Pastured Poultry Preservation

Recently, preparing to leave Massachusetts for a sojourn in the sunny south, I surveyed my winter stockpile of provisions with a critical eye. I needed stock. Chicken stock. Lots of chicken stock. What, after all, is a cold winter’s day without a pot of soup steaming on the stovetop and a mug of cocoa reanimating my frosted fingers? Admittedly, homemade stock has never been my strongpoint—for an embarrassingly long time I suffered under the illusion that one chicken’s worth of bones, if simmered long enough, could magically transform an entire pot of water into a rich, fragrant base for soups. This is patently untrue, as a succession of “subtle” (read: watery) stocks demonstrated. With vegetable stocks I had equally unfortunate results, primarily because I could never bring myself to sacrifice a sufficient quantity of perfectly good veggies to the stockpot. (The one time I did manage to achieve vegetable broth nirvana, as part of an over-ambitious soup-in-a-pumpkin spectacle, I ran a tab of about $50. For soup. Never again, Whole Foods).

But this time around I had several secret weapons: The River Cottage Meat Book, the most scrumptious treatise on carnivory ever composed, 75 lbs of chicken backs and too-small-for-sale birds, and a knowledgeable assistant. OK, so maybe Andrew was actually in charge. He spent the season working at Polyface Farm, our source for stock birds and a perfect stopping point in my seasonal migration from north to south. When I learned that we could borrow a kitchen and two pressure canners in return for one night of feeding the crew, I decided that it was time to purchase additional canning jars, and perhaps buy stock in the Ball company.

Do not be deceived by my history of failure: making a good stock is fantastically simple. As long as you avoid the two great sins of stock-making—overboiling and underpacking—you cannot fail. First, you must pack the pot tightly with your bones and/or meat and add only enough water to cover everything. Second, you must maintain your pot at the most tremulous of simmers for 3-6 hours. We added a few carrots, some celery stalks, and several quartered onions to our brew, but eschewed the addition of any salt. While “salt to taste” seems to be the directive that commercial stock companies cook by (check out the sodium content on that Campbell’s soup!), we wanted to save the salting step for the distant day when we use our stock. Besides, our stock was so flavorful that we didn’t need salt in order to taste the chicken-y goodness.

Several hours later, with the afternoon sun streaming into the kitchen, we began to decant our stocks one by one, first pulling out whole birds, necks, and backs, then carefully straining the broth through a fine sieve. Internet sleuthing had revealed that the fat in our stock could interfere with a proper canning seal or cause the stock to go rancid, so we covered the pots, stashed them in my cat-proof car to chill for the night, and made plans to regroup in the morning. Chicken as air freshener—I think it will really catch on.

Then we cooked dinner for 12 hungry farmers.

Morning found us in the kitchen again, skimming off the risen fat and preparing the safe-like pressure canner for duty. Low acid foods like stock require the high heat of a pressure canner for safe home canning. Please don’t ever use a water bath and call it even—it isn’t. You can, of course, freeze your stock and store it for at least a year, but with our freezer bursting from 130 lbs of veal, we felt that canning made the most sense. We saved the chicken fat (schmaltz) for matzoh balls, stir-fries, and spreading on bread, and we canned our eighteen quarts of stock in just a few hours.

Coming soon: What We Did While the Stock (tremulously) Simmered or In Defense of Fat or Why “Lard-Bucket” is Really a Term of Endearment

Dirty Words

What is the difference between dirt and soil?

The difference is first and foremost our 5 cows--Lucy, Lukey, Leche, Maya, and Chloe. All winter long, our cows spent their nights in the barn, leaving us with an abundance of rich manure ideally situated for convenient composting. As soon as the snow melted and the pastures became knee-deep in fresh grass and covercrops, our bovine beasties began chafing for fresh greens (who can blame them?). Last week, we pulled out the mobile electric fencing and led our eager cows onto the first of 3 field of rye grass. These fields will lie fallow this year, allowing the earth to rest before another strenuous year of growing. Fallow fields are not devoid of activity, however. The rye grass added nitrogen to the soil, and like all grasses, sent down deep, aerating roots. Now that our cows have mowed the grass, we can reseed the fields in a summer crop like oats, which will be fertilized by the cow's manure.

But that manure needs spreading, which is why we have our chickens. Our 83 Golden Star laying hens have finished their winter vacation in the barn and are now hard at work cleaning up after the cows. Truth be told, they're much happier (and thus more pleasant to work with) now that they can take dust baths, catch bugs, and run in circles around their pen. Every day one of us moves their covered wagon-esque shelter one length farther in the cow-grazed field. After about a week, we'll move their fencing to a new patch and begin again. All the while that they are scratching through cow patties and scruffing up the soil, the chickens are adding their own fertilizer, which will show up in bright green growth in our next covercrop.

Meanwhile, back at the barn, the pigs are turning the cow's winter manure (and shortly the chicken's too) into compost. Pigs love nothing better than rooting for buried treasure, so we hide pockets of dried corn deep in the bedding and manure. The pigs dig it up, grow happily fatter, and move our composting operation along at a brisk pace. Our compost piles then age in the sun for about a season, until what once was waste becomes farm gold.

Through the additional labor of millions of earthworms, trillions of bacteria, nematodes, and fungi, our land becomes something more than a medium for growing plants.

It is soil, not dirt.

Let them eat chicken

It was a bit like a scene from Macbeth: thunder rolling in the background, a cauldron-like stockpot seething atop our grill, and across from me, Jack brandishing a shiny new chef knife.
It was chicken harvesting time.

Since out broilers first arrived, I’ve spent a good bit of time thinking about slaughter. Not that I relish the thought of killing and cleaning a chicken (far from it!), but I wanted to be mentally prepared to take a chicken’s life respectfully, cleanly, and without excessive girlish squealing. I knew that the last bit might prove difficult after the execution of a rat snake recently found hiding in the chicken coop provoked some very undignified noises. We’ve lost two of our Cornish Cross broilers recently, once to an animal attack and once to dehydration, and in each case I have looked at the carcass and wondered: “could I turn that into dinner?” It seemed an awfully large transition from that limp pile of feathers to fried chicken.

An unfortunate side effect of the Cornish Cross’s unparalleled ability to put on breast meat is that these hefty birds sometimes grow so fast that they break their own legs. A chicken with a broken leg is a sad little creature, and no amount of athletic tape and popsicle sticks is likely to send it back to pasture. Once we realized that we had one such chicken, we knew that it was our duty to kill it as quickly as possible. I decided to view the process as a test run for our first real chicken harvesting day, and I convinced Jack to help me, at least by providing moral support.

I began by reading everything that Joel Salatin’s Pastured Poultry Profit$ had to say about slaughter. Unfortunately, the pictures are rather grainy, and the anatomical descriptions are only helpful if you can tell the difference between a gizzard and an esophagus. Let’s just say it’s been a long time since freshman biology. I then began scouring the Internet for tutorials, home videos, or anything else related to cleaning a chicken. Alas, the closest I could find was a PETA video about factory farming (not what I wanted to model my harvest after) and various clips of people dancing the funky chicken at weddings and bar mitzvahs. On Wednesday night I discovered that Sandy, the manager of the Hil Restaurant, used to kill and process her own chickens, but while she was more than happy to offer advice, she was busy with the Hil for the next five days. It would be all me.

A storm had been building all of Thursday afternoon when I finally set an enormous cauldron of water on the grill. While the pot heated up, Jack helped me do the deed. Beheaded chickens tend to flap, flutter, and inflict psychic scarring on all parties involved, so Jack and I decided to approximate the killing cones that most small-scale producers prefer. With killing cones, the chicken is inverted (for some reason this calms them) and its head pushed through a small hole at the bottom of a large cone (in our case, an old plastic flower pot). While I help the pot and the chicken’s feet, Jack cut our chicken’s jugular vein and we let it bleed out. From what I’ve read, the chicken dies instantly, though the heart continues to beat long enough to flush most of the blood out. Thanks to the cone, our bird did not do a grisly chicken death dance, though it did flutter enough for me to yell at Jack “are you sure you did that right?” One look, however, confirmed that our chicken was indeed going gently into that good night.

I checked that the water had reached 140°, then, once confident that the chicken was unquestionably dead, I dunked it repeatedly to loosen the feathers. Then, to my amazement, our chicken became dinner table fare. The feathers came off easily in soggy white clumps, and I was left with a slightly puny version of a grocery chicken. I finished the job that Jack had begun by removing the head, then I chopped off the feet. Now came the real challenge, the sprint before home plate—eviscerating the chicken. I had worried that I would find this inherently gruesome process both appetite destroying and just plain hard. By then, however, I was in full dissection mode. My curiosity kicked in, and I stopped carrying that an animal was becoming food in a setting reminiscent of Frankenstein’s laboratory.

I can’t watch the medical drama House without becoming squeamish; gory horror films still give me the creeps, yet there I was, with a smile on my face, happily studying the body cavity of a chicken to be sure that I hadn’t missed anything. I guess that’s how you know you’re a farmer.

Smothered Chicken with Mushrooms

According to my cookbook, Country Tastes: Best Recipes from America’s Kitchens, “Sunday chicken dinner on the farm was often prepared this way.” With an endorsement like that (and an abundance of shitakes in the fridge), I was an easy sell on this recipe. The sauce cooked up thick and mushroom-mellow and tasted far richer than it actually was.

1 frying chicken, cut up
salt and pepper, to taste
1 T butter
2 T vegetable oil
1 small onion, chopped
½ pound mushrooms, sliced
3 T flour
1 ½ cup chicken broth
½ cup cream or milk
shredded Parmesan cheese (optional)
chopped fresh parsley, to garnish

Preheat oven to 350. Wash the chicken and pat dry. Sprinkle chicken pieces with salt and pepper.

In a heavy skillet heat the butter and oil over high heat. Add the chicken, skin-side down. Brown on one side, then turn over and repeat. Remove the chicken to a casserole dish and cover the bottom of the dish in a single layer.

Pour off all by 2 T of any fat in the skillet. Now add the onions and mushrooms and sauté over medium heat 5 minutes, stirring occasionally. Stir in the flour, then the broth, whisking until the sauce thickens. Add the milk or cream and remove from heat. Pour the sauce over the chicken. Cover with the cheese, if desired.

Cover the casserole dish and bake for 20 minutes, then remove the cover and bake for 30 minutes more, until the chicken is tender but not falling apart. Sprinkle with parsley and serve with mashed potatoes.

Zen and the Art of Pastured Pountry

According to my beginner's knowledge of Buddhism, attachment is the source of all suffering. Holding that thought firmly in mind, I opened two fiercely chirping boxes this morning and introduced our 100-odd baby chicks to their new home. Some of the tiny birds are intended to supplement our still dwindling flock of layers (these I am allowed to love); the vast majority will be "broilers," destined to be my introduction to the world of animal processing. In anticipation of this moment of truth, I've been schooling myself from Joel Salatin's comprehensive Pastured Poultry Profits. Among the many illustrations within is a series that demonstrates proper chicken processing procedure and includes instructions like, "Pull open the rear enough to get your hand in," and "Pull the heads off. No bone shards that way."

I was the kid in high school who felt sorry for the dissection specimens, and while I'm certainly less squeamish and empathetic today than I was then, I know full well that chicken harvesting won't be nearly as easy as picking strawberries.

Still, these broilers are an important challenge for me. In my opinion, if I can't stomach the process that brings my food to my plate, I probably shouldn't be eating what's on it. I'm looking forward to processing chickens with the same combination of fascination and dread with which I greeted my first rollercoaster. This could get ugly. My stomach will probably be lodged somewhere in my throat. But I've got to give it a try.

Because the baby chicks are just so darn adorable, I'm trying to cultivate a healthily dark sense of humor around them to prevent myself from lapsing into babytalk. I hailed them as my dinner, jokily speculated that the garlic (which is curing in the same garage where we brood the chickens) might season the young birds through a miracle of proximity, and debated with the other interns the finer points of slaughter (Will a headless chicken really run? Does it count if it then crosses the road?) All of this is to say that I'm trying my best not to get attached to these birds because I really, really like to eat chicken, and I'd hate to become a vegetarian simply because I can't deal with the reality of death. We will give our birds a natural, albeit brief, chickenly life. They will eat well, scratch in the dirt, and flap their wings. Then, having given then a reason for existence (domesticated animals like chickens would not exist were it not for human consumption of them), I will kill them humanely and eat them reverentially. Hopefully with lots of garlic.

The chickens are presently too small to be good for much of anything, so my cooking remains very vegetably based. Luckily, summer is a time when veggies can easily hold their own. Last week's heat wave inspired me to make a chilled cucumber soup, then the end of the week harvest set me into a cooking frenzy. Two recipes here call for whey, but that's only because I made ricotta and wanted to find a use for the protein-rich byproduct. You can as easily substitute chicken or vegetable stock where I call for whey.

Cucumber Soup with Smoked Salmon

1 Tablespoon butter
100 g onion, chopped
4 cucumbers, peeled, halved, deseeded and chopped
1 potato, chopped
800 mL whey
15 g dill, chopped
1 teaspoon salt
250 mL sour cream or yogurt
150 g smoked salmon, chopped

Melt the butter in a saucepan over medium-low heat and saute the onion until soft. Stir in the cucumber and potato and saute for a further minute. Add the whey, dill, and salt. Bring to a boil, then simmer for 20 minutes, until the potato is tender. Puree the soup in a food processor or blender until smooth. Cool; chill the soup in the fridge for 3-4 hours. Stir in the sour cream or yogurt and garnish with the smoked salmon.

Roasted or Grilled Summer Squash

8-10 cups summer squash, thickly sliced
4 cloved garlic, minced
1/3 cup olive oil
2 Tablespoons EACH of fresh basil, oregano, and thyme
2 Tablespoons balsamic venegar
1 Tablespoon Dijon mustard
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper

Mix all of the seasoning ingredients together in a large bowl. Toss the squash with marinade to liberally coat. If grilling, grill the squash rounds (put that George Foreman grill to work!) for about 5 minutes, until you get nice grill marks and the squash becomes tender. If roasting, roast at 425 for about 20 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Stuffed Swiss Chard
Think of this as a more affordable recipe for stuffed grape leaves

2 Tbsp. golden raisins
1 c. lukewarm water
2/3 c. short grain sweet rice
4 tsp. olive oil, divided
1 onion, finely chopped
1 bunch swiss chard
1/2 c. reduced sodium vegetable broth
3 large dried figs or dates, chopped, or crasins
1 egg white
1/4 cup pine nuts, toasted
1/4 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. ground white pepper

Preheat oven to 325. In a small bowl, soak the raisins in the lukewarm water until plumped, about 15 minutes. Drain. Meanwhile, cook the rice according the package directions--shortgrain brown rice takes a while; be forewarned. In a small nonstick skillet, heat 2 tsp. of the oil. Saute onion until it starts to turn golden, 5-7 minutes. Rinse the chard until cold running water. Being careful not to tear the leaves, cut out the thickest part of the stems. Finely chop the stems. Add the stems and broth to the onion. Cook until liquid evaporates, about 5 minutes. Stir in raisins, rice, figs, pine nuts, and egg white. Place 1 1/2 Tablespoons (or more, depending on size of leaf) of the rice mixture on each chard leaf. Gently wrap, envelope-style, and secure with a toothpick. Place the chard bundles seam-side down and close together in a 9x13 baking dish. Wish a pastry brush, coat the bundles with the remaining 2 tsp. oil, then sprinkle with salt and pepper. Add 1/4 inch of water to the baking dish. Bake until heated through, about 35 minutes.

Featured on the table: stuffed swiss chard, grilled summer squash, and a beet and new potato salad. Who needs meat?

Fowl Deeds By Night

Something wicked our way comes. Or at least, something hungry, with very sharp teeth and a taste for poultry. For the past week and a half, some fell beast has been stalking our chickens, and every few days we learn a bit more about chicken anatomy when we stumble across the remains of the latest victim during our morning egg run. The electric fence has been less than perfect due to grounding out on tall grass, so we don't know whether the hungry hunter came from above or managed to cross the fence unscathed. This series of events has led to a fair bit of dark humor from the apprentices as well as a number of hair-brained schemes to catch the perpetrators. Jack and Ben (our newest addition to the farm) favor an old fashioned stake out with a BB gun and a bottle strong enough to warm the cold night. Two of our neighborhood children proposed that a CCTV chicken cam would reveal the guilty party. (Perhaps this blog will soon feature a live feed?) I've been trying to strengthen the fence by flattening the weeds and tightening the corners, but we've still lost one hen since I began my efforts.

Meanwhile, our survivors go about their business seemingly unperturbed by the ghost in the darkness. Despite my fears of a declining egg count cutting into my free egg quota (I am troubled by the idea that I might eventually have to pay for eggs while working on a farm. This will not do.), the chickens seem to be producing at or only slightly below normal. This would seem to confirm Paige's optimistic appraisal that perhaps the murdered chickens were in fact our egg eaters. We've found the occasional egg shell and faint residue of yolk lately--tell-tale signs of chicken cannibalism--so if our predator has culled the flock of the offending bird(s) we won't begrudge it the free meal.

If not, well, perhaps we need to call in Val Kilmer.

The Deeper Questions

I actually saw a chicken cross the road today.

It was commuting from the rumored meth chemist's house at the end of the street to the Montessori school on the far side, so perhaps we can speculate that health had something to do with the journey? I like to think that I played a small part in this epic moment, as the sight of me on my bike inspired the cautious fowl to scoot a bit faster. Alas, my own speed was too great to stop and investigate further into moods and motivations, so the immortal "why" remains unanswered.

But I can now authoritatively say that chickens do, on occasion, cross the road.

In Lieu of a Golden Egg

When I informed my friend Lee that I would shortly begin work on a farm, he had one important question for me: is it true that chickens lay eggs the same color as their ear feathers? I must confess, Lee, I am three weeks on the farm and I still haven't noticed that the chickens even have ears. Eggs, on the other hand, they have in abundance. Collecting the eggs has fast become my favorite morning chore, even after one particularly disastrous attempted-chicken-rescue sent both me and my wayward fowl careening into the electric fence. That chicken still runs when it sees me coming.

I am fascinated by the variations in their shape, texture, and color--our hens lay blue-green, sandy brown, and the standard white eggs, and once a tiny runt of an egg no bigger than what a quail would produce. Unsurprisingly, given my passion for miniature, I immediately claimed it for my own. Even though the outcome of my a.m. expedition is never in doubt, each morning feels like my own private easter egg hunt, and I marvel when I lift up a hen to find a warm little egg snug beneath her. Most of our chickens would make horrible mothers--they've abandoned their post long before I show up with the food and water--but one broody hen seems determined to raise a brood. Every morning I find her perched atop 4-5 adopted eggs, and though she relinquishes them without a fight, I always feel a pang of guilt at stealing her work out from under her.

On average, from our 3oish chickens we collect about 18-20 eggs per day. This seems like a bonanza to me, though I am told to expect an egg from each hen about every day and a half. Especially now, as spring makes ever more daring advances, eggs are the perfect representation of abundant, extravagant life. Eggs are both promise and product, seeds and sustenance. Our chickens may be dumber than several varieties of tomato, but I love them none the less thanks to those gorgeous, miraculous eggs.

Happy Easter, Happy Ostara, Happy Passover to all!