The experiment

The healing in my foot has progressed to a point where I decided I'm up to a bit of experimenting with the smoker.

I had a pile of wild goose breasts in the freezer and I've been researching how to go about cooking them. The short of a long story is I've come up with a plan to hot smoke them.

They're lean and skinned both of which aren't ideal for smoking. The skin adds oil and helps to keep the flesh moist. You can mitigate that by soaking in brine (salt, brown sugar and water), washing and drying them, then wrapping in bacon. Or so my theory goes. I've also butterflied the breasts as they're thick.

I've tried to control the heat by using a mix of walnut shells and medium/fine manuka sawdust, soaked for varying lengths of time in white wine.

Now is the moment of truth. The fisher/hunter is lifting the lid on the smoker. We'll either eat well or we'll need a cooked chicken from the supermarket to go with veges I've prepared earlier.

Which will it be? :-)

They weren't too bad, actually they were better than I expected. Other than running out of meths (used in burner under the smoker) and needing to finish off a few inside, they were pretty good. We sliced them finely and served them with the mix of roasted red onions, red peppers, beans, beetroot and mushrooms, and kumara.

Next time I'll start them off in the smoker, then transfer them to the slow cooker and add something like black currents or black berries. Even the addition of orange would be good.

All in all, a satisfying experiment :-)