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GOATOBER
Goat may not be on a lot of people's radars to cook on the BBQ, but it works so well when cooked over the coals, it has a lovely sweet flavour and some creamy fat. Every October people are being encouraged to give it a try within Goatober.
By Marcus Bawdon
A month long celebration of all that is good about eating the bearded beasts, it’s really come as a drive from a number of places, but the man behind it here in the UK is James Whetlor at Cabrito Goat Meat Co. a man super proud of the goat meat he produces. There’s a great story behind this, and it's one showing an understanding of our food chain and the importance of sustainably utilising all elements of the chain. Usually the young billy goats are slaughtered and disposed of, because they were not being eaten, and only the female nanny goats are used in an ever growing goat dairy industry.
As a responsible meat eater, I always feel that it's best to not waster a food source, and James is a passionate advocate of this, raising the ex dairy billies to slaughter weight, and then supplying the meat to the food industry, and places such as Neil Rankin's Temper restaurants are certainly loving cooking the goat meat, and it's proving incredibly popular.
Well I had a lovely piece of Billy meat and wanted to do some direct cooking with a lovely slab of rump. There was a beautiful ridge of creamy fat on the topside of this, and I really wanted this exposed so I could crisp it up. The thought came to me to cook in a similar way the fat capped picanha cut is cooked, and this worked out well with my thinking because cabrito is very popular in Brazil.
So although this is actually a slab of rump it includes the picanha on top and the slab of fat cap. To give it a similar treatment, meant slicing it into thick slices, and bending these round onto skewers, as below.
This as you can see exposes the creamy fat cap for crisping up…very tempting, and looks very similar to how I’ve cooked BBQ picanha the two thick skewers holds these big pieces of meat in place.
Then you need to start cooking, set up a grill with hot lumpwood charcoal with a gap in the middle, the coals either side, so no coals are directly under the meat. You do this to stop the fat flaring up as it starts to crisp up, otherwise you’d have a raging inferno on you hands.
You need to cook through slowly, these pieces took around 25-30 mins, you can give a little bit of extra crispness if you need to by moving over the coals, but watch for flaring up like a hawk. I brushed mine with a generous amount of chimichurri rojo, the recipe for this is here as I was turning it. I cooked until the internal temperature of the thickest slices was 55 deg C.
I then cut crispy slices off the outside and served with a nice green salad and some roasted peppers. A real feast that went down well with the kids…
Support Goatober if you can in a months time, share any recipes online with the #Goatober hashtag, give goat a try, and let us know how you get on, have you eaten or cooked with goat before? how do you like it?