How To Clean A Goose

Welcome back to part two of our goose hunt with Kevin. Master guide, chef, everything really. Kevin's gonna show us how to breast and take the legs off of a goose and then part two will be part three I guess we'll be cooking at his place but all right so it's just on me. Now this might not be the you know the whole proper way of everyone doing it but it's a way that I found it so efficient and it works. You want to find this little pelvic bone. It's about halfway up and you can really feel it. You can be you know here's the bottom where all the intestines and guts kind of hang out and then here's your rib cage. So what I've done is just like cut in and try and get a starting with the skin and kind of work your way up so you can start you know you can start seeing you're exposing some of the meat already. You want to make sure you have a sharp knife as always. You can see it's now pretty much just like peeling off like this is where it starts going going fast. Now I'm committing a big bit of a cooking sin. There's a lot of fat on these birds. It's late season so it's beautiful for cooking but early season definitely you know you're breasting your birds there's not much on them. Late season you can definitely you're feeling up to the challenge to pluck. You definitely pluck the geese and save that fat or save its skin on and just use it for cooking but I know it's self-explanatory but plucking actually you just you just pull all the feathers and an example of plucking if I were to do it if you were to pluck you know kind of pluck up against the grain and you get through the big main feathers to all the down you start seeing the skin it's messy for sure there's feathers everywhere but that is plucking and yeah I kind of wish I would have but that's we're just gonna breast a bird today for this one you're just gonna kind of work up all the way to the neck and you're gonna pull back as much skin as you can just because it just makes it easier in the long run how to actually like get it out versus always pulling down away getting feathers and you see there's feathers all over the stuff but it all gets kind of cleaned up later anyway so something I noticed when I was cleaning my first bird the other day is you can put a lot of pressure on it and also as long as you're close it'll just the knife will want to peel the skin off and and the meat will stay separated I think it does a pretty good job on its own it does if they're warm and if they're fresh you can usually pull the skin off with it if they're a little tight from sitting for a while I mean here you can see I can just actually you know pull the skin right down which does make it a bit quicker but sometimes it doesn't work as easy as this I'm now down to the wing I'm down to here the legs I'll take out afterwards but it's actually now skinned out to this point you can actually work cleanly there's two parts of the breast you have a tenderloin sitting underneath and you have your main portion here so what I like to do is just kind of cut real close inside the collarbone there or I should say keel bone and you can now see it's actually separating from the tenderloin and you want to work your knife inside and up to get all that meat that kind of curves underneath and you kind of slowly start just following down in the rib cage there how many birds do you think you've cleaned Kevin oh I probably a couple hundred couple hundred I think I've cleaned four I've done a few I've done a number um this spot here up at the collarbone where the keel bone and that's what I struggle through it's the hardest part like it actually falls underneath so what I like to do is actually like kind of turn my knife in and cut down inside there's nothing too punctured there's nothing to worry about there but you can get a lot of meat out of that corner and I'll cut down and then follow up with scraping along the bone here and getting right down to the bottom of the wing socket you notice here yeah there's a little left on the actual bone itself but most of this comes out with that so now I'm actually the bottom it's pretty much separated it's just a matter of cutting off a few things there's a main vein in here that if you can cut close enough to the meat sometimes it won't get messy this one might not too bad I hit the vein every time every time I hit the vein last time so I wasn't expecting Kevin to miss it this is definitely you know the business end of it so after all the fun is done it's now become the work part and actually to get it out and I was very intimidated because with fishing you can release the fish and it's all done but with hunting you got it you got to clean it right there's no catch or release obviously so I was intimidated by cleaning birds but after Kevin showing me once and cleaning a couple birds it's easier than fish and there's no like look at that there you go right there that's a steak that's what two pounds pound and a half probably about maybe a pound maybe just under for one like two inch thick inch and a half so that's one part of it the next that we actually have here is the tenderloin I was telling you about that's this piece right here this is like your some people I guess might say tenderest piece but this piece here actually falls along in a little v section in here so you have to dig your knife cut down and through so this is where like a knife like this little Gerber one that I have or a fillet knife really works nice if you just want to kind of peel your way down until you get to where it actually meets under the wing and cut away yeah that's good there we go that's the good stuff tenderloin breast okay GoPro died but that's not going to stop us we got the iPhone okay let's finish this off we are on the leg okay so we had breast tenderloin we're on the leg this is one of my not the finest pieces I can do with the leg there's a joint in the side here and it looks a little grotesque but you pretty much just want to fold it over a table or a truck box in this case and just kind of pop that joint out of place wow so you can see now the hip separated it's just held on by actual meat and sinew and you just want to fall that down until you start hitting the skin I'm going to pull the skin farther back to help get better access at it and this is all kind of rough work so you kind of trim it up once you're done cleaning too wow that's good that's a lot of meat it's a KFC drumstick right there you now have if you think of what we pulled off this is only one half so we have a breast we have a tenderloin and we have a thigh that's probably a pound and a half for sure and there's still another side to do so even yeah average three pounds for a big grater totally that's a lot of meat all right next you'll see us in the kitchen probably not filming at the iPhone anymore we got a lot of birds to clean now nothing goes to waste we are going to clean all the thighs all the breasts maybe even keep a gooseneck I know Kevin has a thing for goosenecks and we will see in the kitchen