Got a craving for a festive stuffed goose?
A vegan stuffed goose? In this recipe I am preparing a whole bird, with legs and wings. Hearty stuffed with apples and chestnuts. With juicy meat and crispy, fat skin.
My vegan goose roast not only looks incredibly realistic, it tastes like the real thing too! Hearty, meaty, Christmas-flavoured, festively spicy, simply delicious! Soft and tender meat, that I am making from seitan and jackfruit. The wings and legs include bones made from cinnamon sticks.
The perfect vegan Thanksgiving – just use the bird as a turkey
It is also the perfect vegan turkey dish for a vegan Thanksgiving. In Germany, where I live, we just don’t really celebrate Thanksgiving. Also, eating turkeys is not as popular over here, as it is in some other countries. So, if you are looking for a vegan stuffed turkey, this is your recipe! Vegan poultry at it’s best!
Celebrate a true German festive Christmas – prepare a vegan goose
A very common Christmas dish here in Germany is the “Weihnachtsgans”, “Christmas goose”. It is a bit like a thanksgiving turkey, but made from goose.
Since millions of goose get killed for that feast every year a German tv show asked me to make a plant based version of the traditional German ‘Weihnachtsgans’. I could not resist to accept that challenge.
The show is for children and teenagers and it contains a mix of news, entertainment and education. I am the head chef of this episode working on the vegan goose with one of the hosts. She is helping me to prepare it. And at the end, we’re eating the vegan German Christmas feast together. The show is called “neuneinhalb”.
It is shown on German television on the 19th and 20th of December 2020, if you’re interested and if you’ve got the German channels called ARD, WDR or KiKa you can watch it… Those channels also have quite a huge online selection of their videos, where you can watch the show over the next years.
No animals were harmed in this production!
This recipe also works very well as a traditional vegan thanksgiving turkey.
Here are a few cell phone photos I took while shooting:
Ingredients for 1 vegan goose or vegan turkey:
Stuffing:
1 celeriac, rather small, approx. 10 cm in diameter
100 g smoked tofu, finely diced
2 tbsp soy sauce
2 onions, finely diced
1 small carrot, finely diced
1/4 leek, finely diced
2 sprigs of rosemary, the leaves
1 apple, sour kind, like Boskop
200 g chestnuts, pre cooked, halved
2 tbsp maple syrup
50 ml red wine
1 piece of toast, finely diced
50 g cranberries
1 orange, organic, the juice and 1 tablespoon zest
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
6 cloves
1 star anise
1 bunch of parsley, finely chopped
Alba oil, a Swedish oil with a buttery taste. You can use other frying oil instead.
salt
pepper
Vegan poultry meat:
6 cans of jackfruit (in brine, available in Asian stores, approx. 500 g per can)
1 litre of light stock
6 tbsp chickpea flour, mixed with 150 ml water
250 g vital wheat gluten
6 tsp of nutritional yeast flakes
3 tsp of onion powder
2 tsp of liquid smoke
1.5 tsp of salt
Approx. 15 sheets of rice paper
4 cinnamon sticks
Glaze for the skin of the vegan Christmas goose:
3 tbsp oil
3 tbsp ketchup
1 tbsp maple syrup
1 tbsp rose hip jam or other jam
0.5 tsp curry powder (Madras, English curry)
1 tsp paprika powder
1 tsp garlic powder
0.5 tsp chilli powder
1 tsp thyme, chopped
2 tsp of salt
2 tsp of pepper, coarsely ground
4 toothpicks
Kitchen twine
Frying stock:
50 ml red wine
80 ml of dark beer
1/2 tbsp dark balsamic vinegar
1 tbsp sweet mustard
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp pepper
1/2 tsp salt
Vegetable bed for the vegan goose:
8 shallots
1 apple (Boskop or other sour variety), peeled, cut into wedges
10 prunes
3 carrots
3 parsnips
Approx. 6 sage leaves
3 sprigs of rosemary
Preparation:
Christmas goose stuffing:
Heat up some Alba oil in a small pan and fry the smoked tofu in it.
Deglaze with the soy sauce. Continue frying until the tofu is nice and crispy.
Remove from heat and set aside.
Heat plenty of Alba oil in a large pan and fry the onion in it.
Add the carrot, leek and rosemary leaves and fry everything.
Then stir in the apple cubes and chestnuts, add the maple syrup and let it caramelize briefly.
Add the red wine and stir in.
Now add all the other ingredients for the vegan goose or turkey stuffing to the pan and fry for a few minutes until everything is soft.
Stir in the smoked tofu and season the vegan poultry stuffing with salt and pepper.
Remove the chestnut stuffing from the stove and set aside.
Forming the body for the vegan Christmas goose:
Now comes the laborious part, the celery has to be caved and peeled.
To do this, I cut off the rooted part of the root. Then the celery must be hollowed out. The best way to do this is to use a small ball cutter. You can additionally work with a small knife. At the end there should be an edge of about one centimetre left.
This must now be freed from the peel. This works best done with a paring knife.
I use the celery to stabilize the body of the plant based Christmas goose.
Now stuff the celery root with the stuffing for the vegan poultry. The celery should be stuffed very firmly with the roast filling.
Meat and skin for the vegan goose or vegan turkey:
Drain the jackfruit cans and cut off the hard tips of the jackfruit pieces. Gently squeeze out the brine.
Heat the stock in a pan and add the jackfruit pieces. Let them cook for about 15 minutes.
Simmer until the jackfruits have broken down into their fibres and the broth is absorbed.
Stir frequently and mash the pieces with a wooden spoon.
Take the pan from the stove and let it cool off.
Mix the vital wheat gluten with the nutritional yeast flakes, onion powder and salt for the filling.
Mix the jackfruit with the liquid smoke and the mixed chickpea flour. Knead in thoroughly. Then gradually sprinkle in the vital wheat gluten and knead thoroughly with your hands.
The poultry meat is going to be a tender jackfruit and seitan mixture.
Fat rice paper skin for the vegan goose roast:
Moisten a kitchen towel with water and place it on a work surface.
Fill a large bowl with water.
Place two pieces of rice paper on top of each other and let them soak in the water for about a minute. Until the rice paper is nice and soft.
Place both rice papers on top of each other on the towel.
This step is now repeated several times. Four times for the legs and wings and 2-3 more times for the goose’s body.
For the goose legs and wings, cut about a quarter out of the rice paper using scissors. It should look like a pie with a big piece missing now. This way the rice paper can easily be folded around the meat.
Take a cinnamon stick and put some of the jackfruit seitan mixture around it as a leg or wing.
For the legs shape the meat around the cinnamon stick, so a little end sticks out. The wings should be thinner, longer and the cinnamon stick should be completely covered by vegan meat.
Wrap the vegan goose legs and wings completely in the rice paper. It is best to first fold the skin over at the thick end and then wrap the rest around the vegan goose or turkey leg or wing.
After shaping the vegan goose wings and legs, lay out two whole wet rice papers on top of each other. Place a small circle of goose meat in the centre of the rice paper. The vegan poultry meat should be about 1 cm thick.
Place the stuffed celery on top. Place the opening facing down on the plant based goose meat.
Assemble the body:
Now shape the body with the vegan meat around the celery. About 1-2 cm thick. To do this, completely cover the celery and then shape a bottom and a breast. The result should be an elongated, fat goose body.
Cover the finished body with wet doubled rice paper. To do this, fold up the lower rice paper on which the body is lying. Out the new ric papers on top of the body from above. To prevent the vegan goose skin from getting wrinkles, you can cut slits into the rice paper skin. Or cut off excess rice paper skin.
Pin the plant based goose wings and legs to the goose body with toothpicks. Tie them to the body with kitchen twine. To do this, simply knot the twine around the goose. Like with a real goose before it goes into the oven.
Glaze for vegan poultry skin made from rice paper:
To create a nice and crispy vegan goose skin, I marinate the skin or brush it with a glaze. To do this, mix all the ingredients for the glaze and generously coat the vegan Christmas goose with it.
Cooking the vegan goose in the roaster:
Preheat the oven to 200°C (390°F) top and bottom heat.
Mix all ingredients for the frying stock.
Place all the ingredients for the bed of vegetables on the bottom of a roaster. They should lay next to each other, not on top of each other. Then pour in the frying stock.
Now carefully place the vegan Christmas goose on the vegetables.
Cook with the lid on in the preheated oven for 40 minutes. The vegan poultry must not touch the lid, otherwise the skin will stick to it and tear off. The roaster must therefore be very large and high.
Then remove the lid. Roast the vegan goose or vegan turkey for another 20 minutes. Until the skin is nice and crispy.
Serve the vegan goose with side dishes such as red cabbage, pretzel dumplings, gravy and the vegetables from the roaster.
Bon appetit and happy holidays!
Are you interested in more vegan meat and poultry dishes?
Please check out my v-meat category, right here on dailyvegan.recipes. Plenty of hearty dishes are waiting for you. There is also a section for vegan fish dishes. A wonderful way to enjoy the full range of all kinds of dishes, without harming any animals. A climate friendly way to enjoy homemade meals.
Sometimes it seems a bit tricky to feed meat eating friends with meat substitutes. Some f them tend to complain, that it is not real enough. And often they are right. When I am cooking my recipes, usually only some fellow vegans tend to complain, since my dishes are too real. But mostly they just enjoy, that they don’t have to miss out on some old time favourites any longer.
Based on 6 Review(s)
