Roasting chicken Archives

March 29, 2014

More Chicken – The Other Red Meat

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This probably isn’t what comes to mind when you think of chicken. You probably don’t associate such a dark, red meat with chicken. But when roosters get to live outdoors, courting hens through pasture and woodland, breathing fresh air all day, roaming far and wide in search of love, and standing guard over their flock, they develop large, healthy gizzards.

The first time I butchered a rooster, what shocked me was the vibrant colors of his internal organs. Gizzards of healthy, exercising chickens have a beautiful blue hue on the outside. That first rooster’s gizzard was an especially brilliant, cobalt blue.

The gizzard is a strong muscle surrounding a pouch with a tough lining. Inside are bits of gravel and small stones. The food a chicken eats passes into the gizzard from the crop. The muscles of the gizzard churn vigorously, grinding the food and gravel together, turning the grain and grasses and bugs a chicken devours into a mash. The gizzard does the job our teeth do when we chew.

As a result, the gizzard of a healthy chicken is tough. Slice it thin, fry it gently in butter, add some white wine or sake, a bit of soy sauce or Worcestershire sauce, and in a few minutes you have a wonderful appetizer. What makes this meat exceptional is the texture. It has a crunch you don’t associate with meat.

March 26, 2014

Coq au Vin – Chicken, the Other Red Meat

Usually, you don’t think of chicken as a red meat. But a year old rooster has meat as red as beef. The pictures below are of the roosters thigh and legs, and breasts. Using Julia Child’s Coq au Vin recipe from page 263 of her Mastering the Art of French Cooking Volume One Fortieth Anniversary Edition, this 4 pound 9 ounce rooster, came out tender and beefy. The one difference is that her recipe calls for simmering the bird in wine slowly for 25 to 30 minutes. Instead, I simmered the rooster for three hours.

You’re never going to be able to walk into your local supermarket and walk out with a year old rooster, or chicken with such rich meat. It takes many months for a bird to develop such hearty meat. The only way you’re going to be able to enjoy Coq au Vin like this, is to make arrangements with me, or another farmer dedicated to raising these magnificent birds.

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Below are links to others who have made Julia Child’s Coq au Vin recipe:

Honor Julia Child with This Coq Au Vin Recipe

All of the examples above use your average store bought chicken. Though you really need a grown rooster to savor the full richness of this dish. After all, the name of the dish is Coq au Vin not Poule au Vin.

January 12, 2014

This Is Chicken?

The variety of meat chicken can provide is truly remarkable. Below is the leg and thigh meat of a roasted, fully grown rooster. The flavor and texture is very similar to a mild goat roast. If you closed your eyes and ate this rich meat, you would have no idea it was chicken.

Gina Bisco in her article Rediscovering Traditional Meats from Historic Chicken Breeds, describes the traditional chicken meat classes, broiler, fryer, roaster and fowl, which were used until the 1940s to describe the various types of chicken meat.

Up until the 1940s, the age at which a chicken was butchered determined its meat class. These classes are no longer used as modern chicken farming has dramatically speeded up the rate at which commercial chickens grow. Most now grow only six to eight weeks before they are processed. They eat voraciously, exercise little, and become fat birds in the blink of an eye. If humans grew at the speed modern chickens do, we would weigh over 300 pounds by the time we were two years old. At that speed, the traditional meat classes become meaningless as there is no difference between a six week old chicken and an eight week old chicken.

Don’t click this link if you are the least bit squeamish, but you get a good idea what modern chicken farming is about in the video: 45 Days: The Life and Death of a Broiler Chicken. Don’t worry, you’ll never find such chicken at A Man and His Hoe. Chickens here are hatched from eggs incubated by loving mothers, and raised with the care only mother hens can provide.

A fully grown rooster is quite impressive when it is trussed and ready to be roasted. Like all chickens which forage for food and walk long distances every day, most of the meat is on the legs and thighs. The redness of the legs and thighs shows through the firm skin.

And roasted, the deep color of the leg and thigh meat is even more evident.

A rooster like this is slow food at its best. Not only do you have to let a rooster grow nearly an entire year, once butchered, you need to let it age in the refrigerator for at least a week before you roast it or pressure cook it, another great way to prepare fully grown rooster.

If you would like to try one of these magnificent birds, call or text me at 360-202-0386, or send an email to theman@amanandhishoe.com. Be advised, that these fully grown roosts are not available all the time, however you are always welcome to get your name on the waiting list for them.

January 10, 2014

Roasting a Rooster

This is a seven and a half month old Golden Buff rooster, butchered at 224 days, and let to rest for four days in the refrigerator. Three to four days is a good time to let a chicken rest before roasting, especially these chickens which exercise so much every day.

These are not birds which sit around all day, doing nothing but eating and growing fat. They aren’t crowded together cheek by jowl. What they do provide is a big story and a big taste. A chicken does a lot of living in seven months. As chickens go, it’s seen the world, traveled far from it’s roost every day, had the chance to experience romance and live a full life. At times they go so deep into the woods they can’t see another chicken. You’ll never find chicken like this in your supermarket.

January 5, 2014

Fresh Liver

You’ll never find liver like this in the store. Liver from chickens which exercise much of the day, get plenty of fresh air and sunshine, is plump and dry.

When chickens are out walking all day, rummaging for food, playing, and having a good time, they are pumping copious amounts of oxygenated blood through their bodies, much like people who exercise. Chickens raised in cramp quarters and butchered at a very young age, never attain the level of health of chickens raised outdoors. And this shows in the quality of their livers.

Fried in butter, chicken fat, or olive oil for several minutes on each side, it has so much flavor that no salt is needed. In fact, you should first taste it before adding any salt. Often salt, instead of enhancing the flavor of foods, just makes foods taste like salt.

Liver is best eaten within a few hours of processing a chicken. Are there any stores which sell chicken liver from chickens butchered that day? Let me know if you find one. The next time you buy chicken liver in a store, ask the grocer when the liver was taken. If they don’t know, what does that say about their concern for the quality of the food they sell to you?

December 26, 2013

Six Day Old Chicks

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When a mother hen senses danger, she’ll spread her wings and puff up, doubling the size of her appearance. She starts showing this behavior even before her chicks hatch. While she is incubating her eggs, she’ll come off the next once a day to eat and drink. A brooding hen will often puff up around other chickens as if she is protecting a brood.

November 6, 2013

Roasting your chicken – preparing it

You’ve gone to the great effort and expense to procure one of these incredible heritage breed chickens from A Man and His Hoe. Unlike a whole chicken you buy in the store, which you have no idea when it was butchered, your chicken will have been butchered no more than 24 hours before you procure it. It may even have been butchered a few hours before you get your hands on it. And you’ll know the exact day and time down to the minute when it was butchered. You’ll also know when it was hatched and how old it was when it died. You may even know the mother that raised your chicken, and if you are lucky, you may get a chance to thank the mother while you are picking up your chicken. Each mother has her own way of raising chicks. Some mother hens are strict constructionists and keep their little chicks in line. Other mother hens are as carefree with their brood as a pot smoking Marin county liberal. Does it make a difference how the chickens taste when roasted? It’s up to you to decide.

These chickens are best roasted. And since your chicken is so fresh (unless you’ve committed the ghastly crime of freezing it, heaven forbid!), you will want to give it a few days rest to help it get over the trauma of dying. Chickens like to die as much as you do, and they deserve a few days to recover from their fate.

Go out into your garden (or if you aren’t in the mood to venture outside send your gardener, that’s why you hire him or her) and fetch a nice handful of herbs. Rosemary, thyme, oregano, marjoram, sage and the like. Basically your favorite herbs.

Set out one to two teaspoons of salt.

Peel some garlic cloves.

Unwrap your chicken and rub the salt all over the chicken. As the chicken rests over the next two to three days, the salt will tenderize the meat, help it relax, and flavor it.

Stuff the cavity of the chicken the the herbs and garlic. They will help the chicken relive those many pleasant days it spent out in the garden.

Truss the chicken. If you don’t know how to truss a chicken, search “trussing a chicken” on youtube. Have fun watching the many thousands of trussing videos and pick a method that suits you. There is no single right way.