Goose is an internationally recognized delicacy. Dishes from this bird are present in the menu of restaurants in many countries. Some housewives grow a goose with their own hands, and then cook it. If you want to do this, learn how to butcher a goose properly.

Before slaughtering self-raised geese at home, the owner must make sure that the birds have reached the desired age. Other key factors need to be taken into account as well. Just learning everything important points, you will be able to prepare the birds for slaughter in accordance with all the rules, avoiding the mistakes made by most novice farmers. You can slaughter a goose if it is older than 2 months. The specified age is valid for those cases when grazing is not provided.

Before you kill a bird, you should stop feeding it. From the last feeding to slaughter, at least a day should pass. It is easy to explain this: the goiter and intestines of the feathered animal sent for slaughter must be empty. Before the necrosis of the bird, it can be watered without saving or restricting water.

Birds that are sent for slaughter must live in a clean and dry room. Such living conditions will help keep the feathers clean. It is advisable to reduce the light level to prevent the geese from pecking at their own droppings.

Goose slaughter

How to slaughter a goose? Among poultry farmers, 2 methods are considered the most common: internal and external. The external method involves the use of a sharp knife as the main tool.

The procedure consists of the following successive steps:

1. The bird is placed upside down in a cone.
2. Before slaughter, she is stunned with a sharp blow to the head with a stick.
3. In the left hand they take the head of a goose and make a puncture in the throat below the earlobe. In this case, the knife should be stuck to a sufficient depth.
4. Sharply cut the carotid artery and jugular vein.
5. Drain all the blood. This will take some time. If the blood does not drain completely, the meat can quickly spoil.

Many kill birds internally. In this case, do not use a knife, but scissors. Before starting the procedure, you need to tie the feathered paws and hang it upside down. Next, you need to unclench the bird's beak, insert scissors into the oral cavity and sharply cut the jugular and bridge veins. After that, a puncture is made in the sky, and the tip of the scissors is directed to the end of the skull. This method is preferred as it takes less time. Regardless of which method you choose, be sure to study the structure of the bird before carrying out the procedure. Those poultry farmers who slaughter quickly and accurately, first study the special literature.

Plucking

Today, several ways of plucking a goose at home are common.

After slaughter, it is better to remove goose feathers using a dry method, which does not involve scalding and use special tool. Feathers are carefully (skin damage is undesirable) pulled out in the direction of their growth. First of all, large feathers are removed from the wings and tail, after which they move on to small ones.

Plucking is also carried out using the hot method. The carcass is placed in hot water, after which feathers are quickly pulled out of it. The advantage of the method is that you can remove feathers without harming the bird's skin at all. However, you need to act quickly while the effect of scalding lasts. Some prefer to singe the goose. This method allows you to quickly remove feathers, but it will be impossible to use them in the future. Also today there are special devices that will allow you to completely pluck a bird in a matter of minutes.

Butchering a bird

How to butcher a goose? Even if you plan to bake the feathered whole, you still need to cut it. After all, you can’t cook a goose with its head and all internal organs.

Cutting is a procedure consisting of several stages. First of all, you need to check the quality of the plucking. There should not even be small hairs on the carcass! If the remains of feathers were found, remove them with tweezers.

Next, the head is cut off to the second vertebra. After that, the wings are cut to the "elbow" and paws. Next stage- separation of the trachea and esophagus from the spine. To do this, just pull them in different directions. With a sharp knife the abdomen of the bird is cut from the cloaca to the keel.

You need to cut carefully so as not to hurt the intestines. The resulting hole will help gut the carcass. All offal is disposed of. Leave only the liver. From the butchered goose, a cackling pipe should also be pulled out.

At the end, the carcass is washed cold water and leave to cool. After that, you can divide the carcass into portions or cut into pieces. For storage, you can put the carcass and the whole. So, slaughtering and butchering a goose is a procedure that can be done correctly and quickly on your own. However, its success largely depends on the theoretical study of the bird structure and slaughter technology.

Video "How to slaughter a goose?"

From this video you will learn how to slaughter a goose correctly.

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Content:

We are talking about cutting a goose after it has been plucked. Unless, of course, you are a follower of Panikovsky from the novel "The Twelve Chairs", which barely took his feet, escaping from the crowd. After all, he got goose meat not in a store, but in other people's yards. If you are a “comrade” of this literary hero or grow it yourself, then you will have to pluck the bird first.

Plucking

There are several ways to pluck a goose carcass.

• Mechanical. This is the most fast way. It uses various electromechanical devices.
• Manual. The most time-consuming, but the result is the highest quality. It can be done in two ways:

1. dry (when they are going to use feather and down in the future);
2. wet (the carcass is dipped in boiling water).

• Steam. Accelerates manual plucking. To do this, you need to do one of the following:

1. hold the bird over the steam;
2. use a steam generator;
3. steam with an iron.

At manual methods The workflow is usually like this. First, get rid of large flight feathers. When removed, pull them in the direction of growth. Then they move to the back, then to the abdomen.

Carcass preparation

Regardless of whether you yourself rid the goose of feathers or have already acquired a plucked one, you will need to carefully examine it. It is almost impossible to pluck a goose without leaving stumps, broken feathers, and little hairs. All this will greatly spoil the look of the dish prepared from it.

You can get rid of all this old grandfather's method- singeing and pulling out the remaining stumps with tweezers or platypuses. Previously, the roasting of the carcass was carried out over a burning burner gas stove. This is not very convenient. The goose is heavy, and then the whole stove will be stained. Now more often use miniature gas-burners.

Before roasting, the goose carcass can be rolled in flour. So it will be drier, small hairs will burn better. After singeing, clean the goose from the resulting soot (you can scrape it with a knife), wash it, dry it with disposable towels.

Start cutting. Just first familiarize yourself with the anatomical structure of birds. It is shown in the figure below.

Knowing the anatomy of birds will help you understand the giblets that you will be extracting. And when cutting not a store goose, but a farm or domestic goose, you will have to do this.

Cutting stages

After plucking and singeing, it is necessary to remove parts of the carcass that are unsuitable for eating and remove the insides. This operation is called gutting.

gutting

• If the head was not removed during slaughter, then cut it off. But it is the head, not the neck. Therefore, remove it approximately at the level of the second vertebra of the neck.
• Cut off the extreme part, along the elbow joint, of the wings.
• Also cut off the paws along the joint.
• Get rid of the trachea and esophagus. This can be done by pulling them out through the neck or after extracting the giblets.
• To extract the insides, cut the carcass. They do it differently. Can be cut lengthwise. With this cut, it is more convenient to get the giblets. In this case, it is necessary to cut along the abdomen from the back of the goose to the front.

And you can make a cross section. It is done in the lower abdomen, under the abdomen. So the carcass will look neater, it is easier to stuff it later. But if the whole goose is not supposed to be baked, then the appearance is no longer important.

In any case, cut carefully. The main thing is not to damage internal organs.

• Get the offal. Make sure they don't break through. This is especially true of the gallbladder. If it spills, then consider that the goose is spoiled, since everything where the bile gets will be bitter. This is where knowledge of bird anatomy comes in handy.

Offal preparation

• Separate the liver from the gallbladder very carefully.
• Free the stomach from pebbles and any other evil spirits. Scrape off the hard inner film. Scald it with boiling water, then it will be easier to remove.
• Cleanse your heart from all sorts of films.
• If you have not removed the trachea before, then feel for it in the upper part and pull it out.
• Get rid of excess fat. It doesn't mean throw away. It must be carefully cut and melted. You can freeze to collect more, and then reheat. Goose fat is used to make pâtés.
• Cut the claws from the paws and remove the skin. To endow this operation, also use boiling water.

Meat ripening

After gutting and cleaning offal before eating them, time must pass. It is called meat ripening.

Therefore, after drying the goose carcass with a towel, put it together with offal in a large container. Cover with a towel, meaning you don't need to seal it, and keep it in the basement or refrigerator for two days.

Some hang carcasses on hooks in cellars. Others put them in muslin bags and hang them up as well. But the last option will be expensive. Muslin can be used in other ways. You don't see fabric like this very often. By the way, it got its name from the city of Mosul in Iraq, where it was invented. In the seventeenth century in Europe, elegant dresses were sewn from it.

Dividing into portions

Goose can be baked whole or cooked in portions. In the second case, you will have to cut it into smaller pieces. This makes it easier to fit in a frying pan or pot for stewing.

In Soviet times, in the standard trade, it was proposed to butcher carcasses of birds as shown in the figures below.

Here on seme "A" it is shown how to divide the carcasses of a smaller bird - chickens and ducks. And on the “b” scheme, the larger one is geese and turkeys. In addition, then a piece of the neck had to be attached to each portioned piece. If it was a goose, then the neck was divided into eight pieces. In times of shortage and average constant prices, it was more profitable for trade organizations.

At home, the bird is usually divided into smaller pieces. So, as shown in the bottom photo.

The bottom row shows offal that can be used in food. When dividing the bird into pieces, try to cut along the articular cartilage.

Having cut the goose as described here, you can start cooking it. But that's another story.