A whisper went through the group. “That's bullshit,” Sabra said. “They shot it up with water so I could pay more?” She shifted from one foot to the other and crossed her arms. She looked ready to kick some commercial-chicken-growing butt.
“Listen, I am not going to say that you should never buy a supermarket chicken because that's just not realistic. But look up the poultry grower at the supermarket where you shop. Ask questions of the butcher in your market. If you don't want your chicken injected with water, tell them. If consumers care about something, it changes the kind of products offered. I try to buy from my butcher because I trust that they know their suppliers, but I don't always do that. Remember, if you're buying something cheap, but then you don't use it all, then it's not quite the good deal it seemed when you bought it.”
I didn't want this class to just be about
cooking
chickens. One of the things that I had come across in our kitchen visits reinforced what researchers already know. Most people don't associate chicken, especially in the form of boneless, skinless chicken breastsâwith a physical animal. In three kitchens, we found packages of chicken meat well past their sell-by dates in the fridge. “Oh, no, I forgot about those,” one of the volunteers had said of a family-sized package of chicken breasts. She picked them up to look at the date and shrugged, then tossed it into the trash. “I hate wasting money like that.”
Chickens are living creatures, a lesson that I learned early in life growing up on a farm in Michigan that has never left me. I told the volunteers the story about it.
“On the farm where I grew up, we kept chickens,” I started. A slightly askew chicken coop graced the far corner of the barnyard, and shortly after buying the house in late winter, my folks went to get some chicks from the local farm-supply store. The weathered old man who owned the place suggested that they purchase 125 chicks to start. “And I'll tell you what”âhe rolled a piece of hay around with his dark teeth. “You buy that 125, I'll give you 125 for free.”
An hour later, they packed five crates with 250 wildly cheeping chicks into the back of Dad's battered Chevy pickup. My brothers and sisters loved the chicks, but lost interest in them after about a month. About the same time, my parents began to realize that the chicks had been a great dealâfor the guy who sold them. He made his real money off chicken feed. My parents stopped by to purchase massive bags every few days to satisfy the voracious chickens. The adorable yellow balls of fluff grew at a startling pace. As adults, they turned into a massive and noisy gaggle of feathers that moved as a single wavering blanket of white.
After a couple of months, panic set in. “We were going broke feeding them,” my mom told me later. They traded some chickens for seed to start the garden and gave others away. It didn't put a dent in the flock.
The day after school let out for the summer, Mom rounded up the kids. She set up the chickens into a production line in the barn. A teenage neighbor caught the birds, and then held them down as she whacked off their heads, gutted them. Then she handed the carcasses to my oldest brother, Milton, to plunge into her huge canning pot filled with boiling water to loosen the feathers. He was only eleven years old. The other kids sat around for days plucking, the feathers sticking to their sweaty legs and arms in the Michigan heat. In one day, they killed and gutted twenty chickens. They would take a three-day break, and then fell another twenty more days later. Within two weeks, they killed one hundred and twenty chickens.
When you've got that many birds in the freezer, you make a lot of chicken. Roasted, braised, sautéed, ground up for spaghetti in place of hamburgerâMom did it all. But one thing she always did was avoid waste. “Oh, no, not after all that work. And besides, I could remember when that chicken was still walking around. I would feel too guilty,” she said.
“When you're starting with a whole chicken, it helps to remember something importantâthat this was a live animal. For a lot of people, knowing that makes it harder to throw parts of it away.” The group nodded somberly. That was a buzz kill, I thought.
Discussion over, we got to work. Lisa pulled a huge plastic bin heaped with chickens from the walk-in. She set one in front of each student.
“First, we'll break them down,” I said, glancing at the clock. “Do this once or twice and it gets easier.” I could sense the resistance. “Go ahead, touch it. Don't be afraid.”
The volunteers stood in a semicircle around the worktable, apprehensively eyeing the whole chickens resting on their cutting boards. Sweet Donna pulled back and curled her hands against her chest. Dri tentatively poked hers with an index finger. Even Cheryl's eightmonth-old, Liam, stared at the chicken suspiciously from the safety of his Björn carrier. “C'mon, you're not going to get salmonella from touching it. If you're going to cut up a chicken, you're going to have to put your hands on it.”
Sabra went first, caressing the pale skin of the breast with neon-green fingernails that matched her eye shadow du jour. “It kind of reminds me of Thanksgiving, you know, when you've got the whole turkey,” she said. “But instead, it's a chicken. Like a little turkey. Kind of sweet, really. I've never felt a whole, raw chicken before.”
It's not surprising that none of them had ever handled a whole chicken. When Julia Child debuted in the early 1960s, shoppers purchased more than half of all retail chickens whole. Now it's around 10 percent, and that's with an uptick in sales in the midst of a recession. As the students stared at their chickens without touching them and the clock ticked down, I worried that perhaps the night's agenda was a little too ambitious.
I started by holding up one of the legs and pulling it away from the body. Then I turned it upside down, and the leg splayed away. Using my knife, I cut around the “oyster,” the soft, tender round of meat tucked at the top of the thigh joined at the back. As I cleaved the leg from the body, I explained that the French think the oyster is the best part of the chicken. “They even have a phrase for this,
le sot-l'y-laisse,
which means âonly a fool leaves it behind.' ” Then I slid the tip of the knife along the breast bone and carefully sliced against the rib cage until the breast fell free. I felt for the shoulder joint that pins the wing to the bird and located the soft spot to push the knife through.
On the other side, I put my blade atop the sternum and leaned with my weight on top to crack it open, leaving the bone attached to the breast meat. With pressure on my knife, I cut through the rib bones on the side of the bird around the breast until it detached. The wing came off the same way, and thunked solidly onto the cutting board.
Now it was their turn. Brow furrowed, knife in hand, each volunteer gamely attempted to cut up her chicken. Donna held the wings ever so daintily, trying to minimize her contact. To my left, Gen cut the leg right off, perfectly. “I did it! Look!”
Elsewhere around the table there were varying levels of success. Maggie, Lisa, and I circled the table offering advice. Terri, the one most resistant to the ways of a knife, started to saw with vigor into the backbone. Trish tried to hack through the leg bone, missing the joint completely.
“Okay, wait. If you find a bone, stop. Take a deep breath. Pull your knife back. You shouldn't get that much resistance if you're doing it right.”
It's hard to teach what's become second nature. How do you articulate the feeling of knowing you've hit the joint at the right angle, so it comes off easily? Then I had a morbid idea.
“Touch your knuckle,” I commanded. Everyone touched their first knuckle with their other hand. “Now feel down at the leg joint on your chicken. Can you find a similar knuckle? Feel around for it.”
Terri poked around the leg joint until she found it. “Now take your knife and cut through it.” She hit the joint and it fell away easily. I observed as Donna followed the curve of the leg and in one quick motion separated it. Without realizing it, she let out a quick squeal of delight and threw her hands overhead in a cheer. “I did it!” Then she looked around and pulled her arms back down, embarrassed.
Legs separated, we shifted to the breast area. The sound of cracking filled the room as the volunteers cut through the bones. Lisa brought over a big bowl for each cut of meat and a plastic container for the mound of remnant bones.
Knives down, Maggie whisked the cutting boards to the dish area and the students rotated through the hand-washing station, merrily belting out various renditions of “Happy Birthday.” I eyed the clock; half an hour behind already and we hadn't even started cooking. The goal for the night was to demonstrate roasting, baking, sautéing, grilling, and braising.
“First, we'll roast a whole chicken and a few individual pieces. You'll want some kind of fat, maybe butter, olive oil, or sesame oil, plus some seasonings. A little bit of acid is nice, too, maybe some lemon, lime, vinegar, or white wine.”
To demonstrate, I took the organic chicken and set it on my own cutting board. Starting with the breast area, I carefully stretched my fingers between the skin and the meat to loosen the membrane between them. In the cavity created, I rubbed in a mix of chopped garlic, fresh herbs, and olive oil, then topped the skin with salt, freshly ground black pepper, and a bit of cayenne pepper and rubbed it in. To finish, I wedged pieces of lemon into the center cavity along with two cloves of garlic.
“Forget the idea that you need a lot of complicated cooking equipment,” I said. “All you need is an ovenproof pan with sides at least one inch high that is not too much bigger than the chicken. You can even use a skillet, as long as it can go in the oven.” A roasting rack can make life easier, but it's not necessary. In this case, we used a simple rectangular pan from the catering supplies. I scattered a few hunks of carrots, celery, and onions on the bottom and then perched the chicken on top. “The vegetables should elevate the chicken a bit, allowing fat to drain off. Plus, they keep it from sticking.”
Dri raised her hand. “Okay, so it seems like Julia Child was always trussing a chicken. It was all truss, truss, truss.”
Everyone laughed. “You know, at Le Cordon Bleu, we learned a complicated way to truss that stitched the whole thing up like a tight little football. But you don't need to do anything, really. I like to at least tie the feet together to help it keep its shape, but it's not mandatory.”
There's heated debate among chefs around the “best” roasting technique. I keep it simple. “Put it in at high heat, about 425 degrees. When it occurs to me, I turn it over after forty minutes to brown the other side, but if you're not so keen on getting tongs out to turn over a hot chicken, by all means leave it alone. Lisa doesn't turn hers, do you?” Lisa shook her head. “See? Some cookbooks advise roasting at 350 degrees, others at 400 degrees. This isn't science, it's more of an art. After an hour, check it with an instant-read thermometer to see if it registers close to 175 degrees, or if the juice that runs off when you pick it up looks clear. Pink? Put it back. Clear? Take it out. Let it rest for a few minutes, lightly covered with foil.”
Meat will continue to cook for several minutes after leaving the oven. It's called “carryover cooking.” Sitting also allows the juices to reabsorb into the meat.
“What if you undercook poultry?” Shannon asked, bringing up something we had talked about in her kitchen. “I am always worried about it, so I just cook it and cook it and then cook it some more. I think that's why mine always turns out so badly. I mean, you're supposed to cook chicken pretty much to death, right?”
“Suggested cooking temperatures tend to be higher than what's really needed to kill off any latent bacteria,” I said. “Cooking it past that point isn't going to do anything. It's kind of like trying to get more pregnant. If you're really worried about undercooking chicken, just spend a few dollars and get a meat thermometer. It will take out the guesswork.”
A blast of hot air hit the worktable as I shoved the chicken into the upright oven to roast.
Next, I grabbed a whole chicken breast with the rib bone still attached and set it on my cutting board. “Again, it's what gets put under the skin, just like a whole roast chicken. You need a bit of fat and a bit of flavor.” As a demonstration, we used a recipe from Ina Garten of
Barefoot Contesssa
fame that involved smearing a bit of goat cheese under the skin and then sliding in a couple of whole basil leaves. I drizzled the top with olive oil, coarse salt, and pepper. Everyone did the same, and we put all the breasts onto a sheet pan topped with parchment. We put them into the kitchen's other oven at 375°F. “These will stay in for about a half hour.”
We moved on. “
Braise
simply means cooking something covered at a low heat with a bit of liquid.” Lisa and I started with the big bowl of thighs and legs. We had settled on a classic mustard chicken dish, utilizing some of the Dijon from the tasting.
“Dark meat is great for braises because it can take long, slow cooking,” I said. The volunteers gathered around the commercial stove as Lisa added oil to a large pot and waited for it to heat. “First, we're going to brown the meat. Getting a nice, dark color makes a big difference. What you want is a hot pan with hot oil,” I said as Lisa set up a large pan to demonstrate. “Then add your food and give the pan a shake, just like Lauri demonstrated last week. That's how you keep food from sticking.”
Lisa put a thigh into the hot oil with long tongs. As if in protest, the pan crackled with a loud persistent sizzle. I added a few more pieces.
“Do you hear that?” I asked. This was an important lesson. “Don't cook just with your eyes. Teach yourself to cook with your ears. Listen. It's loud, it's sizzling and sounds sort of angry. That's what you want. Most home cooks are afraid of high heat. Don't be. Smell this chicken right now.” Lisa waved them closer. “Seriously, get close and take a whiff. What does it smell like?”