We butchered one of our Boer goats last month…..or was it the month before? “BBQ” the wether was past prime butchering time (i.e. we should have last fall) but he finally went to freezer camp. After several years of experience butchering goats and deer, we have a pretty standard operating procedure now. Shoulders and ribs are slow roasted in the oven; hind quarters are either slow-roasted, cut into stew sized pieces or ground up for burgers; loins & tenderloins saved for “special” meals and the neck meat and other scraps saved for burgers.
The dogs and chickens love butchering day. Scraps here, scraps there, scraps, scraps
EVERYWHERE! (Imagine me doing that
sing-song while I fling small pieces of fat, sinew and flesh across the yard
for the chickens to brawl over.)
Charlie and Kai get the choicest of scraps; liver, heart, kidney, and whatever else they manage to swipe out of the gut bucket when one turns their back for even a millisecond. Kia snagged the goozle this time. I have no idea where the word “goozle” originated, but it is the local word used to describe the throat piece that looks like a ribbed, plastic pipe. Normally that stays IN the gut bucket, but Kai managed to swipe it. I can’t quite describe the sound that is made when canine teeth chew through the eight inch, cast-aside esophagus of a goat. Seriously. I can’t. All I know was that I was audibly bombarded by such a horrific noise that it made me visibly wince. (I came back to this post over a month later and I STILL cringe at the memory of that sound). Anywho.
Once all the meat was cut, cubed and picked from every possible bone, the bones and some other not-quite-good-enough-to-eat, but good-enough-for-broth scraps went right into the pressure cooker. Bones are usually saved for the dogs, but I was running out of soup stock and thought I’d try my hand at goat bone broth. I added water, onion, celery, carrots, bay leaves and a few shakes of salt into the pressure cooker and set it at 10 lbs. of pressure for about an hour. I let it cool down in the pot, strained it, poured it into ½ gallon mason jars and stuck the broth in the fridge. Normally I like to can broth to have on hand, but I wasn’t going to waste my time if the goat broth wasn’t up to par.
Charlie and Kai get the choicest of scraps; liver, heart, kidney, and whatever else they manage to swipe out of the gut bucket when one turns their back for even a millisecond. Kia snagged the goozle this time. I have no idea where the word “goozle” originated, but it is the local word used to describe the throat piece that looks like a ribbed, plastic pipe. Normally that stays IN the gut bucket, but Kai managed to swipe it. I can’t quite describe the sound that is made when canine teeth chew through the eight inch, cast-aside esophagus of a goat. Seriously. I can’t. All I know was that I was audibly bombarded by such a horrific noise that it made me visibly wince. (I came back to this post over a month later and I STILL cringe at the memory of that sound). Anywho.
Once all the meat was cut, cubed and picked from every possible bone, the bones and some other not-quite-good-enough-to-eat, but good-enough-for-broth scraps went right into the pressure cooker. Bones are usually saved for the dogs, but I was running out of soup stock and thought I’d try my hand at goat bone broth. I added water, onion, celery, carrots, bay leaves and a few shakes of salt into the pressure cooker and set it at 10 lbs. of pressure for about an hour. I let it cool down in the pot, strained it, poured it into ½ gallon mason jars and stuck the broth in the fridge. Normally I like to can broth to have on hand, but I wasn’t going to waste my time if the goat broth wasn’t up to par.
I personally finished drinking a gallon of goat broth in
less than a week. And I will be making
more, much to the dismay of the dogs.
