Cantonese Roast Geese!
The roast geese episode is live over on YouTube!
Last year we were in Guangdong filming a series on Cantonese BBQ, a three-part series taking a look into the back story of this delicious institution. It's an interesting thing to film the process of, given that it starts with an animal (usually at an ungodly hour in the morning) and ends with a delicious lunch. The somewhat morbid part of watching this process is figuring out where this line is: when does this stop looking like a dead animal, and start looking like a delicious lunch, in more brutal words, where in the slaughterhouse does your mouth start watering.
It's a dance I had to dance as a filmmaker too - Chris and I aim to make videos about delicious and iconic aspects of Chinese cuisine, my goal is to make you hungry, and I'm not going to get you there by showing you a pile of dead geese twitching on the ground, I do however, think that's something we as meet eaters need to come face to face with, a good portion of what we eat starts with death.
Also, YouTube doesn't like blood... So here is what ended up on the cutting room floor:
The dispatching of the geese - done quickly with an icecream cone holder and a box cutter.
The de-feathering - a complex process including a washing machine, a wax, and a team of workers on little stools catching nearly naked wet geese as they slide across the tile floor.
And the shaping of the goose - feet and wings chopped off and an air pressure hose in the neck of the goose to blow the whole thing up like a balloon - to seperate the skin from the meat (I did put that in because it's wild).
I've spent a lot of time in slaughterhouses as a food photographer, it's this weirdly invisible part of our food systems I think is important to capture. Growing up in Canada our grocery stores are this wall between us and the origins of our food, our fish come without heads, chickens in these nice little feetless and headless pre-roasted bundles, our cows come perfectly sliced and labelled as 'beef', no snouts or hoofs to be found.
Yesterday, while filming an upcoming episode in Sichuan, Chris and I were served a cow head, which was as crazy as you are probably imagining it to be. It was an oddly refreshing and blunt celebration of where our food came from.
Hope you guys have been enjoying the channel, there is a lot more to come!
