I havw gotten the chance to go hunt catalina goat in south texas. I a, wondering what the meat is like. I know it will not be venison but is it edible and if so is it any good?
I used to travel to Mexico a lot on business and I'd always ask my customers down there where they'd like to go to diinner. It was usually someplace that had goat meat. They liked it cooked over charcoal and some pretty nice restaurants down there featured it as the main course. I tried it several times and to me it was always kind of dry and course. Not bad, just not something I liked. It was nothing like venison. It has its own taste and texture. I guess it's an acquired taste.
Moose-limbs love it. Goats produce milk, just like cows. Beef is good stuff, so I'm guessing goat meat is also good stuff. Go to a grocery store or a to butcher shop, see if you can get some and try it...
All mammals produce milk, not only cows and goats (Class Mammalia is named for the mammary glands). So not a valid comparison unless one includes mice, bobcats, minks, coyotes, monkeys, etc as being good to eat. Haven't tried these, so I don't know how they taste.
When we hunted around Enchanted Rock and Watch Mountain in Texas we shot a lot of goats and never wasted any of the meat. Cook it like any other meat and it is delicious. Obviously a two year old is going to be a lot tastier and tender than a seven or eight year old billy/nanny, but the back straps from any are great. Known as 'cabrito'.
From your moniker I assume you live in California. There is no shortage of Mexican grocers in our state who sell birria. Saunter in and get a sample. I don't know if wild goat is much different. I had some which my brother in law killed off his rice field. I wouldn't go out of my way to have it. If you don't like it, perhaps you could trade it for some beef or pork in East L.A.
Say it 3 times fast. Yes it can be coarse, but there are different cuts and different recipes. I liked Indian style curried goat & I doubt very much it was the best cut of meat the goat offered.
Could be Catalina goats in South Texas, but most likely they're what we call "Spanish goats". And yes, they are definitely edible. Get a young one, biily, mutton, or nanny, doesn't matter. Long as they haven't started breeding yet. Just like deer, kill it clean and quick. Dress it, being careful not to let the hair get on the meat much. Let it hang and cool. Outside if it's cold enough, or in a cooler, or quarter it and ice it like you probably have done deer.
Equal parts of kosher salt, course ground black pepper, GRANULATED ONION, GRANULATED GARLIC. All equal volumes, or there abouts. Good bed of mesquite or live oak coals, have the fire on one end of the pit, the goat on the other if possible. You're looking to cook with indirect heat, not grill it like a burger. You can take that goat, open him up like a book, or spit him on a rotisserrie, or you can quarter him up. Rub him down all over with those seasonings. Lay it on the pit. Cook it at about 200 or 225. You'll know when it's done by the fact that when you grab a leg bone, and try to pick it up, the meat falls away and all to pieces. Don't be alarmed if it's still very pinkish. If you wanna use a meat thermometer, go for 165-170 in the thickest part. Should take several hours. How long exactly depends on the size of the pieces. You can wrap the smaller parts in tin foil if you break him down to cook. I prefer to do it that way. Once the smaller parts are looking done, just wrap them in tinfoil, set them off to the side, and let the big pieces finish.If you like to baste the meat, half and half of vinegar and oil works, or Italian Salad dressing works. I've even cooked briskets with em at the same time, catch the drippings, and baste the goat with that.
In South Texas and Mexico, they call it "cabrito" and done right, it is fine chow. Yo could cook just one quarter at the time till you kinda learn the ropes, but it isn't hard to do. Pot of beans and some flour tortillas, maybe some quacamole, cold cervesa. It's party time!
I use to work with some Jamaican Guys who had some great curry Recipes for Goat meat dishes, that they would make all the time go onto YOUTUBE, for Jamaican Goat meat Recipes there are some nice ones there.
This is how we cook Mountain goat around here.
Place a rock of equivalent size in roaster with a roast of your choosing,then cook until done, take the roast out and feed goat meat to the dog and eat the rock. The rock is more tender.
gorrilla made me hungry!! Where can I get BBQ for breakfast?
When 14 years old, my buddy and I spent a week on a barrier island off the N. Florida coast with nothing but a pot, a sack of potatoes and onions, salt and a few cans of Beenie Weinies. The plan was to shoot doves and shuck oysters and live like Indians camped among midden mounds a thousand years old. There were no doves. It was a long walk to the only oyster bed not separated from the island by a deep channel.....we got pretty hungry with six days before the next ferry. On the second day, I shot the oldest, rankest, nastiest, boniest old billy goat you can imagine. We boiled him for five days and the gravy was still tough.
Red Wing Blackbirds and oysters made three meals a day for me because I'm deathly allergic to fish. My buddy ate pretty good because fish were plentiful. The goat got to be a joke. We'd cut up big pieces every day in the stew pot hoping they'd lose the 'squeak' when chewed. It never did. We fished out the overdone spuds and onions and put more in but the goat stayed tough.
Since then, I've had several BBQs with goats and pigs sharing center platters. Delicious!
Added to my previous comment. We used to take the backstraps into Miillers Meats in Llano and they smoked them for us. Used to put one on the bar prior to the evening meal with a sharp knife and cut the first five or six thin slices, there was never any left when we sat down for the main meal. I do the same now with der backstraps, use my own marinade as Miillers wouldn't let on what they used.
I've also eaten the backstraps and haunches of a a five year old bull tahr I shot in New Zealand. Backstraps sliced, flattened out and fast fried on a hot skillet with garlic and butter out in the open air. Absolutely delicious. Also try Aoudad, another 'goat', again cook it right and don't mess it about and it is delicious. Most all meat is spoilt by the Chef.
It just so happened a friend has dropped by with a chunk of dead goat. It went in the smoker at 8 this morning and should be done about 4 this afternoon. Apricot and apple wood chips for smoke and charcoal for heat.
THAT was good. My buddy raised this goat and butchered him last fall. He had nothing but butter and Montreal Steak seasoning on it in the smoker. It really was smelling good about 3 hours 'early' so we probed with a thermometer and decided it was lunch instead of supper.
The meat is beefy in texture but slightly venison in flavor. More antelope venison than deer, too. Tender, juicy and by far the best lunch I had all day!
I have been involved in the hunting of lots of mountain goat. It is so tough, we don't even pack it off the mountain, and the government does not insist that we do so (so I guess, a lot of folks agree with my taste in general.) One of my hunters shot the wrong goat (through poor communication I GUESS) and we ended up with a young kid on the ground. I thought, " What the heck!". "I'm gonna try this one out, if IT ain't edible, none of these suckers is!" My wife marinated a couple back-straps for a couple days, and went over it with a tenderizing hammer. Bottom line? The actual taste wasn't bad, but I'm pretty certain you could chew that stuff until your teeth wore down. The only thing we didn't try (and I wish we had) was a pressure cooker. I know that Jamaicans use them when they cook curried goat. Not sure about East Indians, or Arabs. Mexicans do the barbeque thing on cabrito, but I don't know about their marinate deal. But cabrito, does mean baby goat, I think, so it seems obvious that they have some toughness concerns themselves.
Age of the meat is important in most everything we eat. I had my week of trying to chew on an old Billy and shot an over-the-hill bull elk one year that took some pounding and spices to make 'good eating'. A mature Sage Hen will ruin a cast iron skillet but young ones are eatable in a road-kill kind of way. (Have to be out of everything else.)
An old cowboy that just died last year said he grew up on the old Gamble Ranch that ran from the west shore of Great Salt Lake to ten miles inside Nevada line north of what's now I-80. He said they ate beef every week or two and dried some and canned some, but they had no refrigeration so whatever beef they ate came in on the back of a cowboy's saddle.
He said he was 13 years old when Cary Grant bought the Winecup Ranch that runs for 25 miles to the west of Gamble (now one ranch). Cary Grant had a 'Delco Plant' and an ice house and a deep well and really fancied the place up in just a year or so. He decided to show the place off to the Hollywood crowd and made plans for a big party and rodeo. It was a big deal with butchered yearling steers for a big BBQ for all the hands for many miles around and citified people in awe of the REAL West.
The cowboy said he realized he'd never eaten a healthy cow before that day.
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