Best roast goose and recipe
Posted by Fiona Nevile in Christmas, Duck Goose and Turkey | 12 comments
Photo: Danny carving the Christmas goose
What do Heston Blumenthal and I have in common? Apart from the fact that we both wear glasses.
We buy our geese from Clerkesgeese.
Decorating other peoples’ houses has wonderful benefits. Generally the conversation turns to food and information is shared. A young client (‘mother‘ of the mischievous Freddie) mentioned that she had tasted one of the Clerkes Farm Geese last Christmas and had ordered one this year. When she added that Heston Blumenthal had voted their geese the best in his goose taste test, the die was cast. The prices were pretty competitive too.
This morning we discovered that our Christmas goose was a bit too long to fit in the oven. The solution was to raise the bird’s legs up in the air. We constructed a cantilever arrangement with butchers string that Isambard Kingdom Brunel would have been proud of, and managed to just squeeze it in.
In the past we’ve battled with various roast goose recipes, with little success D followed a well known cookbook two years ago and produced a burnt offering at lunchtime. Today we decided to go with the method described on the Clerkesgeese website.
We feasted on the best goose that I’ve ever tasted for Christmas lunch. Succulent and packed with flavour. So hats off to Clerkesgeese. They made our special meal a gourmet delight.
Leave a reply
I’ve never been brave enough to risk goose – it’s too expensive not to like and none of us have ever tasted it. We had turkey, beef & chicken. Luckily I cooked the beef on Christmas eve and we have a tabletop cooker (bit like a big electric frying pan) – my oven packed up on Christmas morning & I had to cook for 9 in the top oven which is grill sized. Fortunately I have the key of an elderly neighbour who goes away for Christmas & was able to pop the turkey in her oven. The beautifully tented roastin tin was too big for her cooker though so all had to be re-wrapped. Still it was delicious and we got by with 1 small oven. It’s amazing what you can manage without when you have to. Hope you had a lovely Christmas.
We also had goose on Christmas day. Only just finished off the last of the pickings today, a fantastic meat when it is perfectly cooked. Lots of tasty stock for soup as well.
Goose is lovely – it’s a permanent fixture on our Christmas dinner menu.
Goose skin, however, causes canine flatulence like we’ve never experienced before!
The first time I cooked goose it was too big to fit in my little oven, or rather the roasting tin was. I made one out of foil, put it on the oven floor and put the goose on the rack to let the fat drip. It was wonderful. This year we had a rib of beef that only just fitted in the Aga.
Hi Fiona and Danny
Sounds like a wonderful Christmas. We had rib of beef and gammon but the goose sounds fantastic!
Enjoy the left overs!
Sam
We too had goose this year. The neck meat, gizzard and liver were made into paté to eat on oat biscuits when we had the pre lunch bubbly!
Our goose was from an excellent farm at Carlton – I recommend it – looking at your link I think the price was slightly less.
Lots of useful goose fat for roast potatoes for weeks to come 😉
Celia
Merry Christmas to you and your family, and thank you for visiting my blog 🙂
Kim x
We had a goose a few years ago- our then cat spent the whole morning sitting beside the cooker, nose towards the edge of the door so any aroma went straight in- just like a furry bisto kid.She was so exhausted by the time the bird was ready to eat that she had to go to sleep on the sofa and missed lunch completely. But she did get the meat from the neck after it had been boiled up for the gravy!
That little dog of yours reminds me of my little dog. Different colour, different breed, but definitely doing the same thing 🙂
I’ve never cooked a goose. Who knows, maybe I’ll give it a whirl next year. Thanks for the pointer to the web site 🙂
Where else would you expect to find a MinPin (or any dog for that matter) but at the feet of the person carving a roast? Don’t you think that large birds should come with dimensions as well as weights so you can tell if they are going to fit in your oven? We have photographic evidence of Christmas Dinner this year as we have a young friend from Mauritius staying. She took photos of everything and has been scribbling down recipes since she arrived a couple of weeks ago.