Five top tips on how to cook a goose

I’m fol­low­ing the fash­ion this year and cook­ing a goose for our christ­mas dinner. Appar­ently, it’s not as easy as it looks. Luck­ily I’ve got my mum’s top tips for the per­fectly cooked goose.

It being the season of good will and all that, I thought I’d share them with you.

1. Cook­ing a goose is not easy. It’s not like cook­ing a turkey or a chicken. If you’re feel­ing nervous – you should be. Make sure you have got a big enough pan to not only hold the goose but also a cook­ing rack under­neath it. A goose must not cook in its own fat. If it does, really bad things happen. I don’t know what they are, but take my mum’s word for it. Fat needs to run off. A goose can pro­duce a tre­mend­ous amount of fat!

2. Don’t wrap your goose in cook­ing foil. You may have heard that geese dry out really easily (see point one above). This is true. But put­ting foil round it won’t help. And it will prob­ably stick to the bird and burn. So def­in­itely don’t use it.

3. The out­side of your goose must be very dry. To make sure you get lovely crispy skin that’s nice to eat, your goose needs to be dried. If pos­sible, hang it up some­where to dry for 24 hours before you roast it. Pat it down with kit­chen towel before you put it in the oven. If you like, you can very lightly salt the skin.

4. The inside of your goose must be very moist and juicy. Put lots of fruit and juicy stuff­ing in the middle because it has a large interior cavity and it can dry out. This is the trick to making sure your goose doesn’t look like a shriv­elled prune when you take it out of the oven.

5. The fat is useful. Use the fat to cook your pota­toes in. Makes them taste amaz­ing and really crispy.

The cook­ing time for a goose will vary dra­mat­ic­ally depend­ing on its size. Gordon Ramsay recom­mends about 15 mins for each kilo. This BBC video might have more detailed advice … if you can be bothered to watch it – I couldn’t, I rang my mum instead. She says: the oven should be about 150 degrees for a fan oven – and then you just have to keep an eye on it. When the bird starts to get a good colour (and you’ve removed the excess fat to start your roast pota­toes) use a two pronged fork and press into the thigh meet until you reach the bone.?

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Ori­gin­ally posted 2008-​​12-​​23 04:03:00. Repub­lished by Blog Post Promoter

Tags: Chicken, Cook, Domestic turkey, Goose, Gordon Ramsay, Home, Potato, Stuffing
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