I've been waiting to cook a 7kg goose I was given in the Summer in exchange for some hay from a friendly local horsey lady.
I prepared it with loving care. I made a special plum sauce and made sure the whole roast goose 'experience' was spot on.
It looked great. The Freddie Krueger marks are from where I scored it and rubbed in a bit of Five Spice.
I hoped it would feed 6 of us (B-I-L is staying for a week).
As it cooked I drained 3 pints of goose fat from it and it seemed to shrink a fair bit. I placed it on the carving board and there was enough meat on it to nearly serve 3 people! It was 99% bone and fat.
We had a laugh and luckily there was some fillet of beef in the fridge (which I planned to do Beef Wellington with tomorrow) so 3 mins later we had some nice rare fillet steaks with a plum sauce and roast potatoes!!
As for the goose, never, EVER again!!!
When God designed the goose, I'm seriously wondering what he intended its purpose to be!!
C'mon then, let's see your Christmas culinary successes and failures.
I never got on with geese - alive or cooked. I prefer guinea fowl,
Last season, as part of his anti-poacher alarm measures, our shoot captain put some guinea fowl on the ground. Unbeknownst to me.
On the first shoot day, I shot one. My claim that it looked like a melanistic emperor pigeon did not receive general support. Since I had to endure the opprobrium heaped on my head, I took the bird away and cooked it. Delicious.
You can cook wild goose for a week and even the gravy is still cheuch.
Mrs GB considers that a 7kg bird should have fed four easily and a good one should have done six, so its flesh to fat/carcass ratio was far too low. They do exude a lot of fat, but that seems a lot.
I think your generous horse lady either doesn't know how to raise geese, or knew exactly what she doing offloading the carp one one you.
GrahamB wrote:Mrs GB considers that a 7kg bird should have fed four easily and a good one should have done six, so its flesh to fat/carcass ratio was far too low. They do exude a lot of fat, but that seems a lot.
I think your generous horse lady either doesn't know how to raise geese, or knew exactly what she doing offloading the carp one one you.
Thanks for that Graham.
It made for a good bit of banter for the rest of the evening so all wasn't lost. In fact, I haven't laughed as much for ages. My B-I-L has come to the conclusion that it was off the 'effort expended / food rewarded' scale.
I suppose I shouldn't have been to expectant. How often does one see goose on a restaurant menu??
On Countryfile yesterday (so it must be true) a goose farmer said that you get less meat per pound from a goose than from a turkey, but your experience does seem to prove the point to excess. Shame, as I was wanting to try goose last / this / next Christmas, but am struggling to persuade the chef.
We alternate Christmas lunch goose or venison, as it happens this is venison year. However a 16 lb goose will easily feed 8 with about half that fat in our experience. We even fed six on a wild Canada goose shot by a farmer neighbour when we lived near the Thames. I'm afraid you got dumped on there Mono or you eat huge quantities of meat!
FLYER Exhibitions
It was 99% bone and fat. 
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