Goose Confit: What the heck is it, anyway?

For several days, I took photos of piles of duck and goose fat, salted goose legs, and cooked goose meat sitting at the bottom of a vat of fat and oil.  I posted these photos on the HHMM Facebook page, alluding to the dish that would be the prize at the end of that journey: confit.  The few comments I did get were mostly along the lines of "ok, gross, what the heck is it anyway?"  I'll be the first to admit I had no idea what confit was a couple of years ago, but I stumbled across it in a search for what to do with the piles of duck legs I had after a successful hunting outing.  So what the heck is it, anyway?

Confit is, at it's core, a food preservation process.  It is also a way to get more mileage out of the ducks we harvest. Essentially one renders the fat from a duck or goose, then very, very slowly poaches the legs from that same duck or goose in that same fat, completely submerged, for many hours (like 10).  Really, this is only the beginning of the process.  Then the whole kettle o'duck is chilled, such that the legs are sealed in the congealed fat.  In my 'research' on the subject, The time the meat sits sealed away is the time that full flavor develops.  Makes sense; the meat is cured before the cooking process.  This cure subsequently flavors and salts the fat in which the meat is cooking.  After a few weeks of resting, it is easy to imagine flavors balancing and evening out in the dish.  Apparently, the dish is ready after a week or two of resting, but it can be preserved for months this way.  As another stroke of gourmet genius, the fat used to cook the initial batch of legs can be used over and over again to confit subsequent batches.  This stuff is at the pinnacles of rustic haute cuisine and practicality at the same time.

 

 

Let's back up a few weeks.  Pop Pop and I were several hours into what was already one of our most memorable and successful hunts on the Clark Fork Delta.  Between us, we had harvested nine ducks, and whilst I had been on a walkabout, Pop Pop had managed to scratch a goose from a low flying flock.  Now that I was back in the blind the wind had picked up and riled up lots of flocks, and a few came within range.  On one occasion a flock few by closer than the rest.  I picked out the closest and unluckiest bird, swung through and kept swinging and pulled the trigger.  The big bird folded and hit the water hard.  Jocko waited for the command to retrieve the bird but not patiently.  He powered out, expecting to find another pint sized bufflehead.  You could see he was a little taken aback by the size of the bird as he neared it, but the dog has heart and he clamped onto a leg, made the long swim back, and delivered the bird to hand.  Not bad for a pocket sized lab.  It was an awesome moment.  We don't normally kill a lot of ducks, and we rarely get a shot at geese, let alone hit them.  Something special was going to need to be done to commemorate our great hunt, and it seemed that a batch of confit would be just the thing.  Now I had both the inspiration and raw material to conduct this experiment.

 

Classically, confit de canard is made from the same ducks that give up their inflated livers for fois gras.  As a means of getting more product for their effort, duck farmers made confit.  When a duck is fed such that its fatted liver has exquisite flavor, one might assume that the rest of the bird, including the fat would have the same quality.  Not surprisingly, duck fat is all the rage as a cooking medium these days.  It is easy enough to buy duck fat (and confit, for that matter) from several online purveyors, but I wanted local flavor.

 

My raw material differs a little from theirs.  I saved fat and skin from one of the geese and most of the buffleheads and rendered it.  This is a simple process.  Put the fat and skin in a heavy sauce pan, add a small quantity of water, a cook on low heat for several hours.  Apparently, if it boils, it is bad news, so go slow.  Turns out you can render a pretty good quantity of fat from a limit of buffleheads and a goose, but it isn't quite enough for the four goose legs I saved.  I made up the remainder needed to cover the legs in the bottom of a cast iron dutch oven with olive oil, which is considered by some cooks to be an appropriate substitute for the duck fat.  Ten hours of cooking and two weeks of storage later, we pulled two legs from the fat, put them on a drip pan, and roasted them in a hot oven until the skin started to crisp.

 

 

 

Perhaps I didn't roast the skin crispy enough, but we did without it in the end.  The flavor of that component alone was subpar.   Everything else was spectacular.  Rich is certainly a word that should be applied to wild goose confit, but it doesn't end there.  It is fork tender meat, and it has all of the flavor that makes waterfowl delicious and unique, but with none of the harsh liver flavor.  Only this was special.  The cure penetrated evenly to the bone and corned beef was slightly in the back of my mind, but it was moist, never too salty, and really like nothing I had tasted before.  Succulent.  Really, really good, and worth the effort.  And remember, I made it with bufflehead and Canada goose fat.  The fat was in no way flavorless, but it sure wasn't nasty, either.  Bottom line, I'll be saving that treasure trove of blended goose, bufflehead, and olive fat for the slow poaching and preservation duck legs next season.