I’ve never in my life eaten goose. Never seen it on the menu, never seen one in the supermarket. I guess it’s just not popular in the U.S. Even though hunting of wild geese is popular (among hunters). Why is that? Is goose any good to eat?
Also – are there cultures where “goose grease” is eaten as on bread, where Americans would use butter? (I got that from Avram Davidson’s fantasy stories about Dr. Eszterhazy of the Triune Monarch of Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania, modeled on the Austro-Hungarian Empire.)
Goose is quite tasty. I’ve eaten it plenty of times.
I come from a family that hunted, it should be pointed out.
I think farmers stopped raising geese for market as turkeys and chickens became so popular they crowded out nearly all other poultry. Even duck has become a specialty item almost exclusively reserved for Asian cooking.
They aren’t that hard to find in the supermarket. They are almost always frozen, though, so you would have to look in a different section.
I’ve made it a few times but never really developed a taste for it. I’ve only roasted them, though (yes, really greasy). I expect the meat would be more tender cooked some other way.
Goose is good. It’s like buttered slathered with bacon fat and then deep fried in bear grease. If you were to take the drippings from a couple dozen roast ducks, separate out the fat, and then sculpt it into the shape of a goose, you’d have . . . a goose! Evolutionary marvel: no bones, no meat, 100% grease. True fact.
I made the mistake of oven-roasting my first duck about a year ago. Didn’t anticipate that much grease. I think I’ll try slow-grilling them in a barbeque smoker next time I’m feeling adventurous.
One Christmastime I was watching “A Christmas Carol” and got curious about the Christmas goose bit. I took a trip down to my local supermarket, and, lo and behold, they had two or three frozen geese for sale. I bought one and made it using recipes I found on the Web. Turned out pretty good.
You have to carefully collect the rendered grease and dispose of it. For the 5-7 pound goose I made, I got like a half gallon of fat out of it. I suppose for that reason it’s more difficult to cook than a turkey, and you get considerably less meat out of it. But it’s quite flavourful.
We steam ours, then roast them, as recommended by Mark Bittman in How to Cook Everything. You pierce the skin before steaming it, and most of the fat comes out during the steaming process.
Julia Child had a recipe that called for cutting up and skinning the duck, then baking the legs in a mustard/rosemary crumb coating and sauteeing the breasts with brandy and shallots. Finally, you fry up strips of skin until they are crispy and add them to a spinach salad. That way all the different parts cook perfectly. Roasting tends to either leave the legs undercooked or the breast overcooked.
My favorite way to have duck is in Thai curries, though. I wonder how goose would be?
:dubious: Since when is “Really. Greasy.” a reason an American wouldn’t eat something?
At any rate, it’s the skin that’s greasy…as it would be for a water fowl. The flesh isn’t. Does depend on how you cook it.
There’s probably a historical reason for why goose went…er…the way of all flesh?..in America. Something to do with the industry and all. I think it’s a shame. There are a lot of things they eat elsewhere we don’t eat here. In England I could walk across the street (in a very small town) and bring home goose, duck, rabbit, boar, ostrich…kangaroo!
Anyway I think goose is very good. You can get it here…I got it for Christmas a few years ago. And alarmed my family. Because it wasn’t turkey. Next year I’ll serve them boar…or haggis .
Our deal here is that it is horridly expensive and not much meat. I have visions of that Victorian Goose you see as large as the boy Scrooge sends to buy it. Well, no such luck and the scrawny little things that they overprice here look like they died of anorexia.
Poultry raisers in the Northeast provide geese. It’s no problem special-ordering one. And fresh geese are available all around NYC during the Xmas season.
I’ve never cooked a goose, because the Ukulele Lady is one of your basic Kitchen Anti-Fat Harridans, and we heard somewhere that goose is really, really greasy.
Do you goose-cookers save the grease to use for sauteing? I always have some fresh-rendered chicken and/or duck fat in the fridge, because it makes the most delicious home-fries and latkes.
I’ve roasted a goose once. It was good. One thing I don’t think has been mentioned is that geese have lots and lots of fat. You know how when you roast a turkey, you might get a little half centimeter dribble of rendered fat at the bottom of the roasting pan? Well, that goose oozed about 10 centimeters of rendered fat, the pan almost overflowed. I was…astonished…by how greasy that goose was. Liters of goose grease left over.
I’m sure 200 years ago that was a selling point…but that was in a context of a pretty crappy diet and hard manual labor all day every day. People needed the calories.
I live in Brooklyn as well. Wild geese are everywhere! I can’t take my son to the park sometimes because of all of the green goose poop. The geese are usually not that agressive, but we did have a large one chase us out of the playground one day!
Does anyone know if these wild geese are edible? There are so many (hundreds in my neighborhood alone, roaming all over).
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