German · Main
Martinsgans
- Advanced
- 60 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with acid holding everything up to the light, richness that coats and comforts.
Ingredients
- 1 whole goose, about 4.5 kg, with giblets
- 45 g fine sea salt
- 8 g black pepper, ground
- 12 g dried marjoram
- 5 g dried mugwort
- 3 tart apples (about 450 g), quartered and cored
- 2 onions (about 250 g), quartered
- 150 g pitted prunes
- 600 ml water
- 250 ml dark beer
- 15 g cornflour, slaked in 30 ml cold water
- 10 ml cider vinegar
- 50 ml cold water with a pinch of salt, for the skin
The skills inside
Roasting in a hot ovenRendering fat: and cooking in what runs outSalted water & the float testStraining & passing through a sieve
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · alcohol
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
- Two days ahead, pull the loose fat pads from the cavity and neck and set them aside in the fridge, or freeze them, to render into schmaltz. Rub the bird inside and out with the salt, pepper and marjoram and leave it uncovered on a rack in the fridge until the skin feels dry and papery.
- Prick the skin all over the breast, flanks and thighs at a shallow angle with a fine skewer, travelling through the fat layer and stopping before the meat. Fill the cavity with the apples, onions, prunes and mugwort and close it with skewers.
- Set the goose breast down on a rack over a deep tin holding the water and the giblets and roast at 150C (300F). Every 40 minutes ladle the rendered fat out into a bowl and top the tin up with hot water. Turn the bird breast up after 90 minutes. 40 min
- Roast on until the leg swings loose in its socket and the thigh joint reads 82C (180F), about 3 hours 30 minutes in all. Raise the oven to 220C (425F), brush the breast with the salted water and give it 12 minutes more, until the skin blisters and cracks under a fingernail. 180 min
- Rest the goose 25 minutes. Strain the tin juices into a jug and discard the giblets, then lift off the last of the fat. Add the beer and boil hard until the jug is down to about 400 ml, then thicken with the slaked cornflour and sharpen with the vinegar. 25 min
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Roasting in a hot oven 56 recipes
- The oven was fully up to heat before anything went in, given time beyond the indicator light rather than judged by it.
- Every piece has air around it. Nothing touches its neighbour and nothing is packed to the edge of the tray, because crowded food steams itself in its own moisture and never browns.
- Colour is even across the whole tray, the tray having been turned at least once: no pale row at the back and no dark row at the front.
- It came out BEFORE the target temperature, not at it. Carryover keeps driving the inside up by several degrees after it leaves the oven, and that rise is part of the cooking rather than an error in it.
- The temperature was read at the coldest part rather than the easiest one to reach, and read again after the rest.
Where it goes wrong The tray was crowded, or the oven was not truly up to heat. The food releases steam faster than a cool box can carry it away, so it sits pale and slack, and the extra minutes spent chasing colour take the inside well past where it should have stopped.
Rendering fat: and cooking in what runs out 73 recipes
- It started cold or low and came up slowly: fat that met a hot pan seizes and scorches before the inside can melt, and there is no recovering it.
- The fat in the pan is clear and clean-smelling, pale to golden, with no dark sediment on the floor and nothing acrid in the steam.
- What is left behind is crisp and deep gold with no soft pale fat still clinging to it and no black burnt edges.
- There is a real volume of it: enough to film the pan floor and be poured off and kept, not a dry smear that never ran.
- Whatever cooks in it browns in it and takes its flavour, rather than sitting in a greasy pool that never gets hot enough to colour anything.
Where it goes wrong The heat was raised to hurry it along, so the outside seized and browned before the interior fat could melt; very little runs out, and the solids come out burnt on the outside and rubbery within.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Cabernet Sauvignon or Malbec
- Also Right
- Tempranillo (Rioja Reserva)
- From the Taps
- Amber ale
- Zero-Proof
- Sparkling water, make room
Tannin binds to seared protein and fat: each bite softens the wine, each sip resets the palate: the steakhouse equation.
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