I cooked goat for the first time this week. I am making birria this weekend for cinco de mayo, and wanted to make sure I liked the meat before committing to a large amount for the birria. So I bought 1/2 "shoulder" from a middle eastern shop - here is what it looked like. The meat is from Australia according to the package (Thomas Farms).
I have lots of cookbooks but not too many have recipes using goat meat. Eat Your Books tells me I have > 23,000 recipes, but only 13 using goat (that is 0.06%)! I picked a recipe from Hugh Acheson's The chef and the slow cooker that I borrowed from the library, goat & garlic with couscous. It's a northern African-inspired stew with lots of garlic, sweet onions (I used cipollini onions), carrots, tomato, coriander seeds, lemon, and bay leaves.
I seared the meat on both sides in a cast iron pot, cooked the garlic and transferred to the instant pot together with the other ingredients and the broth, and cooked it in slow cook mode. I found out that the lowest setting isn't equivalent to a slow cook, it's lower and closer to a warming setting. Anyway, it cooked for 5 hours at that low setting, then increased it to medium and cooked for an additional 11 hours. The meat was very tender at the end, pretty much falling apart. I let it cool and separated the meat from the sauce, removed all the bones. The next day, I reduced the sauce and added honey to it, added the meat back and served the stew on top of couscous with a generous sprinkle of fresh oregano. I found the flavors on the milder side so having the fresh oregano on top was key. I would probably use more of everything next time (more garlic, more coriander seeds, etc).
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