Eastern European · Side
Goose Schmaltz and Gribenes
- Easy
- 75 min
- roughly 1 of 4 for cost
Leads with richness that coats and comforts.
Ingredients
- 500 g goose skin and fat trimmings
- 60 ml water
- 1 onion (about 150 g), sliced 3 mm thick
- 3 g fine sea salt
Equipment
Fine sieve
The skills inside
Straining & passing through a sieve
Allergen screen
None found among the 14 screened.
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Chill the skin and fat until firm, then cut it into 1 cm pieces. Warm fat drags under the blade and you tear the skin instead of cutting it.
- Put the pieces in a heavy pan with the water over the lowest heat the hob will hold. Leave it, stirring now and then, while the water boils away and the pieces slowly come to sit in their own melted fat.
- Carry on until the bubbling changes from big and lazy to fine and quiet and the pieces have shrunk to pale gold curls, 45 minutes to 60 minutes in all. 45 min
- Add the onion and cook until onion and skin are both deep brown and crisp, 10 minutes to 15 minutes. The onion runs ahead, so fish it out early if it darkens first. 10 min
- Strain through a fine sieve into a clean jar. Salt the gribenes while they are hot and eat them the same day; the fat keeps for months in the fridge.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Straining & passing through a sieve 148 recipes
- Nothing solid got through: a finger drawn through what came out finds no fibre, seed, skin, curd, or grit.
- Where the dish wants body it was worked through rather than left to drip, and the solids left in the mesh are spent and dry rather than still holding liquid worth having.
- It is judged on the tongue rather than by eye: smooth, with no residual grain left behind after the mouthful has gone.
- The mesh was fine enough for the job and held its shape, and nothing bypassed it by going over the rim.
- The yield is close to what went in less the spent solids: not half of it abandoned in the sieve because it stopped running and nobody pushed.
Where it goes wrong It was pushed through a mesh too coarse for it, or the sieve was overloaded and slopped at the rim, so the fibres it was meant to remove are in the finished sauce and it reads grainy on the tongue.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Vermentino or Sauvignon Blanc
- Also Right
- Albariño
- From the Taps
- Witbier
- Zero-Proof
- Sparkling water with citrus
Lean fish, bright acid, done: coastal whites built beside the same boats; the fresher the fish, the leaner the pour.
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