[Sca-cooks] Roast Goose Breast Down

Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius adamantius1 at verizon.net
Thu Jul 28 18:33:36 PDT 2011


On Jul 28, 2011, at 7:15 PM, Jeannette Neilson wrote:

> Johnnae is correct in what the books say, indeed she is. :)  What the books don't say, is that the breast meat can dry out if care is not taken - roasting it breast-side down was taught me by my late-husband's grandmother & she was very explicit about the whys of it. I learned the same from other veteran cooks & - oh, about 35 years of cooking geese & various other game meats. I have had dry [goose] breast meat. With gravy, it was edible. ;) 
> But then, I've only cooked &/or had store-bought goose a few times as opposed to I-don't-know-how-many hunted geese. They are very different to cook & don't taste the same, partly because there is far more fat in store-bought than hunted. 
> *shrug* Just sayin' what I learned, how & the why's of it all...
>   ~  Sionaid

Store-bought geese do tend to be considerably fatter than wild ones. I actually have seen several references in books to roasting them breast-side down for at least part of the time (James Beard comes to mind).

My own experience, such as it is (fairly considerable with store-bought geese, zero with wild, I regret to say) is that dry breast meat _can_ result from an excessively high roasting temperature. There's only a certain speed at which the intramuscular connective tissue can break down; the goal is to have the meat cooked through (whatever that means to you; geese aren't subject to the salmonella caveat that chickens and turkeys are subject to) in the same time frame as the tenderizing of the meat. Actual moisture loss shouldn't be a big problem if it's done right, and even if it's not bursting with juice, the meat is more dense and rich than dry and throat-clenchingly unappealing.

Adamantius






"Most men worry about their own bellies, and other people's souls, when we all ought to worry about our own souls, and other people's bellies."
			-- Rabbi Israel Salanter




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