![]() (Here is how to make sausages using a bird's neck as the casing.) I stuffed it with ground goose meat and spices, tied it off at either end, and roasted it à la ficelle, so it would be evenly browned. Specifically, it's the neck from the big Canada goose. So, armed with all kinds of random goose parts, what to do with them? I have a whole ton of duck and goose recipes already on the site, so every new season I try to refine old recipes and then attempt to stretch myself a bit with new recipes. I like my breasts medium to rare (yeah, I'm snickering too. As pretty as cooking a whole goose is, I generally don't recommend it. (Here's how to break down a game bird.) Sorry. There are no pictures because I broke it down. And then a duck in the small goose, then a quail in the duck, a snipe in the quail. It was so big I could have stuffed it with one of the smaller geese. I should have taken a picture of my big Canada goose, all plucked and cleaned and gutted. It's an occupational hazard when you deal with larger animals. You've seen a goose crap on the grass, right? Can you even remember seeing duck crap? Waaay smaller. Once you get to the gutting, I often hear people say, "Christ it stank! Was so bad I tossed the bird." That's a crying shame, because the stink is, in most cases, just the fact that the ass end of a Canada goose is so large the sheer mass of crap makes the whole thing smelly-until you remove it and wash the cavity. God help you if you try to dry-pluck one. The feathers on a large Canada are tough to remove, and waxing one takes two full blocks of paraffin. Gotta love enzymatic acrobatics-thanks, meat science! Aging develops flavor and tenderizes the meat. Big geese can be tough-they can live more than 20 years even in the wild. I wrote a tutorial about hanging game birds that goes into details. I highly recommend aging your geese, in the feathers, with the guts in, for one to three days. This is understandable: Once you start talking about an animal 12 pounds or larger, everything gets harder to deal with. When it comes to cleaning these birds, lots of people get turned off. But who knows? Maybe it'd taste like knishes, hot dog buns, and hard pretzels? Not sure I'd eat a Canada out of Central Park in Manhattan, though, unless I were really, really hungry. My geese had been gorging on barley, so I knew they'd be fine. And because they are such eclectic eaters, it really, really matters. How a Canada tastes depends on what that bird ate before you shot it. Both birds will eat just about anything, from bread and algae to insects, crayfish, and, yes, grain. That was a monster.Ĭanada geese live like large mallards, which is why you see them sharing the same park ponds. The geese I shot were a mix of cacklers, which are only about three to four pounds, lesser Canada geese, which are about five to seven pounds, and one big Western Canada, which weighed nearly 13 pounds. That, my friends, is one big-ass sky carp. But the species is correctly known as "Canada goose." Got it? Good.Īs I was saying, there are all sorts of geese that look like Canadas, from tiny Aleutian geese no larger than a mallard, to the Giant Canadas, which can reportedly top 18 pounds. The geese I shot happened to be Canadian because I killed them in Manitoba. I should start by noting that there are Canada geese and there are Canada geese incidentally, it is most definitely not a "Canadian goose." That drives me nuts. I managed to return from my sojourn to Manitoba with five Canada geese, and since then I've been busy trying to elevate what most people view as barely a step above vermin. But in the right circumstances they can be wonderful at the table, in many ways better even than either a domestic goose or a wild specklebelly goose, which is known to those of us who hunt them as "the ribeye of the sky." Yeah, Canadas can be all of these things. Stinking, arrogant hissing birds that frighten children. It's the one that chokes our parks, wanders around our neighborhoods, and leaves great cylindrical snakes o' crap all over the place.
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