“I have a Jamaican friend,” Weld says, “who always tells me he’ll take any bucks off my hands.”
Generally, though, people don’t want that for dinner. The best meat comes from goats that are slaughtered early, usually at six, maybe nine months. They might yield 40 pounds of meat, nose to tail, which is another reason goats escape the industrial food chain. Meat-mammal processors are geared for monster hogs and beefy cows. Weld has had a hard time finding a facility to take one of her animals.
“They tell me they don’t butcher rabbits,” she laughs.
During the past year, while developing recipes for our all-goat book, “Goat: Meat, Milk Cheese” (Stuart, Tabori & Chang), we often wondered about supply. But we were never stymied. A quick Internet search led us to dozens of suppliers within an hour’s drive of our rural Connecticut home. We kept it local and got what we needed every time.
Goat meat is savory and not as sweet as beef. It’s neither buttery nor beef-tenderloin tender, but it offers a wider palette for culinary foreplay in the kitchen. It works well with bold, big flavors, particularly spicy and sour notes.
Cuts of goat meat can be easily divided into two categories: quick-cooking and long-braising. The short list of quick-cookers includes rib chops, loin chops and the tenderloin, which is something of a rarity in many butcher shops, weighing in at only three or four ounces. All of those can be handled in a fast saute; with a hot sear with good caramelization; or grilled in minutes. The meat on the back legs, too, lends itself to one quick-cooking technique: It must be sliced off into strips and pounded thin before battering and frying, about as you would cube steak for chicken-fried steak.
The rest of the animal yields the long-braising cuts: front shoulders and neck slices to back shanks, and almost everything in between. Most of the meat is laced with lots of interstitial collagen, which must break down to create a satisfying, rich stew, braise, curry or tagine. In other words, the meat is a boon to ragu, as well as hearty soups and stews. Lots of connective tissue around the bones translates to more flavor in the pot.
And there are lots of bones. There’s a smaller ratio of meat to bone on, say, goat shoulder chops than on similar cuts from cows, pigs or even lambs. But that’s actually a good thing, because bones mean culinary flavor at every turn.
Unless you’re “going island” with a dish from a big buck, most of the goat meat you’ll find comes from smaller animals, which is a plus. A pot of four shanks isn’t a daunting dinner, as it can be with beef or pork shanks.
However, we’d be remiss not to offer one warning: Goat is still the Wild West of butchering in this country. While other animal carcasses are cut up based on standardized charts, goat has, by and large, escaped the bureaucracy. One butcher’s goat roast can be another’s goat steaks.
While we were writing the book, we discovered that the hard way. We found that one local farmer near us tossed the liver into his ground goat meat because he didn’t think anyone would notice. (The liver is delicious and milder in flavor than calf’s liver, but you wouldn’t want it in your hamburger.) Another carved the quick-cooking rib chops into big hunks that were still attached to the long-braising breast.
So when you go to buy goat, you need to ask questions. Which cut? How was it cut, and when? Step up to the butcher counter informed, with a willingness to learn more. If the guy back there seems surly or uninformed, take your business elsewhere. It’s your dinner.
Got goat questions? Scarbrough and Weinstein will join Free Range chat on Wednesday, April 6 at noon.
Recipes
Inside-Out Goat Cheese Goat Burgers
South African-Inspired Goat Curry With Apricots and Buttermilk
Goat Chops With Cherries, Bourbon and Cream
Goat RaguWith Pappardelle
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