‎"We (Asian Americans) have to stop being so fucking polite!" - Asian American dreams: the emergence of an American people, by Helen Zia

Saturday, June 15, 2013

Flight of Chickens - A Tasting Conclusions

A Flight of Chickens: A Tasting

On Sunday, May 26, 2013, a group of us gathered at Lord Robert d’Whitmont’s house in the Barony of An Dubhaigeainn to conduct a chicken tasting.  The group consisted of our hosts, Lord Robert d’Whitmont and his son Daniel, Lady Michele the Ubiquitous (Unclaimed Crown Lands) as the organizer, and Mistress Countess Brekke Franksdottir (Lionsend) as our chef. Also in attendance were Lady Aellin Olafsdottir and her lord Richard from Whyte Whey and Lord Robert le Chat & Lady Barbara the Nearly Naked Friesian visiting their country estate in Lionsend.  Lord Logan and Lady Damiana de Londres from An Dubhaigeainn also came to partake of the plentiful poultry.

The premise for this workshop was to determine whether or not chickens would taste different depending on breed, diet, age, and method of raising.  Based on various anecdotal accounts, we felt that these factors would affect the way the chickens tasted.  However, we wanted to do a side-by-side tasting to compare a variety of chickens in order to assess the flavors in a systematic way.  We also wanted to be able to discuss — based on our test group — how this difference could affect the taste of period dishes and how we could compensate for that difference.

The chickens we acquired were dependent on current market availability with the caveat that if enough of a difference was observed we would try the tasting again with additional chickens of a more period type.  The sample included the following: a commercial fryer, a Cornish game hen, a commercial silkie chicken, a free-range Cornish X fryer, and a free-range Sasso chicken.  The selections were made for the following reasons.  The commercial fryer was chosen as our control. The Cornish game hen is just a younger version of a commercial chicken.  The silkie is the only period breed in our trial.  Cornish X is the hybrid used in modern factory farms.  So the free-range Cornish X was selected to determine if diet and raising methods would change the taste.  The final chicken is a Sasso chicken or colored broiler.  These are hybrid chickens bred as free-range table chickens, meant to be slow-maturing and more active foragers.

In all, we have three examples of commercial chickens.  The Cornish cross or Cornish-Rock is the usual breed of factory chickens.  In our sample, we have no idea of what exactly these chickens were crossed with.  However, in appearance they all bore the same roundish, full-breasted profile.  The free-range chicken came with the head, so we could determine that it was a hen.  The supermarket chickens were headless so we could not sex them.  The supermarket fryer had a yellowish tone to its skin, possibly due to the inclusion of marigolds in the diet.  The Cornish game hen was pinkish.  The free-range Cornish X was a startling white.  The supermarket chicken was fresh, the Cornish game hen was purchased frozen, and the free range was killed on Friday night and the farm had it chilling in cold water.

The silkie chicken is our only period breed of chicken.  However, it is an Asian chicken breed, not European.  Due to its atypical appearance it is easily documentable.  Marco Polo mentions a chicken with fur instead of feathers in his travels.  It also has black skin, meat, and bones.  This makes it valuable for Chinese medicine and easily obtainable in Asian markets.  While the silkie did have a head, they are bred to be morphologically undifferentiated by sex, so we were unable to determine the gender.  In appearance, the silkie is very angular compared to the other chickens.  Aellin said it resembled the retired layers she has purchased at the Union Square Green Market, with its extremely defined keelbone.  The silkie chicken due to its fluffy feathers, hypermelanism (heavy pigmentation), and the fact that it has five toes — when most chickens have four — is probably a bad example of chicken in general, much less a period breed, be it European or Asian, because it is such an outlier from so many different standpoints.  However, it was the only readily available purebred chicken.

The final chicken is the Sasso chicken.  Goffles, the poultry farm, describes it as a colored broiler, a French chicken.  Further research unearthed that Sasso is a French company that produces designer chickens specifically for free-range raising.  Their goal is to develop a hardy, slow-growing chicken for the table.  From what I can determine from their breeding program, they have several different lines of chickens, all hybrids, which means that their offspring will not breed true.  While I can make an educated guess as to which type we tasted, without more input from the farm I cannot be absolutely certain whether the chick originally came from Sasso or if it was bred by Goffles.  Since this chicken did have a head we could determine that it was a rooster.  It was also the largest chicken in our sample, but we could not tell if this was due to the sex or age of the rooster.

Once we examined the raw chickens, they were boiled for approximately 20 minutes per pound.  After cooking, we removed some of the breast meat and the leg, and asked everyone to sample some of each one at a time and make comments on tables provided.  We also sampled the broth and noted the appearance of the broth and taste of the broth.  Please note that this was not a blind tasting; due to color and size of the chickens, a blind tasting was not feasible.

5/26/2013 Commercial Free Range (Goffles)
Control Cornish Game Hen Silkie Chicken
Cornish X (Young chicken) Cornish X Sasso Chicken
A B C D E
Raw Blue band on leg White band on wing
Weight 4lb 6oz 1lb 13oz 1lb 9oz 3lb 13.25oz 5lb 4.75oz
CV American Choice (A&P brand) fryer, up to 3% retained water. $1.69/lb Tyson brand less than 4% retained water, frozen & thawed $2.49/lb V&Ts, frozen & thawed $8.99 each Killed Friday night, $2.19/lb, hen Killed Friday night, $2.49/lb, rooster
Appearance flabby skin, yellowish skin tone (fed marigolds?) lots of fat, overall shape round pinkish white, a lot of fat, overall shape round blackish blue skin, a little grayish yellow fat, keelbone prominent (like Anne's retired layers?), very angular very white skin, some fat, crisp skin, the skin on the edge of the wing was very defined , overall shape round bright yellow skin, very fat, fat around the gizzard, overall shape more oblong, not as much breast meat
Cooked About 20 minutes/lb
Cooking Time (h:m) 1:25 0:40 0:30 1:10 2:00
30 min. after E 30 min. after D 10 min. after B 15 min. after A
Appearance Falling apart, pale yellow, bone pulled out falling apart, whitish not falling apart, grey, bone difficult to eat, very little meat falling apart, very white, pinkish mostly falling apart, bone pulled out, meat is yellow
Weight NA (forgot to re-weigh)
Broth Blue band on pot handle Green band on pot handle White band on pot handle Yellow band on pot handle
Appearance of Broth slightly yellow, obvious fat on top, clear pale, little fat on top, gray pale, little fat, clear pale, little fat, clear lots of fat, yellow
Taste of broth chicken, salty, watery, oily, slight chicken flavor little flavor, watery chicken flavor, not from oil, watery less oil, complex flavor good, vegetable notes, richer chicken taste, good chicken flavor most flavor, rich chicken taste, VG chicken flavor, more fat
Taste
White Meat dry, mild/bland, full taste on upper palate, lingering, shark meat texture, like chicken, less flavor, slight metallic mild, dry, more side of mouth flavor, dry flaky, grassy, greasy, tastes like commercial chicken breast, bland, light chicken tasty, richer chicken taste, gamier, nutty, moist, chicken flavor mild, strong chicken flavor good chicken taste, slight lemony notes?, fresh, greasy, papery, dry, strong, metallic, best flavor fresh nice taste, roasted chicken taste, burst of flavor, white bread, mild chicken flavor, not as strong flavor
Dark Meat mild, sharper metallic taste on upper palate, tastes like alligator, more flavor, moist, chicken moist mild a bit more taste, a little gamey, slippery texture, pepperish - mushroom, nutty, extremely mild, strong chicken less taste than the white, stronger tasting, nice, tangy, papery, oily, not particularly flavorful, fatty, strong chicken chicken, meat near bone yummy, gristlely, stringy like tendons, slight olive taste, tastes like domestic chicken, strong chicken, best flavor chicken, gamy, taste on side back of tongue, mild, flavorful
Texture
White Meat Dry, firm/powdery, oily, denser firm, dry, dense, chewy, less stringy than dark, rubbery, mushy chewy, overcooked codfish texture, firm moist, tender, chewier meatier than control, dry, thick, chewy, tends to stick to the mouth, firm tender/musky, less dry than the other, dry, tough
Dark Meat moister, not juicy, mushy, softer texture moist, firm, soft, somewhat stringy, moist chewy, rubbery, stringy, tougher, mottled color, oily, softer moist, firm, slightly chewy, dense like thin steak, strong firm, smooth firm, moist, chewy, soft, a bit stringy, dry, tough
Bones Friable, somewhat brittle friable, soft strong, thinner bone than the others, strong, brittle strong really strong, hard to chop through.
These are the combined observations of 7 tasters.
If I could not read the handwritten notes, those observations were not included.
From the data sheet you can see that yes, chickens do vary in taste based on diet, weight, age, and breed.  For the curious, the majority of tasters felt that the Sasso chicken tasted the best out of our sampling.  We were unable to determine if that was due to the age or breed of the chicken.  According to the American Livestock Breed Conservancy (ALBC), chickens develop more flavor as they age.

Some additional factors to consider that may have skewed our results are that the silkie chicken and the Cornish game hen were both significantly smaller than the other samples.  However, most of our pots and the water in the pots were roughly the same volume, so these two were cooked with more water per pound of chicken than the others, which may have led to the lighter tasting broths.  Since we were cooking these chickens outside on propane stoves, the flame under the silkie blew out sometime during the cooking time, so we relit the stove and allowed it to cook for longer.  This may have resulted in an overcooked silkie.  Since there was significantly less meat on the silkie compared to the other chickens it may have warranted a shorter cooking time, but due to burner error we are unable to determine this. 

The salty taste detected in our control broth may have been the result of plumping.  Plumping is the industry practice of injecting the chicken with saline solution.  It’s supposed to make the chicken more tender.  It also increases the weight of chicken.

After our tasting we have determined that we would like to conduct at least another tasting with the following types of chickens.  We would like to compare a free-range silkie to the factory-farm silkie. We would also like to locate some period European breeds of chickens, preferably free range.  With help from our friends on various social media groups we have narrowed our selection down to the following breeds: Dorkings, Sussex, Hamburgs, Andalusians, Leghorns, Old English Game, and Icelandics.  We would also like to consider how the butchering method may affect the taste of the birds.  Western practice seems to call for icing or chilling the birds after slaughtering.  However, if a bird is purchased from various live markets (Asian or Spanish), the cleaned bird is bagged and handed to the consumer still warm.  The ALBC suggests that chickens — especially older ones — need to be aged in the refrigerator for a couple of days before cooking and serving.  We would also like to try a kosher or halal chicken to see how those preparation methods may affect the taste aside from more conventional butchering practices.

And of course with any “period” breed of livestock, it is important to note that it is nearly impossible to know how much the breed, and specifically the samples obtained, may have been improved from the original period type —particularly with landrace breeds.  However, unless we intend on raising our own chickens or back-breeding them to period type as has been done by a laurel in Indiana, this is as close as we can get in our fairly urban part of the Known World.

Sources with comments:
Damerow, Gail, Storey's Guide to Raising Chickens: Care / Feeding / Facilities, Storey Publishing: North Adams, MA, 2009.

American Livestock Breed Conservancy http://www.albc-usa.org/documents/cookingwheritagechicken.pdf.  It also discusses some of the differences between heritage breeds and modern chickens.
Their main website also has good information about heritage breeds in general and a breeder directory.  

Colonial Williamsburg Rare Breeds Program http://www.history.org/almanack/life/animals/pr_rare.cfm



http://turtlebackfarm.com/?page_id=645 potential source for a period chicken on Long Island

http://www.angrin.tlri.gov.tw/INRA/o11.pdf This paper is about Taiwan country chickens.  Some stuff that my Dad said about how chicken tasted different with the importation of American broilers to the Taiwan chicken population started me down this research path.  This paper — while not about a period European breed — does show the difficulty that Dr. Lee had in trying to locate a breed/type of chicken that was common in Taiwan in the 70s.  At the time the article was already 30+ years old.  This article shows some of the assumptions he had to make in pinpointing a pure breed chicken.  So I am using it as a guide for some of the pitfalls we could encounter in predictions about how a chicken that has the same name as a “period” breed, or even if it’s found in the same geographic area, may be very different from the period version.



My pet chicken http://www.mypetchicken.com/.  This website sells small lots of day old chickens mostly to people who want urban or suburban chickens.  But that have a nice website about various chicken breeds.

Oklahoma State University’s Livestock Breed Information site. http://www.ansi.okstate.edu/breeds/poultry/  This is my usual go-to place information about sheep, so I figured it couldn’t be that far off for chickens.
Wikipedia on various chicken breeds; the silkie article is actually fairly accurate based on what I was taught about them as a child.

Thanks to my friends on G+ who also helped with the chicken search.

And thanks to Brekke for passing on information from emails going around the SCA-Authentic Cooks yahoo group.

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