Kaz tiridi — Turkey

Kaz tiridi combines kaz, goose, with tirit, a category of dishes built on bread torn into pieces and soaked in hot meat broth and fat. The dish is therefore as much about the bread as about the goose itself, since the bread takes on most of the meat's flavour once soaked. It is associated with Kars, a province in eastern Turkey known for raising geese, where households have long kept geese partly for slaughter before winter. The dish is eaten mainly in the cold months, tied to a seasonal rhythm in which geese were commonly killed in autumn and their meat used, fresh or preserved, over the following weeks. To prepare it, the goose is cleaned and cooked very slowly, in some households in a wood-fired oven or low, covered heat for many hours or overnight, until the meat is tender and much of its fat has rendered into the cooking liquid. Bread, usually a flatbread left to go slightly stale, is torn into pieces and spread in a wide tray, then the hot broth and rendered fat are poured over it so the bread softens and absorbs the flavour; the goose meat is placed on top or mixed through, and a garlic-yoghurt sauce is sometimes added at the table. What distinguishes kaz tiridi from a plain roasted or boiled goose is precisely this reliance on soaked bread as the bulk of the meal, a structure shared with other tirit dishes but paired here specifically with goose and with the Kars setting. Households differ on how long the goose is cooked, whether garlic yoghurt or melted butter is added, and how much broth is used to soak the bread.