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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