Goat is the most widely consumed meat in the world. Yet it’s still scarcely put on the table in households and restaurants across America. Stephanie Izard, executive chef at Chicago’s Girl and the Goat, is trying to change that.
Izard’s foray into the world of goat can be traced to her ancestors. She doesn’t come from a family of goat farmers, but her last name is French for the Pyrnean Chamois, a species of goat that lives in the Pyrenees mountains. After Izard won “Top Chef” Season 4 in June 2008, she took some time off before she opened Girl and the Goat in the summer of 2010. But she put the cart in front of the horse — they’d thought of the name of the restaurant before they’d written the menu.
“I figured if our restaurant was going to have goat in the name, we should probably learn how to cook goat,” Izard told The Daily.
Whether it’s braised in tacos or part of a spicy curry, goat can be found in dishes from Mexico to India. It’s long been a worldwide dietary staple and is lower in fat than chicken and higher in protein than beef. But the types of dishes that Izard is putting on the table in Chicago’s West Loop might be a touch more familiar to the American palate than a Jamaican curry. And while goat has been popping up on seasonal American menus for a few years now, no one is as singularly focused on it as Izard.
“Goat carpaccio, chorizo, smoked goat, goat necks — all sorts of stuff,” Izard — whose first cookbook, “Girl in the Kitchen: How a Top Chef Cooks, Eats, Shops, Thinks and Drinks,” hit shelves this week — said of her menu. “It’s just like playing with pigs. You eat every cut of pig and everything you can think of on menus, so we’re just trying to do the same thing with goat.”
Izard has even found a way to make a goat version of pork belly, which has had its 15 minutes of foodie fame at farm-to-table restaurants in the past few years. “The goat’s belly is not like a pork belly where you’re going to get a big, thick cut. But we found a way — we take all the bellies and confit them and then we sort of pile them up and put a weight on it overnight, so then we’re able to get a nice, thick cut, just like you would with pork belly.”
Because goat is leaner than other meats, it demands a different cooking approach. “It took a lot of experimentation. I think that you take things that you know about other meats and try to apply it to goat and see the things that work and the things that don’t work,” Izard said. Many goat dishes — not just at Girl and the Goat — are braised. But because it’s so lean, it can dry out easily. “We had to find ways to adapt different cooking methods,” Izard said. “So when we braise it, we actually put a little extra fat in.”
These days, you can’t talk about meat without talking about how it’s raised. Is it grass-fed? Where did it come from? Do the farmers read their animals bedtime stories? And while Izard, who gets her goats from Kilgus Farms in Fairbury, Ill., does not use grass-fed goats, there’s a rationale behind it. “We supplement our goats with grain,” Justin Kilgus, who runs Kilgus Farms with his brother, Trent, told The Daily. “We grow our own grain on the farm here. We’ve just noticed a lot higher-quality meat with the grain. It enhances the marbling, and thus it’s a lot more tender of a meat. Rather than an all-grass-fed goat, where it’s a little bit tougher and not quite the quality there.”
And it’s not just Izard who’s embracing goat. At Manhattan’s Scarpetta, chef Scott Conant serves moist-roasted capretto (baby goat) with fingerling potatoes and peas. Shalimar, in San Francisco, serves the Pakistani method, Goat Karahi: diced goat cooked with tomatoes and northern spices. This past April, Bruce Weinstein and Mark Scarbrough released “Goat: Meat, Milk, Cheese,” a book trying, as its name suggests, to push goat forward in the kitchen. And, according to the USDA, more goats were slaughtered than ever in 2010 — 779,000, up from 558,857 in 2004. (The numbers supplied by the USDA are for federally inspected goats, which is required by law.)
How did Chicagoans take to Izard’s goat-centric offerings?
“We were pleasantly surprised with how well it has been received in that people are willing to try all the different parts. I think people are excited to try something new,” Izard said. But it wasn’t just the patrons at her restaurant and her fellow chefs who liked it.
“There’s a meat shop across the street from the restaurant, and I looked out and they were painting something on the glass one day,” she said. “And they’d painted two goats on the window to advertise that they were now selling goats, about a month-and-a-half after we opened. And I thought, ‘Look, people are eating goat!’ It was kind of cool that if we can be one small, small part of what gets people to more widely eat goat, I think it’s great.”
Izard’s foray into the world of goat can be traced to her ancestors. She doesn’t come from a family of goat farmers, but her last name is French for the Pyrnean Chamois, a species of goat that lives in the Pyrenees mountains. After Izard won “Top Chef” Season 4 in June 2008, she took some time off before she opened Girl and the Goat in the summer of 2010. But she put the cart in front of the horse — they’d thought of the name of the restaurant before they’d written the menu.
“I figured if our restaurant was going to have goat in the name, we should probably learn how to cook goat,” Izard told The Daily.
Whether it’s braised in tacos or part of a spicy curry, goat can be found in dishes from Mexico to India. It’s long been a worldwide dietary staple and is lower in fat than chicken and higher in protein than beef. But the types of dishes that Izard is putting on the table in Chicago’s West Loop might be a touch more familiar to the American palate than a Jamaican curry. And while goat has been popping up on seasonal American menus for a few years now, no one is as singularly focused on it as Izard.
“Goat carpaccio, chorizo, smoked goat, goat necks — all sorts of stuff,” Izard — whose first cookbook, “Girl in the Kitchen: How a Top Chef Cooks, Eats, Shops, Thinks and Drinks,” hit shelves this week — said of her menu. “It’s just like playing with pigs. You eat every cut of pig and everything you can think of on menus, so we’re just trying to do the same thing with goat.”
Izard has even found a way to make a goat version of pork belly, which has had its 15 minutes of foodie fame at farm-to-table restaurants in the past few years. “The goat’s belly is not like a pork belly where you’re going to get a big, thick cut. But we found a way — we take all the bellies and confit them and then we sort of pile them up and put a weight on it overnight, so then we’re able to get a nice, thick cut, just like you would with pork belly.”
Because goat is leaner than other meats, it demands a different cooking approach. “It took a lot of experimentation. I think that you take things that you know about other meats and try to apply it to goat and see the things that work and the things that don’t work,” Izard said. Many goat dishes — not just at Girl and the Goat — are braised. But because it’s so lean, it can dry out easily. “We had to find ways to adapt different cooking methods,” Izard said. “So when we braise it, we actually put a little extra fat in.”
These days, you can’t talk about meat without talking about how it’s raised. Is it grass-fed? Where did it come from? Do the farmers read their animals bedtime stories? And while Izard, who gets her goats from Kilgus Farms in Fairbury, Ill., does not use grass-fed goats, there’s a rationale behind it. “We supplement our goats with grain,” Justin Kilgus, who runs Kilgus Farms with his brother, Trent, told The Daily. “We grow our own grain on the farm here. We’ve just noticed a lot higher-quality meat with the grain. It enhances the marbling, and thus it’s a lot more tender of a meat. Rather than an all-grass-fed goat, where it’s a little bit tougher and not quite the quality there.”
And it’s not just Izard who’s embracing goat. At Manhattan’s Scarpetta, chef Scott Conant serves moist-roasted capretto (baby goat) with fingerling potatoes and peas. Shalimar, in San Francisco, serves the Pakistani method, Goat Karahi: diced goat cooked with tomatoes and northern spices. This past April, Bruce Weinstein and Mark Scarbrough released “Goat: Meat, Milk, Cheese,” a book trying, as its name suggests, to push goat forward in the kitchen. And, according to the USDA, more goats were slaughtered than ever in 2010 — 779,000, up from 558,857 in 2004. (The numbers supplied by the USDA are for federally inspected goats, which is required by law.)
How did Chicagoans take to Izard’s goat-centric offerings?
“We were pleasantly surprised with how well it has been received in that people are willing to try all the different parts. I think people are excited to try something new,” Izard said. But it wasn’t just the patrons at her restaurant and her fellow chefs who liked it.
“There’s a meat shop across the street from the restaurant, and I looked out and they were painting something on the glass one day,” she said. “And they’d painted two goats on the window to advertise that they were now selling goats, about a month-and-a-half after we opened. And I thought, ‘Look, people are eating goat!’ It was kind of cool that if we can be one small, small part of what gets people to more widely eat goat, I think it’s great.”
PHOTO: Anthony Tahlier
One dish at Girl and the Goat includes confit goat belly, bourbon butter, lobster, crab and fennel.
PHOTO: Anthony Tahlier
The goat chorizo flatbread, which includes ajvar, peppers, green tomato, apricot and fresh ricotta.
