Posted by Kansas City Star on June 10, 2010 at 12:33:35:
World's tastemakers flock to heritage chicken cook-off
By JILL WENDHOLT SILVA
The Kansas City Star
World’s tastemakers flock to heritage chicken cook-off More recipes from the Good Shepherd Heritage Poultry Cookoff
Frank Reese dreams of the day when there is a heritage chicken in every pot
But before the Lindsborg, Kan., poultry breeder can get his Jersey Giants, New Hampshire Reds, Plymouth Barred Rocks, Silver Lace Wyandottes and Indian Game Cornish back onto the American dinner table, he needs to teach anyone who was born after 1950 how to cook these rare, old-fashioned breeds.
“Cooking our chickens is not like cooking anything you buy at the store,” Reese tells me over the phone one December afternoon. “Unless you’re 70 years old, you don’t know how to cook them. I’ve had chefs in New York screw my chickens up royally.”
For starters, roasting a chicken at 400 degrees an hour and a half until the skin turns a crispy brown works only for modern industrial poultry. Heritage chicken requires a far gentler hand to coax the flavor out.
These are more muscular birds that have pecked their way around a farm yard rather than living cooped up in a cage. Think low temperatures and slow cooking times in a pot with a lid on it to keep the moisture in.
Reese, the founder of the Good Shepherd Poultry Ranch, is best-known for his widely publicized, decade-long struggle to get flavorful heritage-breed turkeys back on the Thanksgiving table. The only flaw with Reese’s save-the-birds-by-eating-them plan is that heritage turkey, which can cost as much as $200 with shipping and handling, remains a mostly once-a-year splurge for chefs and gourmet cooks.
Good Shepherd raises 3,000 heritage chickens a month. Available in the frozen section of Hen House supermarkets for $4.99 a pound, heritage chicken is a much more affordable luxury.
Unless, of course, you really botch things in the oven.
That’s why Reese cooked up his own heritage chicken cook-off. Not a $1 million Pillsbury Bake-Off, for sure. But he got enough sponsors — the Kansas Farm Bureau, P. Allen Smith Garden Home and Hen House — to award $1,000 to the grand-prize winner.
By the March deadline, amateur cooks had sent in 864 recipes. The grand-prize winner would be announced at the first-ever Heritage Chicken Cooking Competition Awards Banquet. Reese expects to make the competition an annual event that can grow in size and scale.
Birds of a feather
Bob Del Popolo uses a knife to slit open a package of thighs from a New Hampshire chicken and begins pounding the pieces paper-thin for Chicken Scaloppine With Lemon Sauce. He follows the beating by dredging the pieces in a mixture of flour, salt, pepper and lemon zest. Later, he’ll finish the dish with a lemon cream sauce with a splash of white wine flecked with tarragon.
It’s early on a Saturday morning in mid-April, and Del Popolo is one of four finalists representing a cross-section of potential heritage customers. Working in the professional kitchens of the Art Institutes International in Lenexa, the contestants have three hours to prepare their dishes for the judging panel.
The silver-haired Del Popolo is a Liberty-based architect. He has never been in a cooking contest, but he loves to cook and entertain. He has gourmet tastes and travels frequently to Italy.
He grew up in Buffalo, N.Y., where his father worked as an executive chef for more than 50 years. As if to prove good food runs in his genes, Del Popolo points to an Escoffier cookbook he has toted along for reference. “I had this on my bedside table instead of ‘The Three Bears,’ ” he says.
I ask him if he thinks heritage chicken is a product average consumers could embrace.
“I really feel because of the movement of healthy eating, people are becoming more aware, so they’re looking for unique and different foods,” he says. “It’s taken 20 years to get people aware. This is just another venue to make it happen.”
Cheryl McCleary of Kansas City, Kan., has never cooked a heritage chicken before creating her Cowboy Chicken for the cook-off. As she rubs a spatchcocked Plymouth Barred Rock chicken with a rust-colored spice blend, McCleary says the price of the birds was, indeed, a source of teasing at home.
“My husband actually put a post on Facebook saying, ‘My wife just went and purchased a free-range chicken and there’s nothing free about it!’ ” she says.
Bev Jones of rural Brunswick, Mo., is the most self-assured of the contestants, having worked her way up the ladder of several national cooking contests, including Pillsbury, Cooking Light, Gourmet and Ocean Spray.
“I thought of heritage chicken as something homey, so I went back to the basics. I’m hoping my dish is sophisticated enough for the judges,” she says while sprinkling Japanese panko crumbs over the top of her Ultimate Buffalo Chicken and Brown Rice Casserole made using a Jersey Giant.
Ann Knowles of Salina, Kan., has previously cooked heritage turkey for her family. She discovered she needed to use a slower oven and baste with the natural juices more frequently than she would with a conventional turkey.
But as Knowles checks on her heritage bird she discovers it is cooking much slower than she anticipated, and she fears it won’t be fully cooked by the time it is scheduled to go before the judges.
“This one is a lot more bosomy a bird than the one I practiced on,” she says. “When you buy a (regular) chicken, the breast meat all tastes the same. You really have to season it. (Heritage chicken) has a richness that needs less seasoning.”
Knowles’ Southwestern-themed recipe drew inspiration from chef Rick Bayless and from a time she lived in Tucson. “The secret of the dish has to do with the basting,” she says. “It’s going to sing ‘La Cucaracha!’ ”
Recipes to the rescue
As contestants nervously push through the swinging door from the kitchen into the dining room carrying their finished dishes, they meet the panel of judges for the first time.
And talk about intimidating. Reese has managed to coax some of the best taste buds in the food business to rally around his cause.
Cookbook author and former New York Times restaurant critic Molly O’Neill cuts a piece of chicken. She sniffs at it then pops it in her mouth. She folds her hands in her lap and chews deliberately before picking up her pen to make notes. She plans to use the winning heritage chicken recipe in her upcoming cookbook, “One Big Table” (Simon & Schuster) due out in November.
Jonathan Gold, a restaurant critic with the disheveled air of Einstein and the disciplined palate of Escoffier, chews slowly as his eyes wander toward the ceiling. Gold, who works for the alternative L.A. Weekly and New Yorker magazine, has the distinction of winning the only Pulitzer Prize ever awarded for food criticism.
P. Allen Smith, a syndicated and public television show host, became friends with Reese after Smith began raising heritage chickens on his Arkansas River Valley farm. His interest in raising the birds prompts him to ask for the name of each breed he tastes.
When the contestants have all presented their recipes and left the dining room, O’Neill is the first to bristle at the use of convenience products.
“You should not let them use convenience products. Period.” she says, turning to Reese, who stands quietly at the back of the room as an observer. “This is something that someone has spent their heart and soul to raise. One had Country Time lemonade — with sweetener! It’s a violation. Given the product you’re selling, you’re leading taste. It’s your responsibility.”
The panel, which includes local chef Jasper Mirabile and local food blogger Chris Perrin, discusses points large (“You couldn’t really taste chicken in any of them”) and small (“Is chipotle too hard to find?”) before determining the winner. But, ultimately, the question boils down to this: Can a recipe help save heritage chicken?
“There is one genotype to feed the world, and we have all these genetic breeds that are superior,” Smith tells me at the heritage chicken awards held later that night.
“The whole issue of genetic diversity continues to haunt me, and ‘free-range’ and ‘organic’ doesn’t have anything to do with it,” he says. “We’ve got to get the word out so (consumers) understand what heritage means. … Tell me how one type of chicken is even close to a sort of homeland security. I mean, what’s the back-up plan?
“Right here in Kansas, it’s happening. You all ought to be proud of that.”
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Baked Chicken a la Tucson
And the winner is Baked Chicken a la Tucson by Ann Knowles of Salina, Kan.: “My grandmother fattened the hen, killed the hen, dressed the hen, soaked the bird in iced salt water and with great care and love, baked the bird in a slow oven, basting over and over until it was cooked to perfection. … mmmm … My favorite Sunday dinner. I updated it while living in Tucson.”
Makes 4 servings
1 (3- to 4-pound) Good Shepherd Heritage chicken (New Hampshire or Plymouth Barred Rock)
Lemons and limes, halved, to fill chicken cavity
2 teaspoons New Mexico chili powder
Salt and pepper to taste
Basting sauce:
1/4 cup dark brown sugar
2 cloves garlic
1/4 cup honey
1/4 cup tequila
1/4 cup orange juice
1 (7-ounce) can chipotle peppers in adobo
1/4 cup olive oil
1 teaspoon orange zest
2 tablespoons mustard
To serve:
Flour tortillas
Juice of a lime
Rinse and soak chicken in cold salt water to cover for 1 hour; drain.
Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Place chicken in roasting pan breast side up. Stuff cavity with halved lemons, limes, chili powder and salt and pepper to taste.
In a small mixing bowl, combine the ingredients for the basting sauce. Blend or process in food processor. Apply enough basting sauce to coat the bird. Bake at 325 degrees in covered roasting pan for 2 to 3 hours, basting every hour. The chicken is done when it reaches an internal temperature of 185 degrees, the drumstick wiggles in the socket and the juices run clear.
Cut up chicken. Squeeze additional lime juice over meat. Serve with hot flour tortillas.
Per serving: 520 calories (44 percent from fat), 25 grams total fat (4 grams saturated), 105 milligrams cholesterol, 33 grams carbohydrates
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