tekobo

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??

I do the same as Pequod for low temp cooks. I smoked some fish the other day and can hold at about 105C with the left vent closed, right vent on second to smallest hole and the top about an 1/8th open.

Hi @MacKenzie, meat, three veg and I think that marrow found its way to your tummy tum tum. Yum.

Disclaimer: I am a city girl and only ever venture, briefly, into the countryside to pick up meat and return home. My experience of Dorset is that it certainly has highways and I have generally been driving fast on one to get through Dorset to somewhere else, like Cornwall. Having said all that, I am sure it is as you saw it on the TV show @MacKenzie. We Brits tend to think of the UK as a crowded, built up island but there was a recent survey that showed that only 6% of the land in the UK is built on. Who'd have thunk it?

Great looking shop and chop. Yup, the @Aussie Ora's friend is right. It is called a Barnsley chop on a lamb but I've never seen it done to a pig. Extra bone to chew, what more could you ask for?

I love the fact that the Aussies are plain speaking and direct. We got on just fine. And they ribbed me mercilessly for the one and only time in my life that I ever got sun burned. Mind the hole in the ozone layer, that's all I can say!

This made me laugh a lot. My stint working in Australia twenty years ago was as an ex-pat. I used to joke that I was an ex-pat, ex-colonial in an ex-colony. They asked for White Men from England and, in amongst the bunch, they got me. A black female engineer. I had fun.

I'm almost 50. Started as a Philly fan when I was in my 20s. I haven't hurt anyone yet. But we will win. I have faith. Soak? About 6 hours. Smelled wonderfully yeasty. Will share results later in the week. Not sure how long I can hold back but I have a few grown up meals to get through before I can settle into a sticky wings meal for one!

OK. So I don't like beer to drink but I think it is awesome for brining chicken. I had 7kg of wings delivered yesterday and am now brining them before draining and freezing for future "emergency" use. Here is the assortment of beers my husband thought he could spare from his collection Looking wonderful and frothy with dark demerara sugar and Kosher salt mixed in. (12oz beer to 1 tablespoon salt and 1 tablespoon sugar) The wings, getting to know the brine. A control set of wings in lemon brine, just so I can remind myself how much I like beer! And now I have to wait. And so will you. I am sure I will need to break out an emergency supply sometime in the week. Looking forward to it.

Awesome! We have the same problem with getting those cuts here in the UK. You must be soooo happy.

Oh, alright then. Someone has to take the blame. The manufacturers?? Says she who just sacrificed some good beer to make yet more beer brined wings.