I haven't cooked a goose but a few people I have seen cook it have done 2 things. They put it in the sink and pour boiling water over it before cooking,and after drying it they pierce the skin all over to let the fat run out so it won't pop the skin and splatter. I think you have to keep emptying the fat from the roasting pan as it cooks,or it will run over as geese have a lot of fat. Although, maybe a wild goose won't have as much as a big fat farmed goose....

I cooked my goose two years ago. Here's the main thread which addresses the fat issue, especially Linda's warning about the baster.

https://www.gardenweb.com/discussions/5561643/what-s-the-most-delicious-way-to-roast-a-goose#n=16

To the best of my recollection, I did pierce the skin all over--and there were a few pinfeathers, but it was pretty darned clean. I also used a spice rub, which might have been authentic English Christmas goose, and certainly went well with it, but which was kind of challenging and not as delicious as if I'd made my own. It had a lot of "sweet" spices in it. I think American barbecue spices would have been grand, and I can imagine liking it with hoisin. Oh, wait. Um...I've had plenty of duck with hoisin and that's what I'm imagining. :D Anyway, I have a "goose pot". That's a 15-qt. oval Le Creuset roaster, and it tickled me to put my goose in the goose pot. I pretty much treated it like a turkey, but used a cooking time/temp chart for goose.

John, I'm sure you'll do something far more creative! Just message your friend back and tell him you will only accept pristine birds or you'll deliver one from Colonel Sanders!

I cook a farmed goose every Christmas but I’ve never cooked a wild goose. There is less meat on farmed goose than turkey or chicken and I imagine wild ones are even skinnier. There is a lot of fat but you can pour some off during cooking. It’s really no different to roasting a chicken. Goose is very forgiving. I don’t use a rub other than salt. Goose has enough flavour plain imo. I do a sausage meat stuffing and a sage and onion stuffing. Otherwise I largely make it up as I go along. Apples, onions, sage, prunes, apricots and orange all have an affinity with goose either in the bird or in the riasting traywhere they lend flavour to the gravy. One thing to check is whether the roasting tray and oven are big enough. Geese are long in proportion to their width.

I cooked a farmed goose years ago.....and it was indeed swimming in fat. I have a friend who is now goose hunting and promised me a breast. he says the wild geese have very little fat.....and very little meat anywhere but the breast....as they don't walk as much as farm geese. He says he doesn't pluck nor even gut....but just removes the breast. Sounds wasteful to me.....

Stay tuned!

It sounds like wild geese don't have a lot of fat, but do save that and the duck fat as goose or duck fat makes awesome roasted potatoes :-)

I think all waterfowl have more fat than land fowl, don't they?

It's been many years since I cooked a goose, but it's not very different than cooking duck - just bonier IIRC - lots of pricking while roasting and a deep pan to hold all those yummy drippings.

One thing I can attest to is all that fat can make a big mess in the oven if it splatters. You can line the oven with foil to make cleanup a bit easier.

I'm sure your results will be great, as always🙂

Wild goose or duck is much leaner than farm raised. I would brined them overnight. This helps keep the meat moist and will remove some of the gamey taste. Do not prick the skin. There is not enough fat to necessitate this. In fact, rub the skin with butter or oil to encourage browning. Put about an inch of chicken stock or wine on the bottom of the roasting pan. Roast the gooose on a rack in a 350 deree oven until the internal temperature of the thigh is 160. Remove and tent with foil. Let it rest for 15-20 minutes.

I don't much like duck or goose, but back in the 70's, our "back to the land days" someone gave us a goose to raise for our holiday meal.

Hubby went out to "do the deed" and thought it was like snapping a chicken's neck.

Well this goose had a neck that turned into every kind of wiggly ! It also had about a 6' wingspan which he beat the hell out of hubby!

He finally won, and we roasted that goose, but I wasn't very fond of it!

Nancyjane, this is my goose dispatching story, copied from the older thread:

My stepdad disliked turkey and always wanted a goose for Christmas (which are very hard to get here). When DD was about 3, we moved to the country town where we have lived ever since. On the local grocery store notice board I saw someone had pinned up a card offering geese for Christmas, so I ordered one.

On delivery day, the vendor turned up and handed me a hessian sack that was moving. I froze like a deer in headlights. “It’s still alive? What do we do with it?” I quailed. “Your DH has his police revolver, doesn’t he?” the guy joked (police revolvers here are kept securely locked in the station gun cabinet when the police officer issued it is not on duty) as he left.

I called a lady I knew who I also knew killed and dressed her own chickens for advice. She advised me to dispatch it, let it hang overnight and bring it over first thing in the morning.

Making sure DD was busy playing in her room (not wanting to traumatise her), we took the goose out to the backyard where there was a large tractor tire sandpit that DD played in. We stretched the goose’s neck across the side of the tyres and DH quickly beheaded it with a very sharp machete we used to cut down weeds in the yard (when we moved in it was very overgrown), while I held onto it so it didn’t go wandering around headless in the yard- that was a visual I was keen to avoid.

Note: Don’t do this next to a Super-6 fence. Even if you hose off the blood straight away, you’ll always be able to tell where the bloodstains were if you look closely enough.

We hung the goose overnight in the (empty) chicken house where DD couldn’t see it.

Next morning I took to the lady I knew, who expertly plucked and dressed it for me. I took it to stepdad, who was very pleased, but as we didn’t have Christmas dinner with my mother that year, I didn’t actually get to eat any of it.

I haven’t done this again, once was enough :-)

I agree with moosemac, a wild goose will bear little resemblance to a farm raised and fattened one. I'd also brine it. There will be little fat, so I think the house is safe!

Good luck. My Grandmother once decided to roast a wild goose that my brother shot. It had very little meat and was pretty much inedible by the time she'd roasted it for several hours. She did make some soup from the remains and we ate it, but I don't remember that it was all that impressive.

LindaC, that's what my nephew does with wild turkeys. I keep telling him to at least make stock, sheesh.

Annie

One of the geese was delivered to me last night. I think the other goose and the duck will be brought over today.

Not at all what I was expecting. It has been skinned, like a deer or rabbit. Can’t tell how much fat it had, as that is all gone. It is a slim little thing, less meat than the smallest chicken. I’m no longer intimidated but I am undecided.

I am clearly not going to use standard goose roasting methods. So I deboned it, as you see, and am cogitating.

What do you think about braising this goose, long and slow, in red wine, stock, thyme and peppercorns, then serving with a red wine/mushroom reduction?

I am trying to figure out if I am in fact going to be tasked with cooking the other birds. If I am, and assuming they present similarly - skinned and lean - then I would appreciate ideas - don’t want to do them all the same.

Duck - was thinking of deboning and pairing with a chestnut stuffing. Maybe I should pound it flat and make a roulade, with a second contrasting meat, like veal or pork?

Goose #2 - no idea. Pot roast? Meatballs? Slow cook then cube, coat in something, and deep fry into crispy goose nibbles?

Oh yeah, I'd definitely stuff one of the birds. It is Thanksgiving, after all. We deboned a turkey one year, filled it with stuffing and rolled it up, and it was very well received.

I think if I paired it with another meat, like a fattier pork, I'd use one of the geese, which is already lacking in fat, that might make a nice and tasty way to add some fat in. I do like the idea of little crispy good nibbles, though...

The braise might be the best way to tenderize that wild goose. Remember, it's been flying around, eating whatever it can find that wild geese eat, unlike domestic geese who stand around eating corn/grain and getting fat.

Happy Thanksgiving. I'm sure whatever you decide on will be delicious.

Annie

We had goose a few times, but I gave up on it, too much work for too little flavor, IMHO. Or at least not a good flavor. I can see marinating a skinned and defatted one, and/or stuffing it with something flavorful.

The last time I roasted a store bought one, it made such a mess in the oven and for clean up, despite my attempts of managing all that, that I swore off of them. I have a very small kitchen as far as prep and clean up space goes . . .

lpink, I was not looking forward to doing the geese because I thought they’d be big domestic geese. Silly me, city boy. These things are like small chickens.

Here are goose #2 and duck. The duck was plucked not skinned, but still has very little fat. I’m thinking it wasn’t leading a very prosperous existence.

I walked down to Pegasus Books and found a used cookbook of French home recipes by Francoise Bernard, that has lots of recipes for braising, pot roasting, stewing, etc goose and duck. Yaay.

Very cool about the book! Now it sounds like it might be a fun adventure!

Goose and pork tenderloin roulade, bacon is to replace missing goose fat

Rolled around chestnut stuffing and wrapped in puff pastry

Duck braising in red wine, also made a red wine and shittake mushroom reduction

Goose braised - stewed, actually - with lots of veg and whatever will stretch this rather small bird

Packing all this stuff up to bring to a friends’ house for the actual eating

Quick report:

The roulade came out pretty good. The puff pastry was not as crisp as I’d hoped, possibly because I baked it for an hour, then transported it, then finished baking it at the dinner location. It was very popular nonetheless.

The goose ”stew” was fine, but was kind of over shadowed by the other fancy Thanksgiving foods. It deserved to be the center of a daily family meal.

The duck with red wine reduction and mushrooms was very tasty although I thought the meat was a little over done.

I talked to the guy who shot these birds. He said this early in the season, the birds are smaller and younger; in March the big geese and fat ducks come through. He offered to give me a piece of venison for a dinner I have to cook Saturday (welcome home for the friends whose house/dog we are sitting). I am not sure I’m going to take him up on it - it would be a very cool dinner if I don’t mess it up, but I’d be a lot more likely to mess it up than if I chose a main dish more familiar to me.

Oh, that roulade looks really nice, and sounds rather "Old English", all roast goose and chestnut stuff! I like the colorful vegetables in the goose stew. The duck sounds good, but it's not as pretty.

Go for the venison, it's easier than poultry, at least in my opinion. Wild game is an adventure. You can always grind it to sausage although venison is naturally very lean.

Annie

Happy Thanksgiving! It looks great anyway. That book was a score! When you asked up topic about what to do with a little goose, I kept thinking pie. Like four and twenty blackbirds. Even if they were a bother and didn't get the featured roles, it sounds like you had a fine adventure nonetheless.

Well done. I would probably have told the cheeky devil to cook them himself LOL

Go for the venison. Like most game, it benefits from bold flavors, which is how you like to cook anyway. The only time I had venison as a kid, my mom just fried some venison steaks we had been given. Underwhelming to say the least. Then, in one of my career incarnations, I had to do 1800's rural woodstove cooking demonstrations during maple syrup season at the nature center where I worked. Our maintenance director gave me a venison roast. I made pot roast, simmered it "on the back burner" for a good long while, and served it with biscuits for dinner for the syrup making crew (I was not allowed to give out samples of the food to visitors due to health regulations). It was delish, but on a cold damp March evening with friendly hungry volunteers, who knows what would not have tasted good. We could wash it down with maple pecan pie, so that helped too . . .

Later, hubs co worker always shared his venison sausage with us, and venison ground burger. Both good in flavorful soups.

Venison being so lean, lard it if you can! Consider using pancetta if you don't want the smoky flavor from bacon, btw. Your meal of duck and goose looks great!

Quick circle back— I ended up using figs from their tree and olives from the fridge to make a sort-of-Marbella chicken.

Great job with the geese and duck! They look delicious.

Take the venison. It is a treat. As jakkom said, venison is very lean. For steaks, I sautee in lots of butter. Do not over cook. For roasts, use lard or pancetta to cover and for stews cook low and slow.

When I was a child, my father used to hunt deer. The best parts were the heart and liver soaked overnight in salt water to remove the gamey flavor. Then pat the meat dry, slice about 1/2" thick strips, season with salt and pepper and sautee in loads of butter. It is funny I am not a fan of liver or heart meats but the venison parts were delicious.