tekobo

I hope you are recovering from your bout of flu @Tyrus. I am sure we will reach an accommodation.

Yes, it was a great game. Both teams showed up. Well worth staying up for. 3:30am here, to sleep!

Here just off to have a snooze so I can stay awake later. Wings and ribs will help get us through the night. Go EAGLES!

Yes @Bruce Pearson, it was a bit like ham. A nice, satisfying cooked ham that tasted just different enough for you to know it was goose. @Tyrus, not arduous at all if you compare with the effort of getting to Milan to beg for some more. We are endlessly amazed at what it is possible to do for yourself - the first time we made bacon we thought it was a thing of wonder! I will still bow at the altar of the great Spanish ham makers but it is fun to do some charcuterie yourself. @MacKenzie, we made a pile of paper thin slices of the goose last night for my in-laws and friends. It tasted more like the Milan cured version when sliced thin. Sadly, none left to mail to you - that breast all got eated! Thank you for prodding me to look at other thermometers. The £15 battery operated (wired) thermometer took about 15mins to set up and saved me from having to keep opening the KK to check on progress. @tony b I love the concept of the MEATER but, for some reason, it is not working for me. Will do some troubleshooting with their team this week.

Your daughter will live a happy life. I think the best meat is found close to the bone. Those wings look great.

Well. All I can say is: delicious! I stopped the cold smoking after 3.5 hours and introduced a bit of heat by lighting a couple of coals with my MAPP torch after 2.5hours. The whole "cook" took 5.5hrs by which time the breasts were at 62C. Left to cool and re-fridgerated overnight before having some for lunch today. Definite "do again". Just as soon as i have tried another recipe that The Husband found for goose breast proscuitto. That will likely be closer to the Milan experience but this German version is very very good too.

Butter. Just a nice thin layer. Like Bruce, I could well eat one of your food pictures Mac.

Yes I do and I will see if I can rig it up quickly if the MEATER doesn't "magically" connect half way through the cook like it has in the past!

So, the goose breasts have been cured for the requisite number of days and we are now into smoking. The recipe says to start the smoke cold and then gradually heat up to get the breast up to 140F-150F. My plan is to cold smoke for two to three hours and then introduce a hot coal into the KK and let the heat build from there, probably maxing the KK ambient temp at your 220F, my 105C. Does that sound about right? This was the easy bit, setting the cold smoker going. I used oak dust. Less easy was figuring out how to get enough depth to hang the breasts. Don't ask why, because I don't know why, but I settled on using the upper grate from the 23" in the 21". More importantly, I ended up hanging the breasts horizontally as you can see here, sitting on the 23" waiting to go into the 21". How do you hang your meats when you smoke in the KK? Do you just put them direct on the grates and don't fuss with hanging them? I stuffed one breast into netting as recommended by the recipe and left one au naturel. Want to see what the difference is. All in place now for the next few hours. Hoping to use the MEATER to track the meat temperature. Annoyingly, it is stubbornly refusing to connect but I am hoping it will start working before the critical point in a few hours' time. Also hoping it isn't this I.D.10T operating the MEATER that is the problem but I am close to sending it back if I can't get this replacement to work more consistently. All advice gratefully received!

Very nice. I like the in and out of the sauce trick. I'm sure they were tasty.

So many pundits, so little time...

Great. Yet more ways to use my surfeit of goose fat. Also reminds me that each goose came with its liver and giblets. I know that it won't be up to foie gras standards but I should be able to get a good goose liver pate going. Another yum bonus.

A good question and it reminded me that I wanted to check whether it would have been more cost effective to have bought goose breasts than these ridiculously heavy birds. In pure financial terms, it would have been cheaper to buy two goose breasts weighing in at about 1.2kg for £15/kilo. Instead I spent £60 buying the whole bird at £10/kilo. However, if it all works out right, I won't regret it. I would never have discovered goose leg hams, had all this goose fat to play with nor the great stock I know my husband will make from the carcass. All good.

So, @MacKenzie did a really tasty number with her Spicy Thighs post here Great photos and a class act. For those of us who like things a little hotter and bonier, here is the winged version. While the KK is getting v hot, make up a Vietnamese slaw. Shred stuff you like and add some mint. Make a dressing using a Vietnamese dipping sauce recipe - fish sauce, lime juice, garlic and chillis essential. Make up the glaze for the wings using this stuff. 2 teaspoons honey to 4 tablespoons oyster sauce and 4 tablespoons chilli sauce. It makes a lot and can be stored for later use. Cook the wings at high temperature. 5 minutes each side. Then glaze each side and show to the fire briefly to caramelise but avoid burning honey. The wings are only just cooked and very very tender. Plated shot especially for my friend @Paul

I hadn't thought of that Tony. Got fixated on the thought of goose hams! I have two more birds to try and six more bottles of fat to acquire so there should be more than enough for a good confit. The goose legs are big - 1.5kg the pair - so the confit is likely to take a while...

We're civil round these parts too. I won't begrudge you your ribs. They'll give you something to chew on other than your nails during the game. Looking forward to your 4th quarter comeback (attempt).

Y'all are losing me with these American cultural references but that's all the losing that I'm planning on in the next week or so.

You never know, goose fat might go well with your Guinness and Chilli chips.

Much as I like to get to know my food, I don't think I would want to grapple with a live goose. The guy who wrote the recipe that I am using also wrote a book called Duck, Duck, Goose which is apparently the last word in cooking waterfowl. I might get it if his online recipes turn out well. No hazard as far as I could tell. I had the oven at 165C to render the fat off the carcass and it just gently and steadily oozed off into the pan beneath with no danger of igniting in my electric oven. I saw that @Syzygies had done/seen one done in a salt dough jacket. That might be fun to try. I haven't done a cold smoke yet so this is all new to me. He recommends starting cold and slowly heating up. I am not sure how that is going to work with this cold smoker http://amzn.eu/5Q7teqa that I got on amazon but will read up in the book that came with it. Advice also welcome! No advice needed for the goose fat though. Goose fat roast potatoes all the way.

I was going to say something nice about your epic chicken. Until you started your needling. All good. I won't rise to the bait. Imagine I said something nice about your epic chicken and that you'll soon be sending me the rub in payment when Philly win.

I agree. There is no way you could get enough Wagyu fat to fill a deep fat fryer and this is an ingenious way of getting your chips to marry with this most delicious of ingredients. Of course, if this was all about the health benefits you would use a boring low fat oil spray in your air fryer but where would the fun be in that?

I love the fact air frying seems to be a method of applying the fattiest (and tastiest) of fats to chips. I suspect that is not what the inventors expected but its the best reason for having an air fryer that i can think of!!!

People rarely recommend Milan as a place to go on holiday. Fashionistas, yes. Industrialists, yes. But plain old hanging around holiday makers, no. If you get the chance you should go. We love Italy and love eating in friendly restaurants where people care. We ate in some stand out neighbourhood places when we visited Milan a year ago. One of the highlights of our trip was eating slices of cured and smoked goose as part of a plate of charcuterie. Awesome. We begged until the restaurant relented and let us pay for and bring home a pack of their cured goose breast. We are normally generous people but when we got home we kept that goose to ourselves, eating thin slices whenever we got the chance until it was all gone. A long preamble but I hope it helps you understand why I am so excited about trying to smoke goose breast in my KK. I buy poultry from a restaurant supplier and their price list says that goose is "seasonal". I checked what that meant a couple of weeks ago and they said they only have them at Christmas but that they did have a few left over in the freezer. That triggered my bulk buying gene and I immediately ordered three. They arrived last week. I have never bought a whole goose before and had no idea how much they weighed. At 6kg each they were a daunting sight! Two went straight into the freezer and I left the third to defrost overnight. To work, breaking down the carcass. I found a recipe for curing and smoking the goose online here https://honest-food.net/smoked-goose-breast-recipe/. I searched no further because it was clear that the author had had the same experience of smoked goose breast as us because he said "It was roll-your-eyes-back-in-your-head good". And better still, he provided a link to a recipe to make these badass goose legs into hams! The legs have been rubbed with cure and are sitting in a vac bag. They will be lovingly rubbed every day for ten days before the next stage of the process. The breasts are sitting in a marinade of peaty whisky. They'll go into their cure today for a few days before being smoked. The carcass was slow roasted in the oven to produce these jars of goose fat. Husband will be making a stock from the roasted carcass. I think this is a bird that is going to keep on giving!

Wagyu fried chips. You would pay a lot for those in a restaurant! They look great.

Hey @Tyrus. Looks very good. But nowhere do you actually say how it all tasted. Well??