The Kitchen Counter Cooking School (15 page)

 

Warm 2 teaspoons of olive oil, then add the zest of
lemon and 1 tablespoon of chopped fresh herbs such as rosemary, oregano, tarragon, thyme, or basil. Heat through.

 

Heat 2 teaspoons of peanut oil, then add 2 finely chopped green onions, 1 tablespoon of crushed peanuts, a couple of squeezes from a fresh lime, and a bit of hot sauce. Gently heat through.

CHAPTER 6

 

“If there's one skill that I think people need to learn, it's how to cut up a whole chicken,” said Rick Rodgers, the author of thirty-five cookbooks. “Roast chicken is iconic, we all love it and that's a great skill to learn, but being able to do something with all the various parts of chicken is something even more people need to know in terms of how it fits in with their daily life.”

Knowing your way around a chicken is a valuable thing to learn. On average, a whole chicken costs about the same as a package of boneless skinless chicken breasts, whether it's a standard supermarket chicken or a more expensive organic variety. Used efficiently, a single chicken can provide the goods for two or three meals.

The breast can be left on the bone and baked, a boneless breast can be quickly sautéed, the thigh meat can be cut up for a stir-fry, the legs oven-fried, and the wings collected and frozen for snacks. If you decide to roast the whole bird, the meat can be used in a seemingly endless parade of dishes: salads, pasta, burritos, casseroles, sandwiches, and so on—virtually any recipe that calls for cooked chicken. As Rodgers notes, you get not only the eight chicken pieces but all the bones, the back, and the giblets,
¹⁵
too. Given that popular brands of stock average about $2.50 per quart and remnant bones from just one chicken can yield up to two quarts, one chicken can provide about $5.00 worth of stock.

 

In culinary terms, it's hard to beat the importance of chicken. It's the number one search term on recipe sites such as
Epicurious.com
,
Allrecipes.com
, and
Foodista.com
. On Google, worldwide traffic for “chicken recipes” dwarfs requests for beef, fish, or vegetarian recipes. Americans consume an average of 60 pounds of chicken annually, edging out beef as the nation's preferred meat.
¹⁶
American chicken growers process 38 million chickens daily—one for every man, woman, and child in the state of California every single day. That's 43 billion pounds each year, says the American Meat Institute, equivalent to the weight of 860 luxury cruise ships.

 

The students arrived, donned their aprons, grabbed a diaper, and selected a chef's knife from the box before heading to the worktable. They were getting to know one another and chatted amiably. I overheard snippets of small talk.

“I threw out all of my iodized salt. I had two of them . . .”

“Yeah, me, too.”

“I went through my cupboards and found most of my oils were rancid . . .”

“I made kale, and my boyfriend was like, ‘This is so good! Where did you get the idea to make
kale
?' ”

Helping out that day was my friend Maggie, a thirtyish streetwise Sicilian American beauty from Chicago with jet-black hair and dragonfly tattoos cascading down each arm. A kitchen veteran turned culinary consultant, Maggie agreed to assist with some of the more complicated classes. Just as the students were filing in, she arrived, aggravated from a day at her cupcake client. The small-baked-goods industry appears to be a surprisingly ruthless affair. Her client was locked in a battle for cupcake dominance with an arch competitor and the stress had prompted cutthroat internal politics. That day, she had had to snap at someone, “Does this kind of attitude belong around cupcakes!? I don't think so.”

Buoyed by the apparent success of the initial tasting evening, I decided to start each class with one. Today we set out small plates featuring five varieties of Dijon mustard. Now they knew the drill. Each person daintily dabbed a bit of mustard onto a small appetizer plate with a tiny espresso spoon. As each jotted down notes on a small yellow pad, they made thoughtful faces. We talked about flavors and words to describe them. The most common:
sour, spicy, bitter, smooth
. No one liked the cheapest store brand. “It's like chalk,” Gen said.

Grey Poupon was the easy favorite, even beating out Maille, a pricey classic French import. “You can taste the white wine in both, though,” Jodi said. An expensive organic brand was written off as bland. Shannon summed up the group's general thoughts. “The more that I taste, the more it makes me want to pay attention to what I used to just take for granted.”

Although it was past seven P.M., the warmth of the late-June day remained trapped in the room, intensified by the heat of the commercial ovens. Cars buzzed by outside the door, which was propped open in a futile attempt to draw in fresh air. Before we moved on to taking apart the chickens, I rounded up the group around the worktable set with a patchwork of colored cutting boards. Maggie passed around glasses of ice water as we talked chicken.

“Okay, I have a few questions. Have you ever cut up a chicken?” Universal shakes of the head.

“Do you know what
braise
means?” One person ventured a guess.

I asked if anyone had ever roasted a whole chicken. Only Trish raised her hand. “I have, but I've mostly bought them that way,” she said.

I lined up four chickens, à la Julia Child in a famous episode of her 1960s TV show,
The French Chef
. In that scene, she described the differences between a broiler, fryer, roaster, capon, stewer, and “Old Madam Hen.”
¹⁷
Instead of different ages, I presented differently raised chickens, all broilers weighing three to four pounds. Two were supermarket chickens, a commercially raised standard variety and a free-range bird that cost just less than a dollar more per pound. The third was a certified organic free-range chicken from a butcher. The last was a pasture-raised chicken purchased directly from a local farmer.

The supermarket chicken felt wet, and the breast was noticeably heavier than that of the rest of the chickens. The organic chicken from the butcher and the pasture-raised chicken, which didn't come prepackaged, felt dry. When I sat all four up as if they were lounging upright, the supermarket and the free-range chickens fell forward, propelled by the weight of their overbuilt breasts. I sliced a breast off each one. I held up the largest, from the least expensive supermarket chicken.

“How much do you think this weighs?” They all ventured a guess: six ounces, eight.

“How many servings do you think this is?” Everyone agreed that it was one serving.

Cheryl nuzzled Liam in his baby carrier. “A half a serving in my house. Yeah, Daddy could eat two of those, couldn't he, sweet pea?”

“How much do you think a serving should weigh?”

Donna, knower of all things Weight Watchers, piped up. “About four ounces,” she trilled brightly. “A chicken breast is three Weight Watchers points.”

I put the breast on a scale. It tipped in at more than a pound. “So this one breast ought to provide four servings.” More than two-thirds of the weight of this chicken came from the breast alone. The breast from the pasture-raised bird from the butcher weighed the least, about nine ounces.

As Michael Pollan noted in his book
The Omnivore's Dilemma,
commercial poultry growers have researched how to engineer chickens through breeding to grow significantly greater portions of breast meat. From a monetary point of view, it makes perfect fiscal sense. Boneless, skinless chicken breasts fetch as much as six dollars per pound—roughly five times the retail price for whole chickens and at least twice as much as the other portions of the bird. The downside? To maximize profits chickens are often confined to massive barracks where they are provided an endless supply of feed around the clock but given little exercise. As depicted in the documentary
Food Inc.,
some birds grow so big so fast, they ultimately cannot support themselves under the weight of their mighty breasts and fall down. Detractors of the industrial poultry process say that the system ratchets up the stress level for the chickens and breaks down their immune systems, thus requiring mass poultry growers to use a lot of antibiotics.

By comparison, organic farmers aren't supposed to give their chickens any antibiotics or feed containing pesticides.

“So what does it mean when the package says ‘all natural,' like this guy here?” Dri asked, pointing to a supermarket chicken.

“In theory, it means that the chicken doesn't have any artificial flavor, but in practice it's a little meaningless,” I said. Chickens are natural products, just like beef or pork. They don't make synthetic chickens, at least not yet. “With some companies, free-range is kind of similar, since the USDA requires only that the chicken have access to a door should it want to go outside, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it ranged anywhere, free or not.” The only way you can know how chickens are raised is to know the poultry grower, or if your butcher knows the grower. “Some free-range chicken growers really make an effort to treat the chickens humanely. The farm where this guy was raised,” I said, patting the pasture-raised chicken, “they make a point to physically transport the chickens to a grassy grazing area. But he's also triple the cost of a standard supermarket chicken.”

A small puddle had formed under the first chicken. Dri pointed. “Um, did that one need the ladies' room?”

“That's probably saline.” Producers sometimes inject chickens with water or brine. It keeps the meat moist, plus it adds more weight, adding cost, even though it's water, not meat.
¹⁸