a turkey (so if you're a white-meat person, you may not care for goose).
I've made a few. One trick I tried once (found online) was to borrow a technique from how Peking duck is made. The day before, boil a huge pot of water and dunk the bird in it for about a minute. I was amazed at the amount of fat that ended up in the water. I had to dunk it in two stages, first the front end, then the back, as I didn't have a big enough pot, but it worked. The skin did crisp up when I cooked it the next day.
I like goose.
btw, my grandfather would save the goose grease and spread it on rye bread, like some do with bacon grease. I imagine he picked that up during the depression.
My grandma cooked them in the oven in a covered roaster, uncovered at the end to crisp the skin. Cook time was around 4 hours or so, (geese are smaller than turkeys). Several times during cooking, she'd tilt the roaster and ladle off the fat. I haven't done one in years, never on a grill or smoker.
Being Czech, she tended to season with carraway, salt, pepper, and often garlic (pretty sure she'd season geese this way, maybe not garlic). Carraway is great on pork as well
A goose won't yield nearly as much meat as a turkey, and they are pricey.
As for smoking, the lower heat might not render out sufficient fat, but I'm just guessing here, as I recall her running the oven high and ladling off a lot of fat from the bottom of the roaster.
Wild goose can be quite good if cooked properly. I have never cared for farm raised goose, too greasy and in my childhood my mother would cook the goose and then save the grease in the fridge. You did everything in your power to not appear sick as that meant a liberal application of goose grease front and back not a pleasing smell. It did clear congestion but I would of rather been sick a few days longer than subject myself to the grease. Was more likely the grease applications that turned me off of goose.
Davek8282 when you say 'cooked properly', do you have any tips? I'm not sure if I'll even be able to acquire a goose anytime soon, but this topic is a good reference for me to come back to, as well.
My wife's family is French so when her mom was still alive we used to have roast goose for Christmas. You definitely want to keep the rendered fat -- it's used throughout the year for potatoes cooked in goose fat (pommes de terre sarladaises). She'd cut off the excess neck skin to be used as a sausage casing.
Here's the thing I can now say: I didn't particularly like the way she cooked the goose. To my tastes, when the thighs were cooked the breast was overdone. I prefer the goose breast cooked similarly to duck breast, to medium or even medium rare, while I like the thighs cooked until they're tender and falling off the bone, like confit d'oie, where the legs are braised in rendered fat. This means that I would have preferred if the goose were cut into parts and different parts were cooked separately. Definitely not as dramatic for a Christmas dinner. This is sacrilegious but my MIL has passed and my wife doesn't have a membership here and isn't going to read this.
[Edited to add] BTW, we'd often start with an appetizer of foie gras d'oie but from a jar or large tin. The Christmas goose is a by-product of raising geese for their livers. A real foie gras is enormous and sells for around 100 euros per kilo. There's a special knife used for serving foie gras. I'm not sure what was more impressive, that there's a special knife for it, or that my in-laws had foie gras often enough to own one. My wife inherited that knife, so now I guess we own one, which is kinda scary.]
Last edited by RobertC; November 12, 2024, 10:07 AM.
realdocBBQ, now you went and got me curious about geese. There is information about geese on the web—and a lot of it.
Breeds, fat content, and recipes.
Pot roasted goose, duck, you are gonna cook parts of the bird until the skin is black in a little bit of oil. Remove parts as they get done and pour out excess grease. You then sautee your bell pepper and onion, add back the meat, fill up with water, cook until tender. Remove the last meat to get tender and boil off excess water if the gravy is too thin, add back all meat prior to serving.
If you are considering cooking a goose I would first try a domesticated one as there are a lot of recipes out there. Just from our experience a migratory wild goose is a far cry from a domesticated goose
My wife Kathy cooks one of my favorite meals which is Canada Goose medallions but she goes through a process to get it done right. Also, we only cook the breasts. It will be tougher than domesticated as geese are active and have a long lifespan. And as we live on the Atlantic Flyway many will have flown a long ways before we get them.
1. Don’t just pluck but skin the breast meat and then remove the skin, sinew, and all the fat even if the fat layer from corn foraging looks good. The fat isn’t going to help the final product.
2. Its breast will also be full of blood and needs brining to draw out some of the blood. But, you can’t use too salty a brine because the meat will become too salty. Many don’t brine but we think it improves the taste and helps with the toughness of the meat.
3. She pan sears the breast with salt and pepper in a little oil in a cast iron skillet, and weights the breast with a weight to keep it from curling. Don’t overcook.
4. Let it rest to reabsorb all the juices. I know, resting isn’t suppose to accomplish anything, but the geese never learned that fact.
5. Slice thinly against the grain.
6. It can use a sauce. She makes a great blueberry or raspberry sauce to drizzle over the medallions.
Just my 2¢, and I’m sure others will have other methods they like.
This...people don't realize how little fat are on a migratory goose. I am always fascinated at the deep burgundy color of the meat. I also breast them out and usually save them for the season and have them made into goose sticks. I did make one recipe where I sliced the meat thinly and dipped the slices in an egg wash then into some seasoned bread crumbs. Fried them in some oil in a CI skillet JUST until the blood started coming up and then flipped(minutes a side). They were really good.
I have only tried to cook goose once. The roasting it like a turkey was a total failure. It was a wild goose. The first and last I have ever harvested. It was greasy and tasted bad. After talking to a friend who guided for goose hunting every fall I just decided I’d rather watch them fly over than eat them. His comment was “If you have 30 recipes for goose you’ll be looking for 31” . A little known fact. Do you know why one side of the triangle is longer than the other when you see geese flying? There are more geese in the longer side.
Some hunters around here call them sky-rats because of the meat. That is how we get a majority of our geese as people give them to us. Our bag limit is generally 2.
My grandfather was an avid hunter and my grandmother would prepare wild goose all the time. I remember eating often growing up and liked it. I just have no idea how she prepared it.
We always had goose for Christmas dinner growing up. In fact, my father and I used to hunt geese and ducks up until I went to college. The goose hunting was up in MD out of pit blinds in fields. Dad used an Ithaca 10 gauge that would really reach out and bring them down. My grandmother would clean the geese but sometimes you'd get a special surprise (not really) and bite down on a piece of lead shot that was missed in cleaning. I really enjoyed the flavor of goose. She also always had a nice spread of crackers, brie, caviar, foie gras, cornichons and finger sandwiches to graze on prior to dinner. Fond memories for sure.
John "JR"
Minnesota/ United States of America
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One of the worst things I have ever eaten. People say to braise it, cook with bacon fat and some other things. Basically, you have to cover up the taste with bacon. I never got the point of that. (same with duck breasts)
The last goose I shot was given to my dog. Even he didn't eat it. That is when I decided that I was out on eating goose.
(I hate the damn things though. In MN they are pests and they are everywhere. It is almost like that know they are federally protected and can't be culled. They walk around like they know it anyway. When I was a kid it never stopped me. I went to war with them more than once. I wish they tasted better, because I would shoot every last one of those dang things if I could)
They were so bad here around some retaining ponds that the local government hired someone to come in and exterminate. They shot a large net over them and took them away. The meat was processed and given to homeless shelters / food banks.
You should have heard the roar from the people who fed them every day when they found out why all the geese were gone.
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