Everything for the Christmas goose – shopping tour for goose food

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The perfect roast goose as a Christmas dinner

Hardly anything is as typical as the Christmas goose on the holidays. A Christmas goose brings back memories of childhood. Christmas parties with parents and grandparents. Eating goose was a tradition with us. Even today it is part of our Christmas festival. You can prepare it yourself. Or enjoy in the restaurant.

 

But first of all we have a recipe for a Christmas goose to eat at home:

Christmas goose in beer sauce

Serves 5 people:

  • 1 goose (approx. 4,4 to 5 kilograms)
  • a large onion
  • 1 tart apple
  • Salt
  • pepper
  • thyme
  • mugwort
  • 100 g sugar
  • 0,33 liters of beer (e.g. Veltins Pils)

Preparation of the Christmas goose for goose dinner at home:

Remove the goose offal. Then wash the goose thoroughly and season with salt. Rub the outside well with salt, pepper and thyme. Fill with a few apple and onion pieces and a sprig of mugwort (mugwort stimulates fat burning and makes the roast more digestible). Caramelize the sugar in a roasting pan and add the remaining apples and onions, pour in about 1/4 liter of water and fry the goose in the oven for 25 minutes at 170 degrees Celsius. Then turn the goose over and cook for another 40 minutes. It is doused several times with beer and the gravy so that an evenly shiny, crispy skin forms. At the end of the cooking time, let the goose rest a little longer at 80 degrees until it can be carved at the table. A tasty goose sauce can be prepared from the roasted meat if you remove the liquid goose fat.
Fit potato dumplings and apple red cabbage.
(Source: djd / Brewery C. & A. Veltins)

You can buy the ingredients in the supermarket, but it is much nicer to buy them directly from the local farmers. This time we spent a few days under the sign of the goose Burgenland. We were invited to a shopping tour that took us through Burgenland via Eisenstadt to Lake Neusiedl. Our route took us to producers who supplied the ingredients for the Christmas goose and our goose meal that we prepared at the end of our trip.

We got to know and tasted delicious, amazing and interesting things on our trip through Burgenland. Follow us on our journey to the Christmas goose in Burgenland.

 

 

These geese spend their lives on pasture © Copyright Monika Fuchs, TravelWorldOnline
These geese spend their lives in the pasture

Where can you order your Christmas goose?

In the beginning there is of course the goose. We get these from the largest goose farm in Burgenland, from Herta Schneider in Eisenberg, where My Weidegans enjoying her life. Our first surprise awaits us there. More than 1300 geese approach us curiously. They live in the wild for twenty months in a pasture that is not covered. When I asked why the geese don't fly away, Wolfgang Scheiblauer replied: “You feel at home here. Sometimes they fly over the fence, but they keep coming back. ”They can fly, as they prove to us with chatter and group flights. Unlike fattened geese, which are fed ready for slaughter within a few weeks, the grazing geese in Burgenland leave it to nature to determine how much weight they eat. Most of the time they feed on the grass on their pasture and also receive barley, oats and wheat from their own cultivation.

 

 

Cucumber, tomato or beetroot vinegar for goose food
It's hard to choose: cucumber, tomato or beetroot vinegar?

Pumpkin seed oil for the Christmas goose

A few miles away we visit the Family Hirmann in Rudersdorfthat makes vinegar. For our goose, we get pumpkin seed oil here, which the family also produces. However, when we enter their warehouses, the scent of apples almost takes our breath away. The apple varieties, each of which smells different, are stored in the containers. “We have orchards. But what we harvest there is not enough. That is why we buy varieties from other apple growers in the region, ”explains Andrea Hirmann.

That's why the warehouse is overflowing with yellow, red, colorful and green apple varieties that are waiting to be processed into vinegar, apple juice or brandies. But apples are not the only ingredients the Hirmanns use to make vinegar. In their sales room we discover vinegar made from red wine or white wine, but also from cherry, strawberry, raspberry, pear, apricot, peach, sour cherry, plum or quince. Vegetable vinegars made from cucumber, carrot, pumpkin, turnip, pepper or tomato are also more exotic. There are also vinegar variations made from wild garlic, dark or light beer, nuts or horseradish.

 

 

Vegetable ingredients for our goose meal
Vegetable stand at the weekly market in Eisenstadt in Burgenland for the ingredients for our goose meal

Fruit for filling the Christmas goose

On Friday we drive on to the capital of Burgenland, Eisenstadt. We visit the weekly market there. The local farmers sell fruit and vegetables. We also get ingredients for our roast goose from the market. There are chutneys made from apricots, apples or plums, liqueurs made from sour cherries or sloes and a cognac made from quince. I find the spruce tip honey interesting. How does it taste? There are also carrots, potatoes, cauliflower, horseradish and other vegetables.

 

 

What is the best wine for our Christmas goose?
What is the best wine to go with our Christmas goose?

Which wine for the Christmas goose?

A glass of wine should not be missing with a Christmas goose. In the Haus am Kellerplatz in Purbach in the Leithaberg region we can taste the wines of the region's winemakers. In Burgenland's wine shop, visitors can use a chip card to pour the wines themselves. A concept that is interesting. They can choose how big they want to drink and how many wines they want to try. Unlike the wine tastings we are used to, in Purbach this is controlled by a computer system that bills the wines individually. When the amount on the chip card has been used up, you simply have it topped up again and can continue your search for the wine for the Christmas goose.

Do you like to travel by motorhome?

 

Apple flavor for Christmas goose dinner
Apple flavor goes well with goose food

What brings the apple flavor to our goose meal?

The rest of the day we spend on the Apfelhof of the Leeb family in St. Andrä am Zicksee. We drive out with Albert Leeb to one of the apple orchards, where he explains to us what he has to pay attention to when growing apples. As we listen to his explanations, we quickly realize how difficult this is, but also how satisfying it is. Then he puts baskets in our hands and says: “Now it’s your turn. Pick as many apples as you can.” We're happy to oblige, because the taste of the apples goes well with a roast goose. Our Christmas goose will not be stuffed with apples the next day. But we take a few bottles of the apple juice that the Leeb family and their team make from their apples. This goes perfectly with a goose dinner that we prepare ourselves.

We are preparing the Christmas goose

We spend the last day of our trip to the goose in the kitchen of the paprika hostess Ilona Püspök, who does the Landgasthof Altes Brauhaus operates in Frauenkirchen. With the support of their chef Robert, our ingredients are now prepared into a goose meal. While our goose braises in the oven at 170 degrees seasoned with salt, pepper and marjoram for about an hour and a half, Robert prepares a mousse from the goose liver. He then serves this to us as a starter together with pumpkin slices, quince jam and a cherry sauce Old cherry varieties from the Leitha Mountains. The main course of our goose dinner consists of our Christmas goose with red cabbage and white cabbage salad. There are also bread dumplings, quince jam and lentil vegetables. On our dessert plate we find the Leithaberg cherries, but also an apple cake, apricot jam and a Somlo'er dumpling. Isn't this a fitting end to our trip to the goose in Burgenland? What do you all mean?

 

Goose dinner for Christmas goose
The result of our shopping tour through Burgenland: goose dinner with cabbage

 

Everything for the Christmas goose
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Do you know this?

 

Source: On-site research at the invitation of Burgenland Tourismus. However, our opinion remains our own.

Text: © Copyright Monika Fuchs and TravelWorldOnline
Photos: © Copyright Monika Fuchs and TravelWorldOnline
Video: © Copyright Petar Fuchs and TravelWorldOnline

Everything for the Christmas goose – shopping tour for goose food

Monika Fuchs

Monika Fuchs and Petar Fuchs are the authors and publishers of the Food and Slow Travel blog  TravelWorldOnline. They have been publishing this blog since 2005. TravelWorldOnline has been online since 2001. Their topics are trips to Savor, wine tourism worldwide and slow travel. During her studies Monika Fuchs spent some time in North America, where she - partly together with Petar Fuchs - traveled to the USA and Canada and spent a research year in British Columbia. This intensified her thirst for knowledge, which she satisfied for 6 years as an adventure guide for Rotel Tours and then for 11 years as a tour guide for Studiosus Reisen around the world. She was constantly expanding her travel regions, but curiosity still gnawed at her: "What's beyond the horizon? What else is there to discover in this city? Which people are interesting here? What do they eat in this region?" As a freelance travel journalist (her articles have appeared in DIE ZEIT, 360° Canada, 360° USA, etc.), she is now looking for answers to these questions as a travel writer and travel blogger in many countries around the world. Petar Fuchs produces the videos on this blog as well as on YouTube. Monika Fuchs from TravelWorldOnline is among Germany's top 50 bloggers in 2021. Find more Information about Monika and Petar Fuchs here.