GOAT by James Whetlor is a truly excellent book about Goats and cooking with Goat meat.

I confess that like many most of my previous experience of eating Goat has been mainly restricted to Curried Goat from numerous West Indian, Jamaican, and Caribbean takeaways and restaurants.

I am not going to list out the exact recipe you can buy the book for that, I just want to give you the idea and its pretty easy to work out amounts if you use your common sense.

I find that the cookbook gives the inspiration and as long as you are not heavy handed with a spice it usually all works out just fine.

Get your Goat meat in a bowl and add in lemon juice, chopped garlic, Jamaican curry powder, chopped spring onion (scallions), thyme, chopped chilli, salt and pepper.

Now this will be where you set your spice level of heat. I have noticed that most of the Jamaican curry powders I have bought really are not that spicy so its more about the flavour than the heat.

Your heat is going to come from the chilli so add as to your desire, we did add a chopped up red Scotch Bonnet and some of the seeds as I like to taste my curry and not just sweat the spice, but each to their own.

Next step is pretty easy as you can see, just mixed it all up in the bowl with a bit of vegetable oil and then left it to marinate for about an hour.

I expect you can leave it longer or not even bother at all if you wanted to. I am sure that the marination does have an impact in ‘letting the flavour develop’ or tenderizing the meat.

I don’t have a chart vs time to check and to be honest I don’t really care that much as I was going to bung it all in the slow cooker anyway 🙂

So do what you feel happiest with and if like me in all honestly you just wanted it to get started while you pop out to the shop to pick up other stuff you forgot about for the recipe it will all be fine in the end 🙂

So I did say bung it all in the slow cooker, but you can cook on the stove top as well if you want to and that was the suggestion in the book. So however you do the next bit will depend on your plans for the next few hours

The recipe also calls for onions and a bit of tomato paste. I added an onion to the pan and cooked until soft, spooned in some tomato paste, another spoon of the Jamaican curry powder and cook a bit longer until it was all nicely mixed and bubbling.

Add that to the slow cooker pot together with your marinated ingredients or add your marinated ingredients into your onion mix in the stove pot

You may need to add a bit of water but remember that in the slow cooker all the liquid will mostly remain so add just enough to cover.

In the stove pot it will evaporate and so you can add as you need if it gets a bit too thick or looks like it is drying out just add a bit more.

A few hours later once the curry had cooked away gently and the meat is tender and falling apart add some potatoes and leave it to cook a bit longer.

On the stove top about half an hour, but in the slow cooker it will take longer so it might be a good idea to par boil your spuds before adding.

I like to leave mine a little longer so that the potato thickens the curry gravy a little bit, that is how I like it though so feel free to do it as you like

That’s basically it, all very simple really once you have it all in the pot cooking, the kind of easy cook meal I love.

If you were being a purist I would suggest serving this with ‘rice and peas’ but I found it just as good served with some plain boiled rice.

I added a big dollop of mango chutney to add a little acid and a little tang where needed to a spoonful as I desired.

I do have to say though that this really was an excellent Curry and I was really glad that James did decide to add it into it. It was quite subtle in flavour, nothing jumped out to cause a big fuss.

I think the type of Jamaican Curry powder that you use has an effect of the taste, I was picking out hints of allspice and cinnamon in the one we were using.

I like that this style of curry did not use a lot of tomato just a bit of paste as that made it less acidic.

The addition of the potato made the sauce kind of creamier as well and it was more like a nice goat casserole than a big ole spicy curry.

I was really glad that I found this cook book, as it really does have so much more to it than just a Goat Curry recipe.

I have tried so far a number of other dishes (read more here and here) but I really did have to gravitate to check out his Goat Curry recipe.

I was really glad that I did as it turned out to be one of the better ones that I have found!

Goat – Cooking and Eating by James Whetlor is published by Quadrille