For those whose chickens are pets, please read no further!
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For those who butcher and eat their excess birds, what do you do to make them tender? I have tried letting them sit in the refrigerator (or at around 40º) for several days before freezing them, dry-brining them in the freezer package and letting them brine as they thaw prior to cooking, and using a covered clay pot or a crockpot. Clay and crock pots work fairly well, but I don't always want to cook them that way. I don't expect stewing hens to be tender, but I'd like to get my young geese and cockerels to be a little easier to eat.
Cooking Free-Range Birds
Ive never butchered a bird but we have used store bought hen and used an injector with an acid based marinade and let it sit for several hours. We grilled it and it was pretty good. Still a bit tougher than a reg chicken but definitely eatable.
Hi Greenhouse: You wouldn't recognize the area here due to the olympics. We watched the opening ceremony last night and it was incredible. In regard to your question about free-range cooking. I don't think they will ever be as tender as caged birds just due to the exercise. We generally cut them up small, very small and use them as in cashew chicken, or teriyaki and rice bowls. We generally use the store bought for deep fried or roasted. Sorry not much help I know, but I really just wanted to say hi to a great sidekick...LOL. Howie.
Pressure cooker?
Hi, Howie! At least I know it's not just me. In the Backyard Poultry magazine where they discussed this, aside from recommending the resting in the refrigerator prior to freezing, they seemed to be saying that their chickens were just fine, thankyouverymuch! I do like to use ours because we know how they were raised.
Not being sportsminded at all, I haven't been following the Olympics. Are they in Vancouver this year? We always loved that city; it had so much more of an international flavor than Seattle.
What ever happened with your GGS?
Catscan, sure, I could use a pressure cooker, if I had one, but then the flavor is kind of deadened, I think. I was hoping to figure out some way that was less drastic, so I could use them in some of my French recipes.
This message was edited Feb 13, 2010 11:18 AM
Greenhouse, I agree with you on Vancouver, and yes the olympic's are being held there. Lastnight was opening ceremony and it was incredible. I just knew I should not be talking with you...You just mention French cooking and my poor wife cannot stand me for two weeks. I miss the French people, France, and, French Cooking. My wife goes nuts when I talk about it...LOL. I won't tell her it's you that gets me started...LOL. I love talking with you and am so glad about your passion for it, and the people...Howie.
Greenhouse I gotta tell you, after our last conversation, about France, the people, and my Kobenhaven Sweetie! Well I googled and found out the military base I was stationed at in Nancy, France. Is still in operation and there is a sorta club of those who were stationed there and so I entered my name and when I was there and as a result was reconnected with a couple of guy's I had not heard from since 1958. Thats just over fifty years ago. Incredible, and it's really you that got me going. I owe you big time. My best regards to you...Howie
Oh, Howie, I am so tickled that I was somehow involved in getting you back in touch with those guys. Isn't the internet a wonderful thing? That's a great story and it warms the cockles of my heart. I'm sure it's making your life richer, and I would think that your wife would be glad of that. Your Copenhagen Sweetie was a very long time ago, so she shouldn't feel jealous. She's the one you chose to spend your life with!
Why not give your wife a French cookbook so you can enjoy the cuisine together?
Leslie
Not to male light of the heartwarming reunion, but what are cockles? I've always wondered.
To provide happiness, to bring a deeply-felt contentment, possibly derived from the similarity in appearance of the heart valves to the cockle, a bivalve mollusk of the family Cardiidae.
Someone pointed out that there is another possible explanation. In medieval Latin, the ventricles of the heart were at times called cochleae cordis, where the second word is an inflected form of cor, heart. Those unversed in Latin could have misinterpreted cochleae as cockles, or it might have started out as a university in-joke. Oddly, cochlea in Latin is the word for a snail (from the shape of the ventricles — it’s also the name given to the spiral cavity of the inner ear), so if this story is right we should really be speaking of warming the snails of one’s heart.
I think I know people to whom that last phrase would apply perfectly. Thanks for the clarification.
Thanks, Porkpal! I'd always wondered myself, but you got me looking it up. Really it's not a very satisfactory explanation, but I guess it's all we're going to get.
We live in the heart of chicken country. Bo Pilgrim lives just up the road and we have chicken houses within two miles of the house. We also have a friend with big cats that picks up the dead birds to feed them. So we know the ins and outs of chicken farming. They only breed meat birds that are processed at 10 weeks of age, so they are much younger than what you would think. They are raised in houses that hold 10,000 birds, so there is not a lot of running around.
ok this makes me happy. I didn't do anything wrong when my chickens weren't so tender after we dressed them. I swore for years I'd never eat another free range chicken again bc I prefer the tender store bought ones. I'm back to needing to send a bunch of mine to freezer camp due to an annoying neighbor so it will be nice to know i just need to not try & fry them. :)
That's the thing about free-range, although the people at Backyard Poultry don't seem to find the same problems, which is what made me wonder. Jyl Gaskin told me that she lets hers rest in the refrigerator for several days before freezing them, and BYPoultry recommended that too. She also puts them in a brine while they're resting, and she gave me a recipe for cooking them in a covered clay pot with olives, lemons and rosemary, which was delicious and about as tender as anything else I've done - although still not quite like store-bought.
And don't forget how much healthier your chickens are, Kyttyn, and how much better a life they had than the ones trussed up all purty in the supermarkets!
yes but i hate stringy chicken! sorry.. I'm spoiled on that one. and ours that are trussed up in the store are still somewhat local... they come from about an hour south of me. So at least I know where they come from. :)
I use chicken a lot for salads & soup... When we did our last chickens, mom was frying them a lot. This time it might not be so bad to eat them.. but trying to eat a stringy, tough fried chicken is not fun.
Try the pressure cooker trick that frans530 told me about in dmail:
We butcher and eat our chickens all the time.. As Howie said, our fresh chickens are a whole different meat than what you are used to at the grocery. Our (meaning all of us home meat chicken raisers) chickens get way more exercise.. the first thing I noticed the first time I butchered was NO yellow fat.. we have lean machines.. they run, jump, try to fly.. they do not sit in a 1X1 cage..
So how to cook..
I usually cook 3 birds at a time than refreeze the meat in serving packages.. I pressure cook them for 30 minutes.. it is the most delicious chicken..
I WANT FRIED CHICKEN... yup, me too.. so I prepare and fry it just like normal.. but then I put it in the pressure cooker for 15-20 minutes (thats after the clacker starts clacking).. take it out and it is SOO good.
both my cookers are presto. one being a hugh canner, holds I think 8 quarts.. the other is what I call my spagetti pot.. its the perfect size and when not using it for pressure cooking I do use it for pasta.. I say it would hold about 8 pints..
I agree you probably got the fat because they were in the chicken tractor. I actually bought cornish cross chickens for meat.. they grow like mad.. I think they stink something awful.. and they do nothing but poop and eat.. The tractor I had them in.. they grew out of in a few short weeks.. so I just open the door and let them run amuck.. lol
Anyway. I kill clean and freeze the chickens whole.. but when we are having chicken I will thaw 3 whole chickens.. I cook them all in the pressure cooker, then I repackage whatever I am not using and refreeze it.
Hey best recipie.. 2 pkgs of cream cheese, 1 med bottle of salsa.. about a lb of cooked shredded chicken... serve it on flour taco shells.. OMG.. wonderful... don't tell the kids its home-chicken.. the teens around here eat it like mad.. my teen wants to know when we're doing more chickens.. the freezer is low.
um.. how do you pressure cook something? Only thing we've ever used it for is canning and I'm guessing you aren't talking about canning the chicken. If there is a link, a site.. something you could point me towards to do this. It would be much appreciated.
That recipe sounds wonderful! thank you. I bet it would be very good cold on cucumbers in the summer too.
This person uses a smaller pressure cooker, not the canning size, and I'm sure that there's lots of information both online and coming with a pressure cooker, if you buy it new, about cooking with them. A lot of people used to use them for cooking, not just canning, but crockpots are almost as good and maybe easier. Still, pressure-cooking chicken would definitely break down those fibers!
Here's one link:
http://fastcooking.ca/pressure_cookers/cooking_times_pressure_cooker.php
and for "fried" chicken:
http://www.wikihow.com/Make-Pressure-Cooker-%22Fried%22-Chicken
No, No, No! Ya gotta tenderize them for three weeks while they're still alive.
Build a little pen, maybe 3X3X3 feet, so they can stand up and stretch. But they must just sit around being couch potatoes so that they go soft. Ha, I am an ex- hillbilly.
Three weeks of all they can eat, zero running, and then you'll have an edible chicken.
OK, please forgive me for yelling.
Melissa-proud new owner of two Cochin Bantam hens.
Interesting idea, Melissa! We tried that with our geese and it didn't help much, although I'm not sure we gave them three weeks. We penned them and tried to beef (uh - Goose? Fowl?) up their diet, but I didn't notice a difference. That's essentially what we did with our cockerels, too, since we never let them out of the tractor.
There are feed lots for cattle.
Well, it was a hopeful idea, anyway, gleaned off an old country dude.
I'll let you know if confinement works, I have ten or more wild roos to eat...
Melissa
And, hey! I wanted some Blue Cochin Bantams, and I found one, and her friend, at the Ag Fair today, wheeee.
Melissa
Molamola I've heard that before.. I was going to pen them for a month, no activities allowed.. & all the food they could eat. I just wasn't sure that was enough... Thanks for the links. having trouble with my virus software.. won't let me use google right now.. The links make it so much easier to look for things!
Penning them up and feeding them well does plump the hens up. I had a hen break her leg and had to confine her for six weeks. She put on weight. I'm hoping she slims down some now that she can run around with the other birds. She is now the biggest one in the flock.
I've been running into people mentioning pressure cookers on several forums recently, and I'm thinking that that might be a good way to go, especially for the geese. I cooked one of those cockerels the other night in a Romertopf (clay pot), though, with some lemon juice and olives, and I swear that thing was as tender as a store-bought chicken. I had dry-brined it before I froze it, and the last one of that batch that I cooked was too salty, so this time as I thawed it I put water in the bag, and rinsed it a few times before starting to cook it. I have no idea if that made a difference, but it was juicy and tender. I think even my kids would have eaten it happily.