If apple sauce is pork, cranberry is with Turkey; what is with goose?

[navyeyelasH]

First christmas I'm cooking and we're having a goose. Is there something I'm meant to get that "goes" with it?

here is the goose recipe I'm using, with cider gravy. Nom nom.

I've never cooked goose, but when I have eaten it in a restaurant I have had either apple or a redcurrant sauce with it (I guess it's OK to use the same sauce for a gander too )

Prunes, traditionally

You could make a prune and apple stuffing?

orange??

Goose is my all time fave xmas bird but be warned - they are a bastard to cook due to much draining of fat required. Don't leave the oven for long as I did and came back to fat on kitchen floor!

Ergh I hate prunes, the remind me of slugs after you have covered them in salt! I was hoping it would be loganberries, not sure why I thought that?

I was going to do an apple & cranberry stuffing as I love cranberry - maybe just use cranberry sauce; is that too odd?

I'm only cooking for me and DP, we normally go to our parents but just bought our first home so want to stay here for a change. So I have no one to impress as such.

Hobbgoblin it always amazes me that recipes fail to mention these things; fat on the floor will seriously impact on my wine drinking preparing time so keen to avoid that.

How often should I check do you reckon? I might invest in a super deep roasting pan.

You should be fine with a deep tin. I can't remember how deep ours was but the bird was to feed 2 adults and 5 smallish children so a fair size.

I think I was checking every hour and basting but got dragged to village pub next door and may have got carried away with mulled wine, hence fat spillage. We are debating whether to do Goose again. We all liked it more than anything else we've tried including Nigella's turkey in bucket, but the fat thing is putting DP off as it was very smokey.

I always had cranberry sauce with Goose as we love cranberries and I think it does go well
Yes check for fat a lot, a good trivet helps as well

Also.. you will have the most lovley tasting roasties. I dont know how you getting your Goose, but we used to get the Goose in one bag and the fat in another. It freezes well and you can have goosefat roasties all year

we just buy the jars of goose fat, saves arsing about, top tip though for spuds that are not just tasty but also crispy is to make sure the goose fat is HOT when you put the potatoes in (heat a roasting tin with a couple of spoons of fat to about 200C for 10 minutes before (smoke point of goose fat is ~190C, so you don't really want to go much higher than this or the fat will break down and give you cancer and stuff))

eh? What's that you say about cancer??

I always heat the fat ready for potatoes, promptly forget and then pour into smoking hot fat in tin. Will I die of stuff?

I thought bread sauce was what you had with poultry. But that may be because I have a thing for bread sauce...

If you heat oil beyond its smoke point, it compromises the taste, and produces carcinogenic free radicals. It won't cause you cancer or overnight or probably ever, but it's not a good thing really.

Fats with flavour (i.e. impurities) such as butter, extra-virgin olive oil, goose fat, duck fat, lard, sesame oil all have low smoke points and are bad for high-temperature frying, and better for flavouring purposes.

Table of smoke points here:

www.cookingforengineers.com/article/50/Smoke-Points-of-Various-Fats

Basically for deep-frying, wok-cooking, etc., you should seek out a flavourless oil, preferably Rice Bran or a flavourless, highly refined light oilive oil for the highest smoke point.