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Getting your goat
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August 26, 2004
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I finally remembered to marinate the goat this morning. I didn't have time to do anything fancy, as I was on my way to work, and I had an early meeting. In fact, I didn't have time to consider what the hell I was doing at all. I just grabbed the first ingredients I could find, which resulted in a hodgepodge of red wine, pomegranate syrup, currants, balsamic vinegar, a half of a bottle of flat beer (!), various spices, and several other things that I have forgotten but are probably best left unmentioned.
After work I chopped some orange zest, ginger, and garlic and sauteed them in olive oil in the base of the pressure cooker. I threw goat and the marinade in, brought it up to pressure, and ignored it for about two hours.
Goat is supposed to be fairly tough and benefits from marination and a long braising time. The exception to this is kid, a young goat, which requires neither; most kid recipes I've found require less than an hour to cook, though some take as long as two hours.
This made me wonder if my goat leg was from a kid or from something older, and if I was possibly doing my goat an injustice by cooking it for so long in the pressure cooker. When I went in to check on its progress. I discovered the the cooker had lost its pressure, so that my goat stew had basically just been simmering for two hours. After inexpertly judging the toughness of the goat meet by feel, I decided to cook it for one more hour under pressure and then call it done.
Unfortunately, I had to go out that evening, so I told Rebecca to take care of it, and I left for the night.
I came back around 1 a.m. and looked in the fridge. Sure enough, there was the goat stew. I wasn't hungry, so I didn't eat any, but I did sample some of the goat meat. It was lean and dense, with a character all its own. I had assumed that it would generally be like lamb. It isn't! It's much leaner and has a unique flavor. I was very excited. Rebecca laughs at how worked up I can get over something like cooking a goat.
I'll write more about it tomorrow, when we have this stew for dinner.
August 26, 2004 in exotic, main_dishes, soups_stews | Permalink
