When Katie Binetti and Joseph Ferraro joined the Baylor Department of Anthropology in 2008, they brought with them an East Coast university tradition: an end-of-the-school year goat roast. They both previously taught at Yale, and Ben Arbuckle, a colleague coming to Baylor at the same time, had been teaching at Harvard. (Arbuckle is now a professor and associate chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina.)
“And Harvard always had a goat roast,” Ferraro said. “So we said, ‘Well, we should have a goat roast of our own here.’ It started up, and it’s been going almost every year. The COVID years, we may have missed one or two of them.”
The goat roast, held in the courtyard of the Marrs McLean Science Building on the Baylor campus, “is a good opportunity for folks to get together at the end of the year, to have some fellowship. And the undergrads, they have a new experience. They get to eat goat, and many of them haven’t eaten goat before,” Ferraro said.
The roasting of the goat doesn’t actually take place on campus. Ferraro and other volunteers cook the goat the night before in their homes. It’s a time-consuming process, Ferraro said, and he usually doesn’t get any sleep before heading to campus with freshly-roasted goat. In past years, Ferraro has roasted four goat legs, while others have roasted ribs. The head of the goat “is actually the most-prized portion of the goat,” he said, and while he would like to have a pot of goat head stew — “It’s going to taste like a chicken soup, but a very, very salty, thick, sort of broth,” he said — simmering over a fire, “I’m not sure Baylor’s ready to have a goat head in a pot.”
Baylor definitely did not approve of Ferraro’s idea of beginning the day with a live goat followed by a demonstration of the required steps to have it roasting over an open flame a couple of hours later.
When Ferraro and Binetti — who are married and occupy adjacent offices in the science building — are doing archeological field work in Kenya, they eat goat every day. They buy a live goat and then use stone tools to butcher the animal.
“And then we collect the bones after dinner, and we bring them all back here,” he said. “They’re upstairs in our lab where we study bone damage so we can interpret marks on antelope bones from 2 million years ago in Kenya. And the cut marks that we make with stone tools as we’re butchering the goat are the exact same marks that you could see on antelope bones from 2 million years ago from some of our earliest archaeological ancestors.”
Luckily for us, we didn’t have to use stone tools to prepare the goat leg in the photo, but we did have to drive to Austin. We had no luck in finding a goat leg in Waco, but Ferraro recommended Afghan Halal Market on North Lamar Boulevard. We were going to Austin on a recent Saturday for a Rhiannon Giddens concert anyway, so the market was our last stop in town before her show. (And what a great performance!) We took a cooler and bought a couple of bags of ice at a nearby H-E-B and the goat was still chilled when we got home later that night.
Preparing the goat was a three-day processm. We roasted the goat on a pellet smoker, which took about eight hours for it to reach fall-off-the-bone tenderness.
The Recipes
Roasted Goat Leg Torta
For the goat:
- 1 goat leg
- 1/4 to 1/2 cup olive oil
- Salt
- Black pepper
For the dry rub:
- 2 tablespoons cumin
- 1 tablespoon dry mustard
- 1 tablespoon black peppercorns
- 1/2 cup dark brown sugar
- 2 tablespoons kosher salt
- 2 tablespoons granulated sugar
- 1 tablespoon garlic powder
- 1 tablespoon onion powder
- 1 tablespoon curry powder
- 1 1/2 teaspoons Italian-blend seasoning
- 3/4 teaspoon cayenne
For the sauce:
- 12 guajillo chiles, stemmed
- 5 ancho chiles, stemmed
- 5 arbol chiles, stemmed
- 2 large tomatoes
- 1 medium yellow onion, quartered
- 1 4-inch cinnamon stick
- 3 fresh bay leaves
- 1 teaspoon black peppercorns
- 2 cups beef broth
- 1/4 cup white vinegar
- 5 cloves garlic
- 1 teaspoon oregano
- 1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
- 1 package taco seasoning
For the sandwich:
- Four sandwich rolls
- Red onion
- Cilantro
- Oaxacan cheese, grated
- Cotija cheese
To prepare the goat: Two days prior to cooking, pour olive oil over the goat and rub in generous amounts of salt and pepper. Refrigerate, uncovered, overnight.
The next day, combine all the dry rub ingredients in a bowl and mix well. Score the goat leg, making several slits. Sprinkle on the dry rub and rub it into the meat, pressing into the slits. Refrigerate, uncovered, overnight.
Heat the pellet grill to 250. Place the goat onto the grill rack and cook for about 5 hours, or until the internal temperature is 165.
While the goat is cooking, prepare the sauce. Add the guajillo chiles, ancho chiles, arbol chiles, tomatoes, onion, cinnamon stick, bay leaves and peppercorns to a large pot. Add water to cover. Bring to a simmer and cook for 8 minutes. Transfer the simmered ingredients in the pot to a large blender. (Don’t discard the cooking water.) Add the beef broth, vinegar, garlic, oregano, cloves and taco seasoning to the blender. Add about 1/2 cup of the cooking water, then blend until smooth. Strain through a mesh strainer and discard any solids.
When the goat reaches 165 degrees, remove it from the grill and place in an aluminum roasting pan. Pour the sauce over the goat, cover the pan with foil and return to the smoker for an additional 3 hours, or until the meat pulls away easily from the bone.
To make the sandwiches, spoon some of the sauce onto the bread. Add onion, cilantro and Oaxacan cheese to the roll, then top with meat. Sprinkle with cotija cheese and add a squeeze of lime juice. Makes 4 sandwiches, with a bunch of meat left over.
