What species of duck/geese do you think tastes the best?

It’s all about how you cook and prep it. Not my favour but I like canadas. You can get over 2kg of meat off one and as long as you know what you’re doing they’re great. I’ve turned them into: Nachos, Hoisin, Crispy ā€œduckā€ with pancakes, and mixed with pork fat to make mince.

Steven Rinella of Meat Eater does a good book which has some recipe ideas but tbh you can essentially just take any normal recipe and sub in the meat. Like most wild game it’s the fat that can let it down and give that muddy taste. Trim that fat and you’re golden.
 
  • Like
Reactions: DRN
Species is important but so is diet.

We shoot some species that you can’t, such as tundra swans. Early in the season they are eating aquatic life and taste like diving or sea ducks. Very hard to make them palatable. Three months later they have migrated 2000 miles and are on grain fields and are quite good if your shoot a young (grey) one.

As a general rule I class them like this - from worst to best
Sea ducks(shellfish in a summer bin for a week) then divers (pochards you would say) then teal/wigeon followed by large grain fed puddlers ( Mallard and Pintails).
Favorite way to eat a perfect mallard or pintail is to pluck then breast out as one piece. Marinate in cranberry juice for a few hours, then season. Put the meat side onto a hot grill to quickly sear, the slip a piece of fatty bacon in there and close it up with a tooth pick. Crisp the skin on both side on the same hot grill, serve pink in the center with a brown gravy with copious garlic.

For geese, we usually put snow geese at the bottom. Not truly fair, as a young snow is quite good, but old birds can be very old (they live up,to 20 years). Then canadas (and I think Greylags are equivalent - at least the ones I’ve eat ) followed by whitefronts (in my opinion pinks are about the same) .

For older tougher geese I will either serve as a kabob, after overnight marinade in pineapple and canned tomato + jalapeƱo. Season with a Greek style seasoning, then kabob with whatever else you like (petite potatoes, mushrooms, pepper, onion, cherry tomatoes). Drizzle all with olive oil and grill

For younger birds I either roast as a proper plucked bird, smoke, or if shot (or if I don’t feel like plucking) I’ll breast out and season with Mexican spices then grill before serving with sautĆ©ed onions and peppers as Fajitas on tortillas, with some fresh pico de gallo to accompany
 
The only reason I say is pintail have grey feet .
Gadwall generally have pale yellow feet
Also the Blueish bit and elongated bill hint towards pintail to me .
I’m not saying I’m right as I’m no expert.
But just curious if you have any other picture to convince me otherwise
 
I ate a mandarin duck once, when the birds were distributed at the end of a rough shoot I picked what I thought was a female teal in the bad light.

That was good eating. But never to be repeated.
 
Put the goose in the oven next to a brick.

When the brick crumbles, throw away the goose and eat the brick.šŸ‘Øā€šŸ³
Nah - for the really rough old birds I’ll grind/mince and make sausage. Proper spice mix and some fat will
Cover up a multitude of issues

And if they are really really tough they become jerky/meat sticks. Mince to almost a paste then season and cure/salt and shoot them out of the jerky shooter
 
Left is 100% Hen Pintail Right Hen Gadwall. Drake Gadwall have black bill's not blue and small piece of black as the left Duck has šŸ‘ I've shot both within the last week and hundreds over the years šŸ‘
I mean you may be right. The two were flying close together though and came in as a single pair. That is of course unless these ducks are not the ones I think I shot in the darkness and they were mixed up. I looked in my bird book and I couldn't make a conclusive identification based on this sole photo and the illustrations.

Things I definitely know:

A pair of duck came in together. I shot at both. I saw one drop.

YPM says he saw two drop (he was in a slightly different place). But someone else also shot at the other one. One of, or both of us, or neither of us, may have hit it. Depends if you believe YPM or not.

But we did pick one of these, and then found the other wounded in the water.

Too many variables here and not enough data to solve the equation. It's quite infuriating and your quite reasonable pintail hypotheses has injected doubt into a good story.
 
We are in the season for a bit of waterfowling, so that got me thinking what species do you think tastes the best??


Feel free to share any recipes you have
Domestic duck, otherwise for both domestic and wild goose and wild duck the traditional brick recipe is by far the best!
 
Back
Top