It Doesn't Taste Like Chicken

[marmar]

It Doesn't Taste Like Chicken

Monday, 23 December 2013 09:40
By Arun Gupta, Truthout | Op-Ed


It wasn’t getting a freshly plucked rooster for my birthday that made it so memorable. It was the realization of what a real chicken tasted like.

It was early spring. Michael had just driven down from the Finger Lakes to the city. Hopping out of his prematurely aged Hyundai, he walked toward me with a lopsided grin and a clear plastic bag. "Happy 40th," he said thrusting a naked bird forward in the chilly night air. I took the bag and inspected the tight, vibrant flesh in the streetlight, noticing a few pin feathers attached to the lower leg, revealing this was home-grown fowl.

.......(snip).......

"The breed is a standard Cornish Cross, which is 99 percent of the chicken that’s raised. But this rooster lived outdoors for nine months, so the meat is more flavorful and muscular than a chicken that spent its short life crammed in a cage," Mike explained. "It needs a lot of wine and time to make the meat tender."

.......(snip).......

But there’s another way to describe it. That outdoor-living, pasture-strutting rooster didn’t taste bland or mushy or dull or chemically. In Pandora’s Lunchbox, author Melanie Warner talks to a food scientist who suggested a taste test. Take three chickens: a factory-farmed inmate, a mass-produced organic chicken and a true pastured chicken, like my rooster.

"The cheap chicken," Warner writes, "will have minimal flavor, thanks to its short life span, lack of sunlight and a monotonous diet of corn and soy. The organic chicken "will have a few ‘roast notes and fatty notes.’" The pastured chicken is a "happy chicken" that "spent its life outside, running around and eating an evolutionary diet of grass, seeds, bugs, and worms." Eating one is hitting the culinary jackpot as it will have a "deep, succulent nutty taste" that’s "incomparable" to the other chickens. ..........................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/20713-it-doesnt-taste-like-chicken

[htuttle]

1. Thought the same thing the first time I had an organic (but not pasture raised) chicken

"Chicken doesn't taste like chicken anymore."

It's expensive ($3-$7/lb, depending on the cuts -- something like $12-$14 for a whole bird), but we've decided to eat less good chicken rather than more bad chicken. I just make more side dishes, and almost always make some sort of gravy from the drippings.

Three skin-on, bone-in organic thighs are about $2.75 around here. That's easily the basis of a dinner plate and a lunch for less than $1.50 each. Can't beat that at a vending machine.

The same food coop I get those from also sells cuts of locally sourced organic pork for about the same price as the organic chicken. They also carry local organic and pasture raised beef, but that stuff's really expensive (individual steaks are over $10-$14 each, 90% lean organic ground beef is about $6.99/lb). I save that for the holidays.

[Warpy]

2. Rosie's is a reasonably reliable health food brand

and while I don't know how much outdoor time they get, they definitely aren't restricted. The meat has to be cut with a knife rather than the side of a fork and is much more flavorful. I find they do especially well with pressure cooking.

They're quite expensive but the difference in quality is worth it. It will be difficult to return to the flavorless, fall-apart standard broiler afterward. Not only does it cut down on your meat consumption, you'll also tend to use every bit of that chicken, ending with chicken soup.

They're not as good as a backyard chicken, offed the day before and brined overnight, but nothing is quite as good as that. I find them a close second.