RAISING GEESE| Goose Lard and Cooking Oil | Why You Should Raise Geese 

Wonderful tip. Definitely going to do this method. I was letting mine settle then pour what was clean into new jars which always resulted in some of the nice lard going to the chickens because of the impurities. Thank you so much! We keep our goose lard in sealed jars in the basement, but the lamb lard doesn't seem to keep as well so far, but your tip may help a lot with that.

Its great to have this fat and oil for cooking! a little in a pan with garlic is a great start to some good tasting food!

@@HickorycroftFarm I highly recommend you the cool book "goose fat and garlic" by Jeanne Strang. It's a great book for southwest France food written in English

@@AlienSKP We will look that book up! Thank you!

Indeed. That more we experiment with using all that the goose can offer, the more valuable they become

I know! Between sheep and goose lard, I am drowning in it. I shall have to start making soap again.

We have American Buff geese. The oil/lard they produce is incredible. So great for baking and almost everything we have tried so far. I even made a grilled cheese with it instead of butter and I am picky about my grill cheese quality, 😆, and I would almost say it was better.

I am actually testing that out shortly in a video so shall be able to report. I have always used lard for pastry so I am curious as well. I used it instead of butter in a crumble topping the other day and it was amazing!

😆

You will still get quite a bit if you skin them if you take out the fat from the abdomen. There is usually on domestic geese that have been well fed (and that includes pasture) a fair bit of fat in the lower abdomen so even if you take the breast and legs off or you can still collect a lot from there. It might be a bit harder to collect it from the skinned bird than cooking them whole for the other fat but you would still get some decent deposits from the sides of the bird (usually under the wing). We do find though the fall/early winter birds are much better for lard collection than birds harvested at other times of year (which does make total sense).

@@HickorycroftFarm thank you for sharing! I’m pitching ducks and geese to my husband for meat addition to our homestead but he’s heard so many horror stories about plucking waterfowl. I’m hoping by showing we can still get the meat/lard with skinning the birds he’ll be more open to the idea.

I did some reading into schmaltz. It sounds like it can technically be made from any kind of poultry which is kind of neat. The big difference between the chicken and goose fat/lard is flavor. We do keep some of our chicken fat and its good for cooking etc. but it has a "chicken" flavor to it while the goose really has no flavor which is great for using it for cooking (its a lot like using olive oil or butter). We didn't touch on it in this video but goose fat has this weird quality that it is fairly shelf stable at room temperature compared to other fats. Either way saving these kind of products from any poultry harvested great!