I tried some goat for the first time in my life. The guy who traded the goat told me you can just eat it like hamburgers. It was ok, I guess, but there was a gamey flavor to it.
Where it really tasted best was with taco seasoning in a burrito or quesadilla. For some reason, those particular spices work really well with goat meat, so much so that I don't think I can enjoy taco meat unless it is made from pasture-raised goat.
I recently slaughtered a sheep, a wether that was almost 9 months old. He was a big dude. I was surprised at how much fat there was on him despite being on pasture. The fat was also white, not yellow, and there was hardly any smell to it. We saved the guts because apparently sheep intestines are heavenly. I am going to try and get some rack of lamb cut up and maybe we'll have a fancy Sunday dinner. The legs can be roasted and the rest of the meat chopped up into lamburger.
I'll let you know how it ends up tasting. For the record, this is a hair sheep, not a wool sheep. The breed is mostly dorper.
I think it's rather surprising how easy it was to get this sheep up to weight. Using temporary electric fencing and rotating them every 2 days or so, there was so little work I had to do it is ridiculous. The sheep are destroying the weeds and the brush and they are not eating the grass to the ground like I worried they might. The pasture that they leave behind is clean and ready for cattle.
I think after a couple of years of doing this, I'll have all the meat I can possibly eat for pennies on the dollar. Or, I can take the surplus and sell it at the sale barn and get at least $150 per lamb, if not $250 if I time it right. Each ewe should give me 1.8 lambs each breeding cycle, and if I breed them every 8 months, that's 2.7 lambs every year -- $500 in the sale barn. 100 ewes can support my family easy, plus I will never have to buy meat or meat products ever again, cutting the grocery budget down significantly.
