Goose Fat is Pure Gold in the Kitchen

Reader Contribution by Andrea Chesman
Published on December 16, 2016

Every once in a while, I buy myself a goose. Goose meat is good — it tastes like duck. Goose bones make a fine stock; goose liver, a fine pâté. But I buy the goose for the fat, which is pure gold.

Geese aren’t easy to find because there aren’t a lot of farmers who raise them. If you are thinking of raising geese commercially, you might want to connect with Suzanne Podhaizer (farmtotableconsulting.com). She used to raise geese for sale and to cook at her Montpelier, Vermont, restaurant, Salt. But like many young farmers who don’t own land, her circumstances changed, and the farm went out of business. Now, she has a consulting business, working on farm to table issues with both farmers and chefs. I was lucky to buy one of the last of the geese she had in her freezer.

The goose I bought was pasture-raised, offered supplemental organic feed, and slaughtered at the age of 5 months (raised from May to October), with a dressed weight of about 8 pounds. I paid $8 a pound — or $64 for my goose. That’s considerably more than I would pay for a pasture-raised organic chicken, which are generally about $6 per pound.

Podhaizer noted that the geese she raised on pasture with conventional feed supplements were larger — and cost less ($5.50 per pound). The difference in the feed was the presence of soy in the non-organic feed. (The difference wasn’t just size. My organically raised bird yielded about half the rendered goose fat of a supermarket goose I bought last year.)

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