3.25.14: Using the Whole Animal

By Dan Compton

Here at Vie, we like to use the whole animal whenever we can. It’s more respectful (to the animal), more economical (for the restaurant), more culinarily exciting (for our diners), and more fun (for us in the kitchen).

For those interested, here’s a step-by-step photo montage showing the process of butchering a goat, which we brought in from Slagel Family Farm for a recent wine dinner.

The goat arrives whole, skinned and gutted. In the above photo, the head and neck have already been removed. The head will go into the pot for goat stock. The neck will be slow-cooked along with the shoulders, legs and bellies (and it will yield the most tender, succulent meat… a little tip for carnivores who are unafraid of anatomy and like to be in the know).

After removing the head and neck, we first split the goat in half lengthwise down the spine.

The next step is to cut out the tenderloin, which is tucked underneath the spine at the back of the animal, where the hind leg meets the loin section. We then remove the back leg by sawing through the tail end of the spine.

These are the hind legs of the goat. If we were going to make sausage, we would continue to break down the legs by removing the hip bone and then separating the individual muscles from the femur so we could remove any silver skin and tendons. But for slow cooking, the whole leg works just fine.

Next, we separate the shoulder section from the loin section by cutting between the fourth and fifth ribs. This gives us a large piece of meat encompassing the base of the neck, the shoulder, including the shoulder blade, and the front leg of the goat. Again, for sausage or other, more cut-specific applications, we could continue to break down the shoulder into its component parts, but for slow-cooking, the whole shoulder is perfect.

What’s left is the loin and belly section with the ribs and spine still attached.

We remove the bones, leaving us with a boneless goat loin (the same cut as a pork loin) attached to the belly. Separate the two and you’re left with three cuts from this section: loin, tenderloin and belly.

The bones will go into a pot with the head to make goat stock. The meat between the ribs was harvested to make a goat knockwurst, which we enjoyed for staff meal.

The shoulders, legs and bellies were rubbed with a spice mixture and left to cure for a day. They then spent two hours on the smoker, a few minutes on the wood grill, and seven hours in a low oven, until the meat was fall-apart tender, at which point we harvested it to serve with farinata, fried kale, fennel and rhubarb jam at the wine dinner, along with a goat jus made from the bones.

The loins spent five days in a pungent sauerbraten-style brine made of red wine, vinegar and spices, before being seared and served as a garnish on the same dish. Also not pictured is the goat’s liver, which we turned into goat liver mousse.