ETM, HIX and River Cottage to launch inaugural #Goatober
Do good and eat goat. #Goatober is the UK's first month-long celebration of the dairy billy goat meat industry
Goatober is the UK’s inaugural month long celebration of the dairy billy goat meat industry. During the month of October, restaurants nationwide including ETM Group, HIX Restaurants, River Cottage Canteens, Shotgun BBQ, I’ll be Mother and Romy’s Kitchen will be putting a goat dish pride of place on their menus and urging diners to try this delicious but much under-used meat. Roasted, raw, curried, baked, skewered, stuffed into a sausage, goat is the meat to be savoured this season.
To mark the launch of Goatober, six competing chefs will each serve a goat inspired dish at a ticketed event at The Jugged Hare, Barbican, London, on Wednesday 5th October. Tickets for the event are £85 per person and go on sale today via 020 7614 0134. Each savoury dish will be wine paired by ETM’s Group Head Sommelier Gui Mahaut, followed by petit fours and coffee. The full line up of chefs and their dishes are:
Smoked Kid Loin, Goat Rustler’s Perk
Stephen Englefield, The Jugged Hare, London
Pulled Shoulder of Goat with Puri and Glazed Onions
Romy Gill, Romy’s Kitchen, Bristol
Kid Faggots, Parsnip and Burnt Butter Purée and Cornish Ale Gravy
Scott Goss, The Twenty Six, Tunbridge Wells
Curried Chop with Rock Samphire Pakora
Jamie Guy, HIX Oyster & Chop House, London
Grilled Merguez Spiced Goat with English Quinoa, Rose Honey, Whole Lemon Dressing and Yogurt
Charlie James, River Cottage Canteen, Bristol
Kid Tartare and Fried Oyster
Gill Meller, River Cottage, Devon
During the evening there will also be a silent auction with an array of top prizes, with all proceeds going to Action Against Hunger, an international humanitarian organisation committed to ending child hunger around the world. Hosted by journalist and food writer Joe Warwick, prizes will include dinner for six at The Jugged Hare; a bundle of signed cookbooks from Quadrille Publishers including Gather by Gill Meller, Grill, Smoke, BBQ by Ben Tish and Deep South by Brad McDonald; an exclusive dinner for six cooked at the winner’s home by Romy Gill; a fish cookery course for two at River Cottage; dinner for two at The Twenty Six; a kid leather product from Billy Kid Leather, the UK’s only entirely British kid leather micro-tannery; plus ‘Challenge HIX’, an amazing opportunity for two people to experience the head to head creative process of Mark Hix and his team for each new menu. Each Head Chef has 20 minutes to cook as many dishes with pre-season ingredients against Mark, and the best dishes will appear on the menu in the coming weeks. The highest auction bidder and a friend will get to watch this process, judge (and eat) the dishes and ultimately shape the new season HIX menus. They will also receive a signed cook book by Mark Hix.
#Goatober is the brainchild of Heritage Radio Network Executive Director, Erin Fairbanks, and renowned New York cheesemonger, Anne Saxelby. #Goatober is an annual campaign every year in October in the US. In 2010, Heritage Foods USA partnered with a dozen goat dairies around upstate New York and Vermont to purchase their unwanted males, who, as unable to produce milk for dairy products, are euthanized at birth. Over 50 New York City chefs agreed to feature goat on their menu for the full month of October including Gramercy Tavern, Babbo, Spotted Pig and Bar Boulud and the campaigns success has continued to grow.
Seeing the success of #Goatober US and while chatting to Shotgun BBQ owner and chef Brad MacDonald, James Whetlor from Cabrito Goat Meat decided to bring the UK together in a month long celebration of goat meat. He comments,
“As an ex-chef myself, there’s nothing that delights me more than seeing top chefs prepping our goat in imaginative, inspired and delicious ways. It’s now possible to sit down in fantastic restaurants to a pile of harrisa slathered goat chops, or goat soulaki, goat tacos or Indian styled pulled goat shoulder or a British classic of boned and rolled stuffed saddle. Britain is finally waking up to the what the rest of the world has known for some time; goat meat is delicious!”