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Cooking Goat:
“We grew up right in this area,” Samson says. “We lived across there. And then my Dad, sometime they would go, the new gang, they would go Kalalau. Late in the night they come home. Home in the night. I used to do the same. I love goat meat, so when I go in there, by nine o’clock p.m. you always going to get goats. Even two o’clock, you go in the back in the cool part of the valley. You go in just looking for horns sticking out. I look for the big billies. That’s what I look. You get two, that’s plenty meat! I always give my uncle them. I love good meat! Good laulau. “The trick about the good laulau you is you got to use the pork fat. I used to feed the other guys. I’d say, ‘Check my pork.’ ‘Hey, pretty good this!’ I got to know that these guys don’t know the difference, because goat grain and the pig grain, you know, like beef, you can see the string when you taste the fat. Oh that’s bad. Pork, the same thing. “The goat grain is almost as close to the pork grain. And you only can change them with that pork fat. Goats get pretty good, but not fat like other animals. Because maybe all that terrain they go. But if you like for laulau, that’s the best, and then you put pork fat in. Nobody would know if that’s goat! All my years, my guys bring goat meat. Without that pork fat, you cook that goat, you smell the goat.” Usually, laulau includes a piece of butterfish. “We used to we can get em,” Samson says, “but salmon can go. I know the salmon, the bone when you fry them is sweet. Salmon, but cannot be butterfish though. Everybody uses the salt salmon. The salt salmon is different from the salmon. You take flat salmon— I never eat the boiled salmon in a long time. I don’t like the grain, the meat would come close to the butter fish. I don’t know how the grain, whether it was coarser or fine as the butterfish, I’m not too sure.” “I’ve had a mountain pig laulau,” Michael says, “I think the best laulau is billy goat. The meat is more moist and stays moist. It’s better than pork and better than beef. I like billy goat.” “The Haena side used to have goats too,” Kelii points out. “I want to say they still have goat back in the valley, when you go more deep in the valley, they get goats.” “I go to Nu‘alolo twice a year,” Kaneakua says, “and I volunteer my time for ten days to feed the crew that goes there to malama that area. Every time we go there, we kind of just do a visual count, and its like 100 goats, the next time we go there it’s 150, the next we go there it’s 200. We try to pack very little, light and tight, and we try not to make a big impact on the area. You’ll see maybe 20 or 30 uhu swimming around, but we’ll try to take only one—and definitely not the blue one. And try to drop one goat while we’re there the whole time to feed ten to fifteen of us. I wish everybody would feel that way. But there’s a lot of pig, lot of goat to go around, and they’re causing wreck in our native forest. “I curry it, like a stew. Curried down, tons of onions and garlic and chili flakes and get some curry going in there, and some bay leaf and basil, kind of get that going. I normally like to brown the meat separate, and then add it to it, get it simmering nice and slow. It takes a couple of hours, but this goat is really tender. It took just a few hours. Towards the end I add some coconut milk, some fresh basil. Skim off all the oil, the impurities that rise to the surface and the stock is super clean and you can add it to all the goodness.”
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