Christmas Centrepieces: Golden Goose

If you’ve chosen to buy your Christmas goose from Soil and Sea this year, then you’re already off to a great start. All our geese are 100% organic, free-range and slow grown to produce a lovely, succulent alternative to the classic choice of turkey. By purchasing a premium organic goose, you’ve already taken a step in the right direction to a show-stopping Christmas table centrepiece.

Where Do Our Geese Come From?

Our goose farmer James oversees his 50-year-old family farm in South Devon, rearing Christmas geese to the highest of organic standards. His geese are a lovely alternative to the classic choice of turkey, free-range and fed on a diet of natural home-grown organic feed alongside clover-rich pastures. They live in a small flock within an orchard with access to a lake. The Totnes-based farm on the South coast ensures the birds are naturally slow-grown and hung for a minimum of seven days for the perfect flavour.

How to Store Your Goose

To make sure your meat is as fresh as possible, be sure to refrigerate as soon as it arrives at your door!

• Firstly, we support free-range birds so take it out of the box and open the bag. This ensures air can circulate around the centrepiece.
• Next, remove giblets from the bird, ensuring you store the meat and giblets separately in the fridge on clean plates.
• Lastly, be sure to set your fridge to 1-3 degrees to keep your bird perfectly chilled! This may however affect other produce in your fridge.

Meaty Tip: As much as your roasted meat is likely to steal the show, to ensure all your trimmings stay delicious through to Christmas Day, we recommend freezing them as soon as they arrive and defrosting thoroughly before cooking. This is particularly important for sausages, sausage meat, mince and chicken.

Recipe: Golden Goose

Like our lovely turkeys, all geese vary in size. Generally, to cook the perfect goose stick to 10 minutes plus 30 minutes per kilogram. Preheat the oven for 10 minutes at the higher temperature of 240°C / 220°C fan / Gas mark 9 and follow this Christmas goose recipe:

1. To begin with, prick the skin and rub with butter or melted goose fat, salt and pepper.
2. Place the goose breast side down on a rack in a roasting tin.
3. To lock in the flavour, cover the legs of the goose with foil.
4. Cook in a preheated oven for 10 minutes at 240°C / 220°C fan / Gas mark 9 then turn down to 190°C / 170°C fan / Gas Mark 5 for the remainder of the cooking time.
5. Getting the goose perfect is hard work, but rotating the bird every 30 minutes will be worth it. For the last 30 minutes ensure that the goose is cooked breast up.
6. Rest (we mean the bird, not yourself!) for 30 minutes, cover loosely with foil and save the fat to use for mouth-watering potatoes and other roasted veg.

Why Rotate Your Goose?

Geese are a little more complicated than a traditional turkey or chicken. For one, a goose is a red meat bird as opposed to white meat. Also, the breast and legs of a goose hold different amounts of meat. So to ensure an even cooking, the bird should be rotated.

Cooking breast side down to begin with allows the thicker legs to cook nicely before finishing breast side up for a tasty crisp skin on top.

Goose Tip: In the spirit of no-waste, save your extra goose fat to cook what can only be described as the best roast potatoes you will ever taste.

Leftover ideas…

This festive season may be different in more ways than one, but Christmas dinner leftovers are always inevitable. After all, Christmas only comes once a year so why not indulge? This year is as good as any to break a few festive traditions, so leave behind those meaty sandwiches and bubble & squeak in favour of something a little different.

From Sticky Legs to Boxing Day Risotto, we’ve collected some of the best (and most unique) recipes to make use of those leftovers – we’ve even accounted for leftover pudding and drinks too. T. You never know – your new Christmas tradition might be waiting for you.