My friend Stuart Brioza called at the beginning of December to tell me that he had a line on fresh goose. When he asked if I wanted one, I answered, unhesitatingly, “ Yes,” because anything meat or produce that Stuart manages to procure through his back-door channels always ends up being among the tastiest things I’ve ever put in my mouth.
A professional chef with a great resume that includes restaurants like San Francisco’s late, great Rubicon, Tapawingo in Michigan, and the cover of Food + and Wine magazine, Stuart is currently unaffiliated, choosing instead to travel and cook (with his wife, Nicole, an outstanding baker and pastry chef) for private clients. I used to love visiting him at his restaurant, but times are even better now that he’s more accessible at his small apartment (where he’s also set up a potting wheel). A phenomenal reference and teacher for my own kitchen adventures, Stuart’s secret is that he’s a professional chef who still really loves to cook. As hard as he works, he always makes time to talk and teach, and he told me he’d help me with strategies for cooking the goose.
In the 10 days or so before the goose arrived, I realized that — other than its fattened liver — I’d never had goose. I’ve had duck, quail, capon, guinea hen, pigeon, squab, gem hen, and the like. But I couldn’t ever even remember seeing goose at the store. And I had little idea at the time that I’d manage to use every single part of the goose and would be eating it in various forms for weeks to come.
Stuart and I went early to the San Francisco Ferry Plaza Farmer’s Market to pick up the birds from the farm that had raised them, Lagier Ranch, which lies about 90 miles due east of San Francisco. At $8 a pound, my 10-pound bird cost me a cool $80, more than I’d even paid for my heritage turkey last year. The goose came to us at a temperature of about 31 to 32 degrees F. It had been chilled down after slaughter but never frozen.
I later talked to Casey Havre, one of the proprietors of Lagier and the person responsible for the ranch’s goose project. Over the phone, her voice (but not her enthusiasm for rearing geese) muffled by a severe cold, Havre told me that she was in just her second year of selling geese. The 45 geese from the first year had sold in a matter of hours, so this year the farm upped its total to 250 geese. The geese, it turns out, perform several functions for Lagier Ranch. “We’re an organic farm and with our cherry orchard, we have to find a way to keep the weeds and grass down, because we don’t till or use RoundUp,” Havre said. “Unlike chickens or ducks, geese only eat grass or other greens — no animals, bugs or anything. A lot of times they’re referred to as weeder geese.”
Havre receives the geese in May as one-year-old chicks. The chicks are raised in a warmed barn for a couple of weeks until they are old enough to go outside and forage. The flock then weeds all summer and fall. Geese are very social and well-behaved. A couple of them even “follow me around like a dog,” she said. Over the months that they weed, Havre also gets eggs — each goose lays about 25 to 30 a year — which she says are “huge and really rich with very dark yolks. They make sort of a one-egg omelet and must be better for you because these geese eat only grass.” That is, until the last three weeks of their lives, when their diet is switched to wheat. “As it starts to get colder,” Havre said, “and when there’s less grass, they like a heartier food.” Come late November or December, the geese are taken at night, half-asleep, to a processing facility in Stockton, where they are slaughtered, eviscerated, de-feathered, cleaned, and hung to dry in chilled, open air.
The goose cycle fits into the natural rhythm of the farm. The geese’s efficiency as weeders decline after one year. They also don’t taste as good that old. And in order to be certified organic, Lagier has to have all livestock out of its orchard by February anyway. It’s one reason why geese are usually associated with the holiday season, though nowadays it’s possible to find frozen goose year round.
The goose that came to me still had its head and feet. Organs were stowed back inside the body cavity. The type of goose Havre raises is called the Toulouse Goose (the slant rhyme would have made Emily Dickinson proud), which originated near the eponymous city in southern France. The breed is old, dating back to at least 1550. A descendant of the European Greylag, the Toulouse goose is gray, as the name of the vodka (which is produced in southern France) inspired by it suggests. Unsurprisingly, the Toulouse Goose is the breed most used for foie gras.
Stuart and I broke down the birds the day we got them. Rather than risk the common pitfall of roasting a bird whole (dried-out breast meat), we decided to cut it into its separate components. That way each part can be prepared using a method that suits it. If you’ve ever cut up a whole chicken, the exercise will be familiar to you. Geese and ducks are similar, though you’ll find that the joints are in slightly different places, and it takes a little searching to find them. Stuart had a couple of very sharp knives, though they were not as large or powerful as I expected. “A sharp knife is essential,” Stuart said, “but after that it’s more about where you make your cuts. You shouldn’t ever really have to hack at a bird and break through bone. When you find the right tendons with the tip of the knife, it sort of just snaps apart.” (This is a good step-by-step tutorial, if you’ve never done this before.)
We separated the wings and legs, leaving the latter attached to the thigh pieces, and removed the entire breast, leaving the meat attached to the breast plate. My plan was to confit the legs and cook the breast on the bone. The head and feet came off and were tossed with the ribcage and neck into a bag for stock. The goose came apart very neatly, as though, like a bicycle, it had been built with disassembly in mind. With clean cuts we trimmed off the fatty edges of skin from around the bone and the thighs, making each piece look neat and tailored. All the fat and the extra skin we we put through the meat-grinding attachment of Stuart’s KitchenAid. “Grinding up the fat,” he said, “just helps it break down and separate when you render it.”
The legs were dusted lightly with sugar, salt, and ground pepper, and cryovaced with thyme and crushed garlic. This step was the requisite curing that both flavors and extracts moisture from the meat. Since reading a column written by Molly O’Neill nine years ago, I’ve been making duck confit at home. The inspiration came from one of her lines in the piece — ”At its best, confit is meat preserved in itself, and therefore it becomes more of itself.” That reason is still why I love making it, besides the fact that it tastes great, is convenient to keep around, and really impresses people (even though it’s easy to make and almost impossible to screw up). Stuart then carefully scored the skin of the breast in a tight cross-hatch, something that would ultimately help the meat dry and crisp when I cooked it. I took my vacuum-sealed bag of curing legs, the breastplate, a bag of bones, head, and feet; and another bag full of ground fat and took the bus home, thinking gleefully to myself, “no one on this bus could possibly guess that I have an entire, deconstructed goose with me.”
At home, I endured scowls from my wife as for days I took over the kitchen with goose preparation. The breast, so nicely scored, went on a paper towel on a plate in the fridge for a few days to dry out. Over time I saw the meat darken and the whole piece firmed up. This gave me time to deal with the goose fat, a particularly significant commodity in France. As Richard Olney explains in Simple French Food:
Perhaps the best way to understand, analytically, the flavor that goose fat can impart to a preparation is to sauté raw potatoes, cut to any form in it — and its power to refine a texture is perfectly demonstrated in a garbure. Omelets are prepared in goose fat, macaroni is flavored with it, soup vegetables are removed from the soup, fried in goose fat, and returned to the pot (unless you prefer to spread it on toast while eating foie gras, the fat from a tin of foie gras should be scrupulously saved for some small preparation that will appreciate it) — in short goose fat permeates this food no less than does butter the food of Normandy or olive oil the food of Provence. The indigens’ claim that it is the only altogether digestible cooked fat should be taken with a grain of salt.
I rendered the fat, something I’d never done before. Stuart gave me instructions, but this site also had a helpful tutorial. The method was simple — I just added a cup of water to the ground fat and slowly melted it down until I had a pot of thick golden liquid. I skimmed nasty-looking scum off the top every 20 or so minutes as the fat simmered and the water slowly evaporated away. The whole process took about an hour and a half — much longer than I expected — but in the simmering fat all the fragments of meat and skin eventually gradually gave up their form, diminishing into little gritty, BB-sized morsels: cracklings. I saved them for later.
Amazingly, my one goose yielded almost three liters of fat. Casey Havre marveled when I told her, exclaiming “and they only eat grass and a little wheat!” According to Olney, “Only a goose especially fattened for the production of foie gras will be fat enough to be preserved in its own fat without a compensating addition of lard.” But with three liters of melted goose fat on my kitchen counter, I thought he might be wrong. Alas, it turned out that in order to completely submerge the leg pieces, I needed to add a little duck fat. I simmered the legs in the fat with a head of garlic with the top cut off in an oven at about 200 degrees for 2.5 hours. When I pulled them out, the meat and skin had retracted up the leg bone and were clearly very tender. I put the legs in a bowl, poured the fat over them, and placed it all on a shelf, where the legs would have a few days in fat before I took them out. I didn’t worry about spoilage. “Goose fat is pretty much only second to lard in terms of air tightness,” Taylor Boetticher of the Fatted Calf, a Bay Area meat and charcuterie specialist, told me over the phone two months later. “We’ve still got the gizzards sitting in it, and they’re fine.”
Finally, the stock. Everything went into it, from the head to the feet to the back bones to the neck. I roasted them at 400 degrees in the oven for about 35 minutes and then covered them with cold water and simmered very slowly for about 12 hours overnight. It came out a beautiful gold-flecked brown. After a straining, it chilled down nicely in the fridge, gelling up from the head and feet. I decided the next day to go for some slightly more concentrated flavors, though, so I bought two duck breasts, roasted them, and then simmered them in the goose stock for about three hours. It was then, I realized, that this stock had to be called Duck-Duck-Goose. After a few hours of chilling, this stock gelled into the most solid and dense that I’d ever made. And its flavor was unreal.
After days of preparation, the moment of consumption had arrived at last. That afternoon I reduced an amount of the stock with port in which I’d marinated dried figs for the sauce. Stuart stopped by in the afternoon and delivered a paté de campagne he had made from the organs and the various goose trimmings left over from his own goose. It was earthy, rustic and very tasty. We served it with cornishons and drank an old German Riesling.
I cooked the big breast on the bone, skin down, in a skillet on medium heat. Because of the meat’s curved shape, it was necessary to prop up the side that wasn’t cooking with a half a potato. The skin browned and crisped quickly (rendering out at least another cup of fat), so we finished it in the oven with the confit legs. We finally assembled it all on a platter, sliced the breast meat from the bone and arranged it around the legs with the sauce and the marinated figs. It was spectacular. The goose had richer, deeper flavor than any duck I’ve had. It was gamy, but gently, deliciously so. The leg meat was tender and subtly flavored with garlic, while the breast meat came out medium rare, a deep shade of pink on the inside.
And that was not even quite all. Weeks later, I went to Stuart’s house to taste the prosciutto he had made with a half of the breast from his goose. He’d cured it in the same way that I had done to confit the legs, then removed it from the cryovac bag, brushed off the spices, and air-dried it in his refrigerator for a couple of days to remove the moisture. Then, wrapped it in cheesecloth, it hung from the ceiling in the coldest room in his house for about three weeks. Thinly sliced, the meat was translucent, like a stained glass window. The fat had changed form and was solid and smooth. The flavor was the most pure of any of the ways I tasted the goose.
Sometime in mid-January, I noticed a little container with my reddish-brown, granular goose cracklings it. On a whim, I tossed them with some cayenne, salt, and pepper. For a dinner party that night I sprinkled the cracklings over pieces of sea bass that I’d sauced with a chicken stock reduction, and that was the last of the goose. A 10-pound goose had given me elements of four meals and fed almost a dozen people. Not silly at all.
Jordan Mackay is the wine and spirits editor for San Francisco's metro magazine 7x7, as well as contributing writer to Wine and Spirits. He writes a weekly column on drinks for Chow and is a frequent contributor to both Decanter and the Modern Luxury suite of magazines. He has written for Gourmet, Food and Wine, the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and Wine Enthusiast. His first book, Passion for Pinot, will be published next spring. He lives in San Francisco.
Story photographs by Jordan Mackay, "Dispatch" photograph from King Molan via Flickr (Creative Commons), "Plate" photograph from FoodCollection/Getty Images.
