Len's News, Notes, and Stuff

Chicken Should Taste Like Chicken

Enjoying food is about flavor, texture, aroma, and visual appeal. And yeah, okay, nutritional value too. If any of those elements isn’t up to snuff, the food isn’t good. Unfortunately, the food industry today is about producing volume, not about producing food that’s actually good. It’s about quantity, not quality.

Feedlot beef has no beefiness to it. Mass-produced pork has no taste. Chicken cranked out by veritable factories is bland – the perfectly safe choice for people who have no idea what they like to eat.

I had the great pleasure last night of cooking up two pasture-raised, organic chickens courtesy of Kawartha Ecological Growers. These were young chickens, technically poussins. I have to tell you that these naturally-raised chickens were real chickens, through and through, putting the supermarket fare – yes, even the pricey Maple Leaf Prime chickens – to shame.

These were about 2.5lb birds, and I had in mind a dish for them that would be simple and clean to let the actual chicken flavor come out. I didn’t want to mask the innate qualities of the chicken with strong spices. I elected to make a simple chicken toscana with peppers. I would portion each chicken into 8 pieces, on the bone, brown the pieces, add some garlic and diced proscuitto, deglaze with white wine, then simmer and braise for 20 minutes with chopped tomatoes. Sautee some sweet peppers to the point of browning them, deglaze with a bit of water, and add the whole shebang to the simmering chicken & tomatoes. Add a bit of salt and pepper, serve with a side of rice, and that’s it.

Right off the bat, I knew something good was going on. These little chickens had no fat. Supermarket chickens usually have a fair bit of fat under the skin, and even the so-called nicer stuff like Prime chicken has a fair bit of fat within the muscle which is particularly easy to see in the thighs. Not these pasture-raised chickens, though. Having fed naturally on what chickens are supposed to eat, and having had to walk around and hunt for it all day long meant these chickens were incredibly lean. That’s a good thing already.

The real test was, of course, in the eating. I have to admit that my greatest fear during the entire process was that I might, in some way, ruin the chicken. I haven’t browned meats in my pans for quite some time, and I didn’t want to overcook the chicken or worse, burn it. I wasn’t sure if the recipe, as simple as it is, would overpower the chicken or just not have enough flavor to be enjoyable. Thankfully, the end result was one of the most enjoyable chicken dishes I’ve had in a long time.

The chicken tasted of chicken! It was moist, smooth, and had an intrinsic chicken flavor to it. I don’t know how to stress that enough. Run-of-the-mill mass-produced chicken is bland. It has little or no flavor to it. These naturally-raised chickens, however, had a light yet sustained meat taste to them. The sauce was equally tasty, having picked up flavorful goodness from the chicken, from the pan, and from the fresh, local tomatoes and genuine proscuitto di Parma.

Simple dishes rely entirely on the freshness and the quality of the ingredients used to make them. The flip side, however, is that they also enable quality ingredients to really show themselves and shine.

Chicken should taste like chicken. Regular supermarket chicken does not taste like chicken. For chicken that tastes the way it’s supposed to taste, you’ll need to spend a little more and buy free-range, naturally-raised chickens. Maybe you can’t do that every time, and maybe not every dish needs that – if you’re going to mask the intrinsic taste of the meat with lots of herbs and spices anyways, it won’t matter what quality chicken you use. If you enjoy good food, if you truly enjoy what meat of each kind is supposed to taste like, please treat yourself at least once in a while to good, quality chicken raised the way chickens are supposed to be raised. Get your hands on some quality free-range, pasture-raised chickens that ran around, pecked everywhere, scratched the earth, breathed fresh air and freely flapped their wings around.

You will taste the difference!