• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

FORAGER | CHEF

Award-winning chef, author and forager Alan Bergo. Food is all around you.

  • Home
  • About
  • Wild Mushrooms
    • Mushroom Archive
    • Posts by Species
      • Other Mushrooms
        • Lobster Mushrooms
        • Huitlacoche
        • Shrimp of the Woods
        • Truffles
        • Morels
        • Shaggy Mane
        • Hericium
        • Puffball
      • Polypores
        • Hen of the Woods
        • Dryad Saddle
        • Chicken of The Woods
        • Cauliflowers
        • Ischnoderma
        • Beefsteak
      • Chanterelles
        • Black Trumpet
        • Hedgehogs
        • Yellowfeet
      • Gilled
        • Matsutake
        • Honey Mushrooms
        • Russula / Lactarius
          • Candy Caps
          • Saffron Milkcap
          • Indigo Milkcap
      • Boletes
        • Porcini
        • Leccinum
        • Slippery Jacks
    • Recipes
      • Fresh
      • Dried
      • Preserves
    • The Basics
  • Plants
    • Plant Archive
    • Leafy Green Recipes
      • Leafy Green Plant Varieties
    • Ramps and Onions
    • Wild Herbs and Spices
      • Spruce and Conifers
      • Pollen
      • Prickly Ash
      • Bergamot / Wild Oregano
      • Spicebush
      • Golpar / Cow Parsnip
      • Wild Carraway
    • Wild Fruit
      • Wild Plums
      • Highbush Cranberry
      • Wild Grapes
      • Rowanberries
      • Wild Cherries
      • Aronia
      • Nannyberry
      • Wild Blueberries
    • From The Garden
    • Nuts, Roots, Tubers and Grains
    • Stalks and Shoots
  • Meat
    • Four-Legged Animals
      • Venison
      • Small Game
    • Poultry
    • Fish/Seafood
    • Offal and Organ Meat Recipes
    • Charcuterie
  • Recipes
    • Pickles, Preserves, Etc
    • Fermentation
    • Condiments
    • Appetizers
    • Soup
    • Salad
    • Side Dishes
    • Entrees
    • Baking
    • Sweets
  • Video
    • Field, Forest Feast (The Wild Harvest)
    • Foraging Videos
    • Lamb and Goat Series
    • YouTube Tutorials
  • Press
    • Podcasts / Interviews
  • Work
    • Public Speaking
    • Charity and Private Dinners
    • Forays / Classes / Demos

Cooking Bone-In Goat Meat

I was trained to butcher animals in the classic western style, anything different was heresy. That is, for the most part animals are separated into 1/4’s (quarters) and from there into sub-primals, separating out whole muscle groups: loin, top round, bottom round, sirloin, whole ribeye, tenderloin, etc. It’s always made perfect sense to me that we separate muscles since most of them don’t have the exact same cooking times, and the bones must to be used to make stocks and sauces.

By Western logic, you’re not going to grill a lamb shank, and you’re not going to serve a 25$ chicken breast entrée connected to the ribcage that you could’ve put in the stock pot. Doing something like chopping up a whole animal and putting it in a piles like you see at halal meat markets seemed to me a plebeian, unrefined, technique that evolved from poverty in third world countries. Now, I’m embarrassed of what I see as an Anglo-centric view of meat that I held.

Goat was no different to me than any other animal and I’d cooked every piece from the brain to the balls over the course of my career, although I knew the sub-primal cuts were significantly smaller. It wasn’t until 2017 that I found I didn’t really know as much about them as I thought. I got contracted to be the face and recipe developer in a video series for my favorite goat & lamb farmer (Shepard’s Song). One of the cuts I was going to use I hadn’t worked with before, but it sounded straight-forward enough: bone-in goat meat.

After I cooked a batch like classic American Dinty Moore stew, picking through root vegetables and meat for bones to discard as I ate, I found myself thinking thoughts American cooks would have if they purchased cooked, and ate it:

“Why are there so many bones in my goat meat?”

“I don’t want to pay for all these bones, this is a rip-off, where’s the meat?”

The answer to those questions was paradigm shifting for me. I don’t know when I had my “aha” moment, but studying world-wide goat use helped. To help break it down for you, consider some reasons humans keep goats around the world:

Goats:

  • Can be eaten, and are delicious!
  • May be a beast of burden for moving and traveling
  • Can have world class fur that’s useable for fiber and all sorts of things. Remember cashmere?
  • Produce dairy that’s easier for many to digest than bovine
  • Are natural foragers and weed-wackers, programmed to find food all over the place
  • Are portable, and easy to move, alive or after processing compared to larger ruminants

There’s been a number of quotes and statistics saying that goat is the most eaten meat around the world. I doubt that it’s by volume, since America is full of over eating decadents. But, when you consider that goats can be raised with a minimum of feed inputs as they’re scavengers, and that they’re standard fare in about every culture but America, you can uncover a different picture.

The people eating goat around the world aren’t eating 2lb goat burgers, they’re probably eating it stewed somehow, because it’s the best way to stretch the meat and extract nutrients from the bones, and stemming from that, is the most tradtional way to cook it. The meat on a carcass is a lot less than something like a cow, chicken or pig we’ve engineered to have extra weight. Pound for pound:

Cutting goat meat into bone-in pieces is the most efficient way to use the animal

Bone-in Goat Meat

Pieces of bone-in goat vary in size and shape, as well as the bone to meat ratio.

Anyone can cut up a goat and cook it, anywhere

Not only is it efficient, but unlike butchering a pig or a cow, breaking down a goat into manageable pieces can be done alone, by one person anywhere in the world, and with only a single tool: a cleaver. The entire carcass is just whacked up into roughly equal sized pieces, and cooked, with little to no waste (I can’t speak for the head here, but I don’t think it’s in the meat I get from Shepard’s Song). Either way, Its insanely efficient compared to the way we treat animals in the U.S for the most part.

What’s it like to eat with all the bones in it?

Traditional bone in goat pepper soup

Using a fork and spoon to eat the soup and separate out the bones.

It’s different from most Western methods of consuming meat I’ve had. There’s a couple things I think it’s good to consider:

1. The high proportion of bone means to extract the most nutrients from it, the meat should be cooked into a soupy-brothy type dish. For the logistics of eating I think it helps if it is a simple broth with a vegetable in it here and there, nothing too complicated so you can easily see where the bones are. Given the combo of meat, bones and broth, I think it’s best to serve with a spoon and fork, along with a separate dish for the bones on the side, just like you would serve with a dish of mussels or clams.

2. Working around the bones, hunting for the succulent pieces of meat isn’t a chore if you do make it out to be. My girlfriend thought it was nice since being careful as you eat helps you slow down, be in the moment and appreciate the quality of what you’re eating. Useful to think about if you’re a chef who eats like a shop-vac in between services over a garbage can.

So how do I cook it?

Here’s some guidelines
1.Because there’s a good amount of bone, you want to cook it in a wet preparation, or a soup, for example my pepper soup recipe I have pictured.
2.Thick creamy sauces can make it easier to crunch on pieces of bone, which can be unexpected, and off-putting for some eaters.
3. Dishes with lots of little additions, like my American style stew with all it’s diced root vegetables, can be difficult to eat with this cut because you can get pieces of bone in with a bite of the diced roots.
4. I brown my goat meat before braising, but a lot of other cooks don’t. I do recommend it though, it will improve the flavor of the broth.
5. Look online for recipe inspiration, Goat Pepper Soup and Jamaican  Goat Curry are two time-tested classics.

Goat Pepper Soup 

Jamaican Goat Curry 

Traditional bone in goat pepper soup

I like to serve a bowl on the side for discarding the bones.

Related

Previous Post: « Smoked Lamb and Goat Tongues
Next Post: Cow Parsnip: Identification, Edible Parts, and Cooking »

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Bill

    January 3, 2021 at 8:25 pm

    Hi,

    I ran into something very like the pictures here in a local supermarket that specializes in exotic/imported products, except it was frozen (but they had a lot of it).

    I was actually looking for lamb stew meat to make vindaloo, but except for the goat the only thing they had besides ground meat (from various exotic critters) was poultry (duck duck goose).

    What do you think – goat vindaloo in my electric pressure cooker?

    Reply
    • Alan Bergo

      January 4, 2021 at 8:14 am

      Sounds great to me.

      Reply
  2. Megan Hamilton

    February 27, 2021 at 10:46 pm

    5 stars
    Hello, do you share your recipe for pepper soup on this site? I’m hoping to try it with some bone-in goat I procured. Thanks!

    Reply
    • Alan Bergo

      February 28, 2021 at 8:02 am

      Hey Megan, here’s two of my favorites. The curry is very popular, these and others like them are on the other site I manage (Shepherd Song Farm) Jamaican Goat Curry Goat Pepper Soup Alan

      Reply
  3. Richard Booth

    July 13, 2022 at 3:50 am

    I love it. I make curried goat often from frozen bags of goat meat I get from an Asian butcher, but I’m the only one on the house who will eat it. My wife and kids “don’t like all the bones”.

    Reply
    • Alan Bergo

      July 14, 2022 at 8:10 pm

      It’s one of the coolest butchery techniques I know of. I love the history.

      Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Recipe Rating




Primary Sidebar

James Beard Award Winner

beard award

Subscribe (It’s free)

Forager Chef

Forager Chef

Footer

Instagram

foragerchef

FORAGER | CHEF®
🍄🌱🍖
Author: The Forager Chef’s Book of Flora
James Beard Award ‘22
Host: Field Forest Feast 👇
streaming on @tastemade

Alan Bergo
Had a blast on the last day of the @wild.fed shoot Had a blast on the last day of the @wild.fed shoot cooking in the Garden of Eden, a.k.a Sam Thayer’s orchard. 

We’d planned on making ground squirrel, bullfrog and crayfish gumbo but only the crayfish came through. Luckily I had some back up andouille just in case. 

It’s may not be traditional, but gumbo with crayfish broth, a heap of @mushroomforaginginmn porcini, milkweed pods (in lieu of okra) wild rice and crayfish-chanterelle salad didn’t suck. 6 of us polished off a gallon 😁.

H/o to chef Lenny Russo who I pestered with questions on frog-based foods beforehand. Hyper-local meals like this are what we made at Heartland in St Paul during my tenure there. 

@danielvitalis 
@grantguiliano 

#ditchlobster #mudbugs #gumbo #crayfish #wildrice #wildfed
Long, fun day snatching crayfish out of the water Long, fun day snatching crayfish out of the water by hand with Sam Thayer and @danielvitalis for @wild.fed 

Daniel and Sam were the apex predators, but I got a few. 

Without a net catching crayfish by hand is definitely a wax-on wax-off sort of skill. Clears your mind. 

They’re going into gumbo with porcini, sausage and milkweed pods today. 

#crayfish #ninjareflexes #waxonwaxoff #normalthings #onset🎥🎬
Working all day on preps for cattail lateral rhizo Working all day on preps for cattail lateral rhizomes and blueberries for this weeks shoot with @wildfed 

Been a few years since I worked with these. Thankfully Sam Thayer dropped a couple off for me to work with. They’re tender, crisp and delicious. 

Sam mentioned their mild flavor and texture could be because they don’t have to worry about predators eating them, since they grow in the muck of cattail marshes. 

I think they could use a pet name. Pond tusk? Swamp spears? Help me out here. 😂

Nature makes the coolest things. 

#itcamefromthepond #cattail #rhizomes #foraging #typhalatifolia
I liked the staff meal I made for Mondays shoot so I liked the staff meal I made for Mondays shoot so much we filmed it instead of the original dish I’d planned. 

Cooked natural wild rice (not the black shiny stuff) is great hot, cold, sweet or savory. It’s a perfect, filling lunch for a long day of berry picking. 

I make them with whatever I have on hand. Mushrooms will fade into the background a little here, so I use a bunch of them, along with lots of herbs and hickory nut oil + dill flowers. 

I’m eating the leftovers today back up in the barrens (hopefully) getting some more bluebs for another shoot this week w @wild.fed 

#wilwilwice #wildrice #chanterelles #campfood #castironcooking
Baby’s first homegrown mushrooms! Backyard wine Baby’s first homegrown mushrooms! Backyard wine caps on hardwood sawdust from my lumberjack buddy.

Next up blewits. Spawn from @northsporemushrooms

#winecaps #strophariaaeruginosa #allthemushroomtags
It’s wild cherry season. I’ll be picking from It’s wild cherry season. I’ll be picking from my favorite spot tomorrow a.m. and have room for a couple helpers. It’s at an event on a farm just south of St. Cloud. 

If you’re interested send me a message and I’ll raffle off the spots. Plenty of cherries to go around. I’ll be leading a short plant walk around the farm too. 

#chokecherries #foraging #prunusvirginiana #summervibes
Load More... Follow on Instagram

Privacy

  • Privacy Policy

Affiliate Disclosure

 I may earn a small commission for my endorsement, recommendation, testimonial, and/or link to any products or services from this website. Your purchases help keep this website free and help with the many costs involved with this site as it has continued to grow over the years. 

Copyright © 2022 ·