Smoked Wild Goose Sausage

A goose is a lot of dark, rich, lean meat wrapped around a frame, and most people ruin it by cooking the breast like a steak and giving up. Ground into sausage with enough pork fat, it’s some of the best game sausage there is — deep and beefy, a little livery in the good way, and it takes smoke beautifully. I make this with the legs and thighs and the trim off the breasts, the parts that otherwise get wasted. Same staged smoke as my kielbasa.

Ingredients

MEAT BLOCK (2,720 g / 6 lb)

• 1,810 g (4 lb) skinned goose meat — legs, thighs, breast trim — all silverskin and tendon removed — ~67%
• 910 g (2 lb) pork back fat or fatty pork shoulder — ~33%

SEASONING

• 48 g salt (~1.8%)
• 6.8 g Cure #1 (2.5 g/kg = 156 ppm on the 2,720 g block — REQUIRED, this is smoked, see notes)
• 6 g coarse black pepper
• 6 g fresh garlic, minced
• 4 g mustard seed
• 3 g ground allspice
• 180 ml (¾ cup) ice water (or dry red wine)
• 32–35 mm hog casing

Directions

1. Cure first: the Cure #1 is not optional here. A cold-then-warm smoke parks the meat for hours in the 40–140°F danger zone, which is exactly what nitrite exists to protect against. Weigh it on a gram scale — 2.5 g per kg of meat-plus-fat.
2. Trim and pluck: goose legs are full of tendons; get them out. Pick every shot pellet while you’re at it — you’ll find them, and a tooth will find the ones you miss.
3. Grind cold: near-frozen, through a 1/4” (6 mm) plate, goose and pork fat together.
4. Mix: seasoning, cure and ice water to a good tacky bind, cold the whole time (Vevor mixer, parts frozen).
5. Stuff: 32–35 mm hog casing, linked. Rest overnight, uncovered, in the fridge so the cure distributes and the surface dries.
6. Smoke, staged, over hickory: an hour at 130°F with the dampers open and no water pan (dry the surface or the smoke streaks), then 150°F, 170°F, 190°F — an hour each, pulling at 155–165°F internal.
7. Finish and bloom: into the 165°F water bath (my bin with the sous-vide heater) to 160°F internal, then ice water 20 minutes, then hang 2–3 hours to bloom to a deep mahogany.

Notes

Fat, again. Goose is leaner than it looks under all that skin fat — and you don’t want the skin fat in the grind, it’s soft and greasy. Trim it off, render it separately for cooking, and carry hard pork back fat into the sausage instead.

Duck works the same way. This exact formula takes wild duck, or a duck/goose mix, one-for-one. Bigger, older birds are actually better for sausage — the meat that’s too tough to roast grinds into something wonderful.

The smoke schedule is my grandfather’s, adapted. The staged 130→190°F ladder, the dry first hour, the water-bath finish and the bloom are all lifted straight from how I make my kielbasa — see that page for the reasoning behind each step.