Bye Bye, Birdie: A Chicken from Farm-to-Table in the City

We were waiting for our burritos to come up at the neighborhood taco truck when we noticed a curious business operating out of a van parked next door.   It turns out that every Saturday some local Vietnamese farmers load their chicken coop into the back of their van and park on the corner of Martin Luther King Wy and Othello St. They vend live hens, cocks and turkeys, leaving the neck-wringing up to their grateful patrons.  Jonas wanted to take a peek just so he could show Bentley the furry fowl, but I had other designs.  I started eating meat six years ago after a 20 year hiatus.  I decided when I was a small child and my father slaughtered my beloved pet cow, Slobber that meat just wasn’t for me.  In my early 20’s I started relaxing my rules, first with the introduction of fish, then chicken, beef, and just in the last couple of months, pork- the final frontier.  I still have huge reverence for animals and I really appreciate meat when I eat it, but I’ve always been a “take the bull by the horns” kind of girl, and I feel that buying a nicely-packaged disembodied chicken breast at Whole Foods is sort of a copout.  If I’m going to fully embrace this whole meat thing, I should be comfortable going from farm to table, right? 

To make a long story short, we drove home with a live chicken pecking her way around my trunk.  I posted a quick video on facebook of the chicken purchase and asked my friends if anyone had any experience with the inevitable next step.  I was shocked at the squeamishness of many folks who I know to eat meat on a daily basis.  It really reaffirmed what I was doing- if the animal is going to give their life for my pleasure, the least I can do is be able to stomach the process, and if I cannot, perhaps I don’t belong amongst the carnivorous denizens after all. 

Jonas and I waited for Bentley to take a nap, and then enlisted the assistance of our neighbor Jamie since we figured the deed might get slightly complicated.  A quick online search revealed neck-wringing as the most humane execution method, and somehow I was elected hatchet-man (or woman, as it were).  I talked the bird and myself through it several times, and I’d like to think we bonded in those final moments when I thanked her for providing me with sustenance.  Jonas and Jamie took turns filming and laughing at my trepidation, though neither of them offered up their manly services so I continued to physically and spiritually prepare myself.  After 20 minutes of hemming and hawing I realized I just couldn’t do it.  It wasn’t a moral issue I was having- more a question of my own physical strength.  I wanted it to be as quick and painless for her as possible and I didn’t think I was capable of that on a first try with no prior knowledge.  I begged and bartered with Jonas until he finally agreed to be the hit man, but he made it very clear that it was only under my orders so I was the true chicken killer.   He quickly got down to business so as not to psych himself out as I had, and started wringing right away.  It was a much harder than I thought, and I don’t think I would have had the physical strength to make it quick.  After a minute or so, the bird stopped writhing, but we removed the head with an axe just to be sure.  We bound her ankles and hung her in the shed to bleed for a day so the meat would taste fresh and flavorful. 

I checked out several online tutorials to sort out the best way to pluck a chicken and made myself needlessly nervous about the ordeal, because it turned out to be really easy.  There are heated debates about whether to plunge the bird in 150° or 180° water, and frankly I think it’s just something you get the feel for over time.  After several dunks in my cauldron and a bit of agitation, my bird (who at this point I had christened “Missy” after my husband’s ex-girlfriend) was ripe for plucking.  (The puns just write themselves, don’t they?)  I read that back in the 1940′s, the world champion chicken plucker had managed to do an entire bird in four seconds flat.  I really can’t believe there is a world champion plucker, but he definitely has me beat.  It probably took me 10 minutes, as I wanted to take my time with pulling out all the nasty pin-feathers since they impart a bitter taste on the bird.

For some reason I focused all my energy on plucking and forgot to be nervous about the gutting part.  I should have been more nervous about gutting!  I have seen thousands of chickens throughout my life perched on supermarket shelves ready to be purchased, so theoretically I should have known my end goal in gutting the bird, right? Wrong.  I got it into my head that I needed to splay the bird from butt to neck in order to get all the guts out, so I started at the bottom with my knife and began to rip little Missy a new arse-hole.  I kept cutting away up her belly and into her breasts until Jonas shrieked at me to stop at once- I was cutting too far.  Luckily I only sliced about an inch farther than I should, but it sure ruined my chances of taking glorious photos of a perfectly roasted glistening bird.  The other thing I failed to realize about gutting until it was too late is that the smell truly is vomit-inducing.  I now know why everyone tells you to do this part outside- I should have listened.  Our kitchen smelled so bad for about 10 minutes that the baby started crying, no kidding!  In the end I managed, and even though it was a bit gruesome in parts, I would not hesitate to do it again, if anything so I could get it 100% right next time. 

We put Missy in the refrigerator untrussed- for some reason she just would not let us close her legs enough to tie them, as you see from the photos- and headed off to a pumpkin carving festa for the night.  We told our fellow carvers a bit about the bird (since they had seen the video on facebook and were both appalled and fascinated) and someone brought up the point that to do a true taste comparison we ought to put a store-bought chicken through the same paces and evaluate them side by side.  The next day, I went to Whole Foods and bought the smallest organic bird I could find- four pounds.  Missy only weighed three, so the comparison wouldn’t be totally exact, but close enough. 

 I brined them both according to Michael Ruhlman’s instructions, and also because food isn’t quite food unless it’s touched by a dash o’ salt (that’s our motto here at Salty Seattle).  If you get a wild hare and decide to duplicate this undertaking, bear in mind that you’ll want a couple of days, since the bird ideally needs to rest overnight post-brining, and the brining itself can take from 6-12 hours depending on the size of your bird. 

Once Missy and her new friend were good and rested post-brining, it was time to get roasting.  I opted for a very simple roast with root vegetables and basic gravy because I wanted to taste the meat rather than a fussy sauce.  Even though something like coq au vin is more to my liking, for the purposes of our farm-to-table tasting, classic roast chicken was the way to go.  My testing crew consisted of six adults including Jonas and myself.  Our guests had varying degrees of experience with self-slaughtered birds; everyone had seen one running around headless, but no one had actually been the hatchet-man.  Our new friend Yoko, who grew up in the Japanese countryside, was the least prudish about the affair, leading me to believe that we Americans could stand to toughen up a notch or two. 

I brought the cooked birdies to the table and Jamie and Steve carved them up.  We all took various body parts according to our preferences, but I asked that people take equivalent parts from both birds so we could do a true taste comparison.  Initially I must admit I preferred the store-bought bird.  I think now it’s because it had a flavor I was accustomed to- quite bland and great for absorbing the other flavors on the plate.  Several other guests preferred Missy right away.  Yoko put it eloquently, “the Whole Foods bird is a bird I’ve tasted before.  Your bird, on the other hand, has a flavor unto itself.”  Another guest, Amy, stated “the more I eat the more it grows on me,” and I have to say I was with her on that one.  In the end, we all preferred Missy, though there is no way her puny three pounds would have fed us all.  If this experiment is to be repeated I’ll either need to butcher two birds or find one little fatty, which might throw in a new flavor entirely.  There you have it, a farm-to-table escapade conceived on a lark at a street-food joint and executed (pardon the pun) with only a few minor glitches.  I’ll leave you with a snippet of video so you can see for yourself how this thing got started.