Unlock the secrets to succulent poultry as we dissect the myths surrounding self-basting turkeys and brining. Say goodbye to bland birds and hello to full-flavored feasts; our discussion sheds light on how brining techniques employed by commercial brands may not be the moisture miracle you've been led to believe. Get ready to learn why additives aiming for consistency could be sacrificing the quality of your poultry, and how you can avoid these pitfalls. We'll also let you in on our top methods for aging poultry to achieve that tender, restaurant-quality dish you crave, whether you're team refrigeration or air-drying aficionado.
As we lay out the blueprint for poultry perfection, we'll guide you through mastering the spatchcocking technique—a surefire way to achieve even cooking and that coveted crispy skin. Have you ever wondered about the best way to weigh down your bird for that perfect sear? We've got you covered, complete with cautionary tales from our own kitchen blunders to illustrate the vital importance of the breading process's 'dry, wet, dry' mantra. With the culinary wisdom shared in this episode, you'll be armed to take your poultry prowess to heights that'll have your dinner guests begging for seconds—and the recipes!
Unlock the secrets to succulent poultry as we dissect the myths surrounding self-basting turkeys and brining. Say goodbye to bland birds and hello to full-flavored feasts; our discussion sheds light on how brining techniques employed by commercial brands may not be the moisture miracle you've been led to believe. Get ready to learn why additives aiming for consistency could be sacrificing the quality of your poultry, and how you can avoid these pitfalls. We'll also let you in on our top methods for aging poultry to achieve that tender, restaurant-quality dish you crave, whether you're team refrigeration or air-drying aficionado.
As we lay out the blueprint for poultry perfection, we'll guide you through mastering the spatchcocking technique—a surefire way to achieve even cooking and that coveted crispy skin. Have you ever wondered about the best way to weigh down your bird for that perfect sear? We've got you covered, complete with cautionary tales from our own kitchen blunders to illustrate the vital importance of the breading process's 'dry, wet, dry' mantra. With the culinary wisdom shared in this episode, you'll be armed to take your poultry prowess to heights that'll have your dinner guests begging for seconds—and the recipes!
Hi, welcome to the Poultry Keepers podcast. I'm Rip Stalvey and, together with Mandolin Royal and John Gunnerman, we're your co-hosts for this show and it's our mission to help you have a happy, healthy and productive flop.
Speaker 2:
Well, the whole self-basting concept that Mandy just brought up, the self-buttering birds, you know, there's turkeys that claim to be self-basting. That was actually a marketing thing, for I remember it on the shrinkwrap package. I don't remember which brand it was. I think it was Butterball, wasn't it? It might have been, and Butterball used the Dwarf as a repeat, but would they have done that?
Speaker 3:
through brine injection or through genetic.
Speaker 2:
I believe that was done. Now most commercial poultry off the shelf. If you read the label very carefully it'll say may or can contain up to whatever percent brine.
Speaker 3:
Usually five percent, I think, is the cutoff.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, so for the, that's doing a lot of things, but it's basically giving you salt water and charging you meat prices for it, because you're paying by the ounce.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, sometimes they just soak them in it, and other times they do injection.
Speaker 1:
It could be injected, yeah.
Speaker 3:
Depending on your brands, and if it was sold as whole or parts, it might be there for preservation sake, depending on the market it's going to. I'm not going to call out the brand, but there is a brand that has 17 different flavors, tenderizers, preservatives and flavors. Then why do you have to put 17 different ingredients into this brine to make it taste like chicken?
Speaker 2:
So it all tastes the same to the consumer.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, because the chickens they're buying today don't have any flavor to them.
Speaker 3:
Well, it changed the color of the bird even it cooked up a little almost gray in color, not like a healthy pink or white or you know a normal meat color. It was a little dingy, looking like it got cooked in the dish water.
Speaker 1:
I got to confess I didn't see that one coming to hope.
Speaker 3:
Well, it was cheap, so there was that going for it.
Speaker 1:
True, true. You know we've reached the part in the show where we're going to get into specific cooking and all that stuff, and with John being a professional chef and Mandy always being up her elbows, and I think the best thing for me to do is just shut up and turn the show over to you guys. So y'all got the floor Carry on.
Speaker 2:
Well, mandy pretty much cooks heritage poultry exclusively. I don't have that luxury, being in a commercial kitchen environment. All our poultry comes in through our mainline suppliers.
Speaker 3:
Well, I've had one Cornish Cross store bought bird to eat in the last eight years and I only went and got one to do a little comparison because I didn't want to grow my own. To me it was heartbreaking to grow them, and even though they're faster, cheaper, I'm so used to seeing the way normal chickens run that I can't watch them grow. So, cooking wise it's all been heritage, with various levels of success based off of breed growth rate, and probably the worst chicken I ever had was when I didn't know about aging, so that very first bird we cooked. If we had made our decision off of that first bird, we probably wouldn't even eat chicken anymore, I mean it was terrible.
Speaker 3:
It was right smack in the middle of Rigor Morris when I threw that sucker in the oven and it was like a gym shoe.
Speaker 2:
It's quite a problem. The very first bird goes on the grill While it's. If you get it when it's super fresh, you're fine, and then you got to wait a while.
Speaker 3:
It needs to be like, within an hour or less, from walking around chicken to cooking that chicken. You've got to be fast.
Speaker 2:
You know, I remember watching Julia Childs back in the 1970 mumble somethings when she was working with chickens. She would always have the carcass on the bench in front of her and you notice she was moving the legs around. That lets you know when it's ready After going through culinary school and everything that lets you know that the Rigor Morris either hasn't started yet or it's subsided. And you're not going to get a tough bird?
Speaker 3:
You need to get full mobility out of all of the limbs before you cook it. If it holds up a little bit, that's going to translate to a much tougher texture than you want.
Speaker 2:
And it does definitely change the flavor because ultimately the Rigor Mortis is the buildup of lactic acid in the muscle tissues and fibers and that it's an acid. So it is going to change the flavor profile of the meat. It's going to acidify the meat slightly until it dissipates. So another reason why you it's not going to hurt you in any way, but it will change the flavor.
Speaker 3:
Now how long you age the birds, that can vary based on the bird and what your cooking goals are, and there's also little details that you can tweak to find out what methods that you prefer. So I go for a four day age and I do it inside of the shrink bag. I don't pull them out and air dry them, because you get different results, like just those little nuances of variation. If you, some people will do a cooler of ice water with salt and they'll leave the birds in there for 24 to 48 hours and then after that they do what they do with them after that. But we like to do a brief soak with salted water, but not enough for it to actually brine them, and we usually have them dried off and back into a shrink bag the same day that we processed and then we'll do a four day age at refrigerator temperatures. But if you want to get super fancy with it, you dry off the bird and put it in a refrigerator to dry uncovered for up to like 10 days.
Speaker 2:
Or a hand sewn linen sack. Yeah, if you wanted super fancy, you can sew them into a If you want to really do the whole breast thing.
Speaker 3:
Well, that actually happens under compression too, and it helps press their develop fat into the meat a little more. We haven't gotten that fancy with it. That's what they do overseas in France.
Speaker 1:
Got a question. You're talking about compressed fat and I'm just asking because I've never done this. Okay, but does the vacuum bag that you put those birds in have the same effect as sewing them up in the linen sack?
Speaker 3:
Potentially, but no one has studied that they have the compression, but it would have the air flow air, chilling the air exchange, it creates something called a pedicle.
Speaker 2:
It's like a protein layer over the top of the skin, and that will actually Wow. We're gonna dive really, really deep here. I don't know if Roll for it, John.
Speaker 1:
You're on a roll, son.
Speaker 2:
Let's just say there's a pellicle layer that's formed and that is very helpful in the future for flavor. When the myard reaction occurs and caramelization happens on the meat, that pellicle really comes alive and brings a lot of flavor, and it's also very sticky and clingy to just things floating in the air. It'll definitely pick up flavors from your refrigerator, but it'll also work great for a dry brine later, and there's a difference between dry brine and wet brine. I don't know if we're gonna get there today.
Speaker 3:
We're supposed to. It's on the list.
Speaker 2:
Okay.
Speaker 3:
Well, we talked about aging and during the aging, that's when you would want to start thinking about brines or rubs. And then the type of salt even matters for that, definitely, and table salt is the fastest to absorb and bring about a salty result. So if you're doing a 24-hour kind of brine, you don't want to use the table salt, rather use kosher salt, because the way that it gets absorbed is different. Maybe John knows more of the science about that than I do.
Speaker 2:
Well, it's a different particle which dissolves quicker, but ultimately it's just NACL. There is a very good. I do want to give a shout out to StellaCulinarycom. They've got a great chart for different brine and resting times and they actually recommend the chicken breast Now this is commercial crosses brine for four to six hours and then come out, rinse off the chicken and let it rest for two to four hours to equalize. Otherwise you get a high buildup of the salts on the outside and it doesn't Say. Your first bite could be very salty, whereas you get into the middle of the chicken and it's not very flavored.
Speaker 3:
Oh yeah, that's true.
Speaker 2:
You know, john, they've got a good page that describes the different brining techniques. The most important thing is making sure your salt content is correct, because a little bit too much is not a good thing, just like a little too little is not a good thing either. You got a very tight window.
Speaker 1:
John, I will say that the brine recipe that you gave me when we cooked our heritage turkey, that bird turned out really. It would have turned out great if I had lowered my temperature in my smoker a little bit, but it kind of got away from me for a little while so it was a little bit dried out. But man, that bird had great flavor and of course I like smoked anything, but it really picked up the smoke flavor well too.
Speaker 2:
Thank you, john. Again the process. You can change the flavor profile any way you want. As long as it's pulling in the salty water, you can bring in any spices and flavors along with it.
Speaker 1:
Well, you had suggested that and I thought I don't really think I want to do that, because I wanted to get the flavor of the bird itself, yeah, yeah, and I could tinker around with spices and flavorings and herbs and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2:
But later, I usually just grab a whole big pint jar of vegetable base better than bullion veg base and mix that up as my brine solution, because it's got everything in there that I love. There's a nice little pro tip.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, good tip there. I appreciate that yeah.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, take that and mix it into enough water. It doesn't need to be the flavor you'd expect a soup to be. In fact, you don't want it that strong.
Speaker 3:
No, yeah, with the older birds. They have so much of their own flavor you don't have to overdo it and drown them in spices to get something out of them. Less is more. When it comes to the older birds, there is something about baking soda as part of a tenderizing brain. That was the new I was looking at. We've tried it a couple of times and I noticed the biggest difference when we were doing chicken tenders and stuff in the air fryer that way. And then what was that other thought I just had, oh, buttermilk.
Speaker 2:
I was just about to give a shout out.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, what's the?
Speaker 1:
difference. My brain milk is buttermilk a lot.
Speaker 2:
Yes, and that is a beautiful thing because it helps denature the protein. The acidity in the buttermilk is a wonderful thing, and if you don't have buttermilk, plain yogurt works great as well. It's the same thing.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, once you start getting into the science of the different ingredients and the reason that they're in there, there's so many options and flavor profiles that you can start playing around with, like chicken doesn't have to taste the same every time you had it.
Speaker 2:
And then, when you had it cooked, there's a lot to do with it. Yeah, so in this case we've got malo-lactic acid denaturing the protein. That's basically the acid that's in the buttermilk.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, you can't go wrong with a good buttermilk. Brian.
Speaker 2:
One of my favorite restaurants in the whole wide world, gus's in Memphis, tennessee. They say their secret recipe is no secret. They soak it over buttermilk, fry it the next day as I'd see there's tubs every night. They just load up the tubs and fill them with buttermilk and the next morning they come out, dry them off, bread them and fry them. Did we?
Speaker 3:
talk yet about the cooking methods versus the age of birds. I don't think we really spent much time on that.
Speaker 1:
We did not, yeah, I think you should do that.
Speaker 2:
That's huge.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, I think. Yeah, it's kind of important. So, for example, a fryer if you're going to fry chicken from raw, that bird needs to be young. It needs to be less than 14 weeks old, and that's just because of the texture of the meat it changes as they start maturing. So, yeah, you could take your Cornish cross and fry them from raw easy peasy. But the others, you really want to know how old that bird is because otherwise you might need to poach them a little bit and do some pre-cooking with them and then fry them. You can make it kind of a double process to use older chicken. I was playing around with that and had pretty good results doing it that way.
Speaker 2:
Well, that's why most of the recipes from the old cookbooks, 1950s and earlier, actually specify the age and type of chicken. For this recipe. Use a roaster or a broiler, because the age is paired to the cooking technique.
Speaker 3:
Yeah.
Speaker 2:
You know hot and fast, or low and slow, so to speak.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, that's pretty much the gist of it really, and the young.
Speaker 2:
Meat exactly like that you see there, just like cooking a steak. It's either hot and fast or low and slow, like a pot roast, and in between you've got shoe leather, or at least in my opinion.
Speaker 3:
That's a good way of looking at it. I usually, after about 18 weeks of age, I default back to the low and slow, and that has always given a pretty good result, and I consider low to be Less than 350 degrees Once you get, I think, in a Dutch oven. Oh, yeah, yeah, I need to get a new one of those.
Speaker 1:
Mandy, I got a question for you, then maybe John too, but I know Mandy processes a ton and a half of chickens, but Do you Give me? Do you write the age of the bird on the bag?
Speaker 3:
Only if it's outside of my normal range, so if it's younger than our tip, because normally is 16 to 18 weeks. So if it's blank, I know it's there. If it's over 20 weeks, I'm making note of that because there's some cooking options that are off limits. I can't fry it from raw, I can't grill it from raw. So, like when we grill a bird, the best results I've gotten is to take that bird hole and spatch cocket and then put it in the oven you know 200, 225, and treat that bird like a rack of ribs and Only put it on that grill at the very end for maybe 12 minutes Just to pick up the flavor of being grilled, but rely on the oven for the cooking process.
Speaker 1:
Guys, how about explain what spatch cocking is, because some of our listeners may not be familiar with that term?
Speaker 3:
Pretty much when you cut the spine out and then flip it over, give it one hard press like you're doing CPR on it, and that kind of flattens out the whole bird. You get a more even cooking result that way, because you're eliminating that interior cavity.
Speaker 2:
If you've ever seen a pressed duck in the window of an Asian market, that's the same thing. We're just butterflying the whole thing out, but that that allows the heat to access the meat better, you know heating up heating a flat thing on a grill is a lot more efficient than heating around thing on a grill.
Speaker 1:
Especially if it's got a big cavity in the middle seems like I saw and I could help me out here. I could be dead wrong in saying this, but I saw some recipes where they spatch, cocked a chicken and and then wrapped a brick in aluminum foil and laid that on top of the chicken to cook it in a Dutch oven To press it down while it's cooking?
Speaker 3:
Yes, Would you get a brick mark?
Speaker 2:
Well, I think, first off, I think as long as your brick is clean to begin with, you don't need to wrap it in aluminum foil. But I do play a little hazardous with my cooking. As long as it's in a Dutch oven, any of the fats and juices that are pressed out are going to be recaptured in the, the potlicker or the Sauce that's created, so I wouldn't be too worried about that. I would be concerned about any sort of weight on a grill because all those fat and juices are gonna fall down to the fire, caused flare-ups, and that's generally a bad thing.
Speaker 1:
I was just wondering if that message would make the flesh dry. Essentially depends on what kind of you're it? Yeah, you know, I don't recall. I just remember seeing this aluminum polywrap brick laying on this chicken carcass in the Dutch oven.
Speaker 3:
Ok, but that's been a while back, so you know, maybe they didn't do that CPR move to could be keep it flat, Because if you don't do that it'll kind of want to revert back to its shape. You really just will pound at one time You're going to.
Speaker 2:
Spatch proc. You really got to push down until everything cracks, just like doing CPR effectively. If you're not cracking ribs, you're not saving lives, is what they tell us last.
Speaker 3:
Because I've never heard it put that way.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, I've heard that before. It's true, I mean you almost you have to break ribs to do CPR correctly, just about. But the same thing, it's just a matter of getting all that surface exposed and not having these undulations and cook it A meat side down first, flesh side down. So when you flip it now you've got the skin which can crisp and caramelize and basically create a self containing bowl for all those juices and meat to cook inside of.
Speaker 1:
I don't, I can. You're talking about the crisping of the skin. Yeah, I can remember my grandmother's fried chicken was so good. I would always pull the skin off, set that aside and save that for last, because it was so darn good.
Speaker 3:
Well and to get that kind of result, there's very particular methods to follow to get that crispiness and I found it's a little bit of a ballet to get an even Christmas and it starts with drying the bird off. So like if you packed them wet and you cooked it wet and you kept it covered, you're going to end up with like more rubbery, not crispy skin, Like there's a lot that has to happen to the science to get that result.
Speaker 2:
There's a mnemonic that I use to remember that in culinary schools dry, wet, dry. So you start with the dry bird and then you put a dry coating on it and then if you're going to use an intermediary like an egg, it's wet and then dry again, your final coating. But you're always putting dry to wet or vice versa. You're never putting a wet coating on top of a wet bird or a dry coating on top of a dry bird. Oh, that makes sense. And cornstarch, so my base layer is almost always cornstarch, really, yeah. Yeah, it's inexpensive and I always have some on hand, but it creates a great surface for other things to stick to later on.
Speaker 3:
So the very first time I was going to try fried chicken for the I mean, this is an embarrassing story, but I'm going to tell it anyways.
Speaker 1:
It's never stopped us before, Mandy.
Speaker 3:
So you know how, when you open up a recipe off the Google and they go through their entire life story and all the things that have nothing to do and you just give me the recipes and I saw the button to skip to recipe.
Speaker 3:
So I tap that button. There's all my ingredients. I get everything out, I measure it, I put everything in the one bowl and then I start putting the. I go to stir this kind of look like pancake batter and it wouldn't stick and it started turning into dough and I'm like what the heck is going on. This is not going to do fried chicken because I failed to read the very important instructions that your wets go with your wets and your dry goes with your dry and you dredge it and you do this whole thing and I had just taken all those ingredients and put them all in the same bowl and I didn't even work for bread when I was like I'll just bake it this way and see if I can make croutons out of this and not waste everything in there. Yeah, instead of doing a wet bowl and a dry bowl and doing the chicken for fried chicken, I ended up with this big ball of dough. Wasn't good for anything.
Speaker 3:
So the big takeaway here is technique is important and follow instructions and read the important parts of the recipe, get the life story, but definitely go and look for those important little tidbits on how you know two different bowls.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, but sadly they they embed those little tidbits throughout their story, so you got to read the whole dang story.
Speaker 3:
Get the good stuff or or get actual cookbooks that were from the period that are working with the items you're going to be cooking and you get your clear and concise instructions, with some nuance in there, of some of the historical methods and figure it out from there. But I think when it comes to chicken, it's pretty much 1950s or earlier. If you're doing heritage birds, those are the recipes you want to be following with.
Speaker 2:
Yes, or pick yourself up a reprint of the escoffee cookbook in English, if you can find it. It's definitely preferred. I mean, that's what every culinary school student and classically trained chef has been traumatized by. But those those, that's how to cook literally, and it'll specify. You know age and preparation, just like you know the old. What is it Better? Homes and Gardens, the red and white checkerboard covered book, if you get an early enough one or a coffee cracker cookbook?
Speaker 2:
Oh yeah, we have those on the shelves. We got the Betty Crocker, franny Farmer. They all have these old recipes and techniques in them still, so keep your eye out at yard sales. A lot of libraries are cleaning out their shelves and they're just putting these out for free.
Speaker 1:
Grab them. Yeah, that's a great way to pick up a cookbook, but it's a shame in the sense that it's not gonna benefit very many people.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, but you know they looked at when was the last time this book was taken out? Oh, 1984. Is it really relevant? We need shelf space. Oh, I know, I know Everybody's into molecular gastronomy. Now, how do I get foams and bubbles and stuff in my food? So that's what's hot and popular now.
Speaker 1:
Well, I'm sorry, but I'd rather have a nice piece of fried chicken than I have a spoon full of foam.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, Maybe at some point someone will do the book called oh what could we call it? The Homesteaders Guide to Cooking Heritage Chicken.
Speaker 1:
There you go. That's a really good project for you and John.
Speaker 3:
My list is too long already.
Speaker 1:
Oh, come on, now Give it a try. Well, is there anything else you guys like to lay on us before we go?
Speaker 3:
Goodness, I wish we had audience for questions, but unless they ask us.
Speaker 1:
This would be a good show for that.
Speaker 3:
So well you got maybe no email, yeah, pre 1950s.
Speaker 1:
Like Mandy said, if you have a question or comment, we'd love to hear from you with a quick email and just let us know what it is.
Speaker 2:
But I do want to put out. I mentioned a document, stela culinary dot com. It's called the science behind brining. So if you go to stela culinary dot com, slash brine just type that in. S-t-e-l-l-a, s-t-e-l-l-a, culinary C-U-L-I-N-A-R-Y dot com slash brine. They've got a great video by Jacob Burton who explains it very, very well and they go into a lot of the different science behind osmosis and air diffusion and salt diffusion and levels and I highly recommend that document. It's all there in one place and it's described better than I can hear.
Speaker 1:
Excellent advice, john. I appreciate that as soon as we stop recording I'm probably going to go look that rascal up.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, I probably will too.
Speaker 1:
So until next time, we thank you for joining us and we hope you enjoy your birds and have fun with them. And now, after this show, maybe you cook up one or two. I don't know why, but-.
Speaker 3:
Go out there and find the weakest link. There you go.
Speaker 2:
You got to eat them, to save them when you're breeding here in this poultry.
Speaker 1:
Thank you for joining us this week and, before you go, make sure you subscribe to our podcast so you can receive new episodes right when they're released, and they're released every Tuesday. If you're enjoying this podcast, we'd like to ask you to drop us an email at poultrykeeperspodcast at gmailcom and share your thoughts about the show. Thank you again for joining us for this episode of the poultrykeepers podcast. We'll see you next week. Thank you so much for being here.