Cooking: Crock Pot Goose

Cranberry Mandarin Wild Goose in the slow cooker

We had a church potluck this past week and I cooked up the goose Aaron shot this spring to share. Aaron cooked a goose last year, other than that we've never made goose before, but I did look up a lot of recipes online to get some idea of what to do. There were very few recipes for slow cooking the goose, most were for roasting in the oven and involved a lot of basting. I needed a hands free option so I could let it cook during church service and have it ready after. It turned out really good so thought it could be fun to share the recipe here!

I needed a hands free option so I could let it cook during church service and have it ready after.

We couldn't remember how Aaron cooked the goose last year, just that it was in the crock pot, and we happened to have some fresh oranges and apples on hand at the time (which is a bit rare for us) that he stuffed the goose with. All the recipes I found online recommended using beef broth and not chicken broth for some reason. Another had a black current sauce they put on afterward, which reminded me I had some black currant jam. So I found what I had, Beef broth, canned mandarins and craisins and threw it together, with black currant sauce or cranberry sauce as optional toppings.

Crock Pot Goose

Ingredients

• Butter

• Salt

• Sage, rubbed or ground

• Beef broth, about 4 cups

• 1 can mandarin oranges in juice

• about 1/2 cup craisins

• water

• plucked, de-gutted and rinsed whole wild goose

Directions

1. Prep the goose, rinse it off and pat it dry. We kept the heart and threw it inside the cavity.

2. Rub the outside of the goose with butter, then sprinkle the sage and salt all around and in it.

3. Pour the beef broth in the slow cooker, add a bit extra water till its about half full.

4. Stuff some Craisins in the cavity along with the heart, and pour the mandarins with their juice in there and stuff the rest of the craisins in. Then gently lower the goose into the broth in the crockpot

5. Cook with lid on for about 6 hours, till internal temp of 165. (I did 3 hrs on high and 3 on low because I wanted to make sure it was done all the way, but the temp was up above 200F when I checked at the end of 6 hrs, so I think it would have been fine on low that whole time)

And that's it! Carve it up and served with some black currant jam or cranberry sauce and share it with friends!

I forgot to get a picture of it cooking or afterward, so here is a picture of a goose from the internet instead :)