Slow Roasted Leg of Goat

Cooked in a Weber

What's going on here? One minute I'm stressing about having nothing to write about for my January blog, and the next minute I'm on to my second. They're sort of connected too. It was when we were staying with our friends in Herefordshire (see Ben's Curry Chicken Potjie), that I was taken to visit a fabulous local butcher, Legges of Bromyard. They had 2.5kg trays of mixed cuts of young goat for sale. How could I resist. Goat seems impossible to get hold of where I live yet here, 80 miles from home there it was, in abundance.

Our traditional Sunday family meal in the cooler months is a proper English roast dinner. We alternate between lamb, beef, pork and chicken with each family member having their particular favourite. Chicken with stuffing, beef with Yorkshire pud, pork with crackling, and lamb with mint sauce. So now it was to be goat. Our teenage daughter Kitty trembled at the thought (chicken is her favourite) and to be honest I was not looking forward to her asking what we would be having.

Weber chimney starter

My attraction to goat goes back to my time in Perth. I have two good friends there who occasionally satisfied my cravings for 'capretto' as a special treat. One had an outdoor wood fired oven and he would slow roast fist sized pieces in a large tray with garlic and herbs. I remember the smell wafting up the street as I arrived.

So here I was with a 1.2kg piece of goat leg and a bag of lumpwood charcoal. This was a big moment.

Goat is an incredibly lean and healthy meat. It benefits from slow roasting and some form of additional fat. I rubbed it with olive oil, and made a few slits between the muscles and inserted a couple of anchovy fillets and slivers of garlic. I laid it on a bed of rosemary sprigs in a pyrex roasting dish, tossed in a few trimmed heads of garlic and whacked it in the Weber.

I kept a bit of water in the bottom of the dish throughout the cooking time to provide a bit of steam and prevent the garlic and herbs from burning. It needed an extra splash from time to time. I also added a few knobs of butter on top of the meat about half way through.

It had a good hot start and was then left for about 2 1/2 hours with a gradually reducing temperature. Half an hour before the end I wrapped it in foil and removed the juices to add to the gravy which I was making on the hob. The gravy base was made simply with butter, flour and chicken stock.

The meat was tender and made a interesting change to our "English" Sunday roast. A jar of mint sauce on the table had a sufficiently Anglicising effect and really did go well with the meat. Well, Kitty did try it, smiled politely, and then left most of it neatly arranged around the edge of her plate so she could lap up the spuds and the gravy.

The other cuts from the 2 1/2 kg tray went into the freezer and will surface again soon in the form a proper 'curry goat', cooked over an open fire in my potjie, sorry, I don't have one so I'll give it a go in my Kotlich instead. Watch this space!