Hunting: Well, Sort Of...

Thanks to the awesome generosity of a hunting friend, I became the proud owner of two freshly shot Canada Geese. These creatures are the bane of golf courses and park managers and reservoir managers along the whole Atlantic Flyway. They are also delicious, nutritious, grass fed, cage free birds, killed by a quick death. If you object to any of this, or don't really want to know where food comes from, stop reading here because it's about to get bloody. Read along with me to see how I turned these feathered friends into food.

For goose #1, I plucked the feathers down the center of the breast from the bottom of the neck down to the vent. I took my knife (a Havalon, which is essentially a surgical scalpel with a knife handle), and made a very shallow cut through the skin to the breast bone. You can see and feel the bone, but the cut should be shallow. Once the initial cut is started, I turned the knife edge-up so that I wouldn't cut too deep. I cut all the way down to just above the vent. 

Here, you can see that I started peeling back the skin. Sometimes, the skin just peels. Other times, you have to barely touch it with a sharp knife to release it. 

I continued to cut/peel back until the entire breast was exposed. The breast will extend down to the wing on the top and the thigh on the bottom. Once fully exposed, removing the breast is fairly simple for anyone who has ever done the same thing with a chicken. The difference is that the goose is wider and flatter than a modern chicken.

It's a little hard to tell from the picture, but you cut straight down the sternum, peeling back the meat as close to the bone as possible. Near the neck, cut down along the wishbone. The objective is to free the meat from the bone alone the attachment points, in between muscle groups. As such, it's more a peeling than a cutting. 

You need to repeat the same thing on the other side. Now, it seems that the general consensus is that it isn't worth bothering with the legs. It seems an awful waste though. I cut back down to the the fat around thigh. I slid my fingers around the meat/bone to to release the skin. I cut the thigh away from the bone, until I reached the thigh joint. Once exposed, I cut the ligaments to release the bone. One of the legs was broken on impact, but the meat was intact. 

I decided to push my luck and see if I could get the wings off. That didn't go nearly as well. The skin got really thin at the wing elbow. As I got to the joint, I kept cutting through the skin. I manage to get some sinewy meat from the wing for a whole lot of effort. It was definitely not worth it to get the wing off.

I put the meat on a plate in the fridge to do a little dry aging. I'm not sure how I will prepare these goose parts. The second goose was hung, in feathers which I plan to pluck, but that is another post.