Still Life with Chicken

Site upgrade (finally).  Hopefully this will stop this site from getting hijacked.  Lost a few posts already – I am a failure at website admin.  Good thing this isn’t my day job!

Last year we raised 15 heritage turkeys – the “rare turkey assortment” from McMurray Hatchery. We lost 1 the night before the big trip to the processor, and saved 3 in an ill-fated attempt to keep a few for breeding.  Of the 11 we took to the processor, I sold 7 of them to friends and kept 4 for myself.  I ate 2 of them last year, and have 2 left.  Letting your meat sit a year in the freezer isn’t generally a good idea, but I knew in the spring that we were not going to get any fresh ones this year so I went ahead and saved one to cook for this thanksgiving.

Commercial turkeys are almost always a breed called the Broad Breasted White.  These birds have been raised mostly since after WWII, and were engineered to have put on the maximum amount of weight in the shortest amount of time.  They also have white feathers, which make it easier for people not to notice when there are pin feathers left in the bird after plucking.  These birds get gigantic – and they do it in record time.  They do such a good job at getting big, that they get too big to do the deed, and without the friendly hand of man (ok, who likes that visual ) would not be able to reproduce.  They also can’t really walk around that much either – so even if you buy a free range turkey, if it was a broad breasted white chances are it didn’t range far from the feeder.  This makes for some soft mushy muscles – not unlike what you wind up with when you sit in front of a computer all day, only moving to feed yourself.  These turkeys don’t get very old either – they can reach market weight in a little more than 4 months.  Young birds just don’t get a chance to develop much flavor.  But that’s ok – these birds were not bred for flavor, they were bred for cost effectiveness.  That’s why a lot of these turkeys are sold injected with stuff to make them taste better.  Well – I guess that injecting also makes them heavier, so people can charge you for water weight.

By contrast, heritage breeds are a more self-sufficient bird.  They do not get as large as a commercial turkey breed, and as a result have no problems reproducing without our help.  They have not been bred to have DDD size breasts, and they can fly.  They also have better immune systems.  They take longer to reach their market weight, so they’ll be older when they go to the processor – usually at 6-7 months.  This means they have some time to develop more flavor.  They will range easily, and are happiest when they can eat bugs and grass and what not.  They aren’t as food obsessed, so will leave the feeder and go roaming.  This means that they get a lot of exercise, which makes them lean and gives their meat more texture.

So with the big day arriving tomorrow the question of how to cook this fancy heritage turkey has come up again.  If you google “Cooking Heritage Turkeys”, you’ll get a lot of very strong opinions on the subject.  The one thing people agree on is that you probably don’t want to treat this turkey the same way as your standard commercially raised turkey. Two of the biggest things I see people discussing are whether or not you want to brine this heritage turkey, and what type of cooking temperature to use.  Last year I followed the recommendations that I read here and went with the no-brine, high temperature approach.  I pulled it out when the thigh reached 150 for fear of overcooking, just as the article suggested.  The white meat was absolutely perfect and delicious.  The dark meat was undercooked and tough (but still really tasty – I ate it anyway).  Over the summer, I decided to try a different cooking method, and I brined the turkey and smoked it – so the low and slow method.  While the skin was like leather, the meat itself was delicious, and the dark meat was much better cooked this way.  So – I’ve decided that for this Thanksgiving, I’m going to do the brining again and roast it at a lower temperature – I’ll probably do 275.  I’m also going to let the thing come up to a higher temperature.  I found one recommendation for 180 at the thigh, but I think I’ll take it to just 165 and see how that goes.  The recipe I’m using is below – I’ll post a review of how it turned out when I’m done.

To prepare the turkey:

• Put 1 8 pound heritage turkey in a 5 gallon stockpot with 3.5 gallons water.  Add 1 cup kosher salt per gallon of water, and 1/4 cup maple sugar per gallon water (I ran out of maple syrup, so I used mostly maple syrup and a little bit of honey to get me to the right amount).  Stir up salt till it dissolves, cover pot and put in fridge for 12 hours.  Make sure the turkey is fully submerged.  Remove from brine and allow to air dry in the fridge for 8 hours before cooking.
• Create an herbed butter mixture with about a pound of butter, whatever fresh herbs I have laying around the yard (which happens to be sage, parsley, and rosemary) and some pepper.  Rub this mixture under the skin as well as on top of it.  Put some in the cavity too.
• Stuff cavity with onions, celery, and carrots.
• Put oven at 275 and roast, breast side up till close to correct internal temp (165 at thigh).  I’m guessing this will take a good 4 hours.  Then crank the oven to 450 and brown for about 20-30 minutes to crispy up the skin.

I’m still internally debating whether to mess with starting the turkey breast down and then flipping it, or whether to brown first at 450, then drop the temp, or do the browning last.  I am pretty sure I’m sticking to the plan listed above, but you never know what I’ll do in the heat of the moment. Flipping a bird (heh) is a much more doable thing when your bird is only 8 pounds – I definitely wouldn’t even consider it for one of those giant birds.

I finally finished reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle during a recent trip, and I am feeling much less depressed about it than I was only 20 pages into it.  What is revealed as you read the book is that Barbara and her family have been very serious gardeners/canners/poultry raisers for years prior to this.  They spent a whole year remodelling their farmhouse first before they embarked on their quest to feed themselves.  Their barns were already built.  And they’d been building their soils and their gardens for many years on this property.  They had well established asparagus beds, and knew exactly how much they had to grow of what crops and how they had to grow it.  If I’m reading the book correctly, it looks like Barbara had about 15 years of experience prior to this point to practice.  So now I don’t feel so bad, and in fact I think I’m doing pretty good considering I’m only in my third year of practice.  It’s hard to be patient when you have such a clear vision of what you want to do.  Unfortunately, that vision also shows me all the work it will take to get there.  Patience, it seems, is my only option.

We got a new adult male turkey on Sunday to replace the one that got eaten by coyotes earlier this winter. The hen seems happier. He was apparently getting picked on by his brothers, so he also is no doubt grateful. He’s incredibly skinny compared to the males that we raised, which is strange because he’s about the same age that they would have been. He came from a flock of over 100 birds, so maybe he just couldn’t get any time at the feeder. We’ll see if he starts bulking up any now that he’s got no competition. I got him for free from a lady in Dallas, Oregon who breeds the Black Spanish turkeys — I found her on the internet of course. I don’t see how people managed to farm without the internet. Not only can you buy your chicks online, replace your adult birds if needed, there is all this information and community support out there that someone like me who was not raised on a farm couldn’t do without. I suppose pre-internet, you just had to grow up on a farm in order to know how to do things correctly. That’s not to say that it still doesn’t feel like a little bit of trial and error with things. Like, hey, maybe you should teach your turkeys to sleep inside in the winter, cause the predators will be more bold then. Soon I suppose I will learn the wisdom of letting a duck start sitting on eggs in the middle of winter. The white muscovy duck, after about a week of waffling about whether she was going to get serious about sitting on the eggs, has resumed her post for good now. We moved some food and water closer to her nest under the woodshed so that she wouldn’t have to go far for it. It’s been super cold – Is about 19F as I write this. I think if she spends too much time away from the nest the eggs will freeze solid.

Even though it’s less than a month into Winter, I’m already getting antsy for spring. This year I decided that due to our impending massive house remodel, I would not have a vegetable garden, and restrict our poultry raising endeavors to whatever the chickens/ducks/turkeys decided to do on their own. Then I spent the entire month of December designing a garden that looks like a mini-versaille, complete with cutting garden, baby orchard, tiny vineyard and a living fence made of filberts and various types of edible hedges. And I found an old greenhouse catalog I’d been saving and plunked one of those down in the middle of my new garden plan. Along with a new tool shed. I told myself it was “just for fun”, that I was just passing time while the power was out due to the winter storm. But then January came, along with the seed catalogs. I decided to pick out a few seeds from my favorite catalog, figuring I’d pick out everything I really wanted to get, and then edit the list down to a select few things that I’d plant in our smaller garden. Today I decided to just order everything, deluding myself into thinking I was getting the seeds “just in case” and probably wouldn’t plant them all. I should get them in a few days. Which is a good thing, because according to the garden calendar at Portland Nursery, I could be planting things already. Don’t want to get behind. And I’m going to have to hide the McMurray catalog – am already fantasizing about which chickens would be the tastiest to try this year in my quest to find a meat bird that isn’t as frighteningly blobby as the meat-on-legs cornish cross.
It seems I’m not the only one feeling springtime a’coming. Our female muscovy duck disappeared this morning. We thought maybe she’d been dragged off by a coyote, as we’ve been having a rough winter with predators (lost 1 chicken, 1 duck to a hawk, 2 turkeys to a coyote). But, I found her underneath the woodshed porch way in the back, sitting on some eggs. I can’t reach her to move her. I suppose we should just see what happens, although it seems a bit early to me to be hatching any ducklings. Muscovies take about 5 weeks to hatch out their eggs. So, I suppose it will be almost march when the little fuzzys would come out. I’ve got my doubts any of those eggs will hatch.

I love New Years — it always feels good to start a fresh year. Every year I must resist the urge to make resolutions. This year I caved in and made one despite my best intentions. Time elapsed before New Years resolution broken? Less than 24 hours past New Years day.  So, I’m not going to say that I have resolved to keep a blog this year — I’m just going to do it and see how long it lasts.