Sun 19 May 2013 | 
Do chooks lack flavour?
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One thing that strikes me every time I eat somewhere else – away from the farm, in restaurants, mostly – is that the flavour of food seems washed out. Like so many before me, I’m discovering that taste is dependent on many, many factors – the most notable being the breed, the nurturing and the freshness of the ingredient. But it has taken me until my forties to find out.
So it shouldn’t come as any surprise to find that a panel in the Sydney Morning Herald tasted chicken meat and found it shouldn’t taste of anything.
“The panel eventually agreed the appeal of chicken is its subtleness and that it carries other flavours well. A good chicken should be ‘moist and tender with a clean flavour that doesn't really taste of anything’.”
Oh dear. So it’s official. Chicken is really just animal tofu; a sponge for other flavours. Millions of animals die each year (and the vast majority live an abysmal life) for no other reason than to act as a piece of tender sponge for sauce. We factory farm a meat simply to be a vehicle for dressings or marinades, not because it has any inherent quality of its own. How far down the industrial food chain have we gone?
You wouldn’t think that chicken was the meat equivalent of cotton wool if you had one of my chickens. Robust in flavour, moist but not soggy, the brown meat isn’t slimy, so the wife reckons, compared to the leg meat she despises on mass-produced birds. There’s complexity in the aroma, colour in the fat. Each breed has its own nuances, though the Barnevelders’ pinkish meat (when raw) and fine texture is rather attractive on the palate. My neighbour’s buff Orpingtons are magnificent eating too.
But this idea that chicken has no inherent flavour of its own is a furphy. Why, if it’s just a moist, tender piece of meat with no taste, do we make chicken stock? Yes, we’ve bred them to be bland and moist and so short legged that they can’t breed naturally and not much else (the bloke from Inghams reckons they marinate 60 per cent of their birds to make them even more tender). Yet there must be some residual flavour there, somewhere. You’d hope.
Life on the farm has settled back after Maggie’s death. We’ve been bucket feeding her orphaned calf for two weeks now. And bottle-feeding it for nearly a week before that, even before his mother died. From drinking two litres in about 30 minutes through a teat attached to a beer bottle, the calf (Bobby, I’m afraid, we’ve called him) now drinks three litres in about a minute. He then spends the next 30 minutes trying to knock you over as you do chores. Leggy and playful, he’s been chasing sheep, talking to the pigs, and being generally curious. Speaking of sheep, I’ve had to borrow the elastrator again, and learn how to use it.
I’ve also just made elderflower cordial. Elder trees abound in this wonderful temperate climate and a friend showed me how to spot the flowers from a fast moving car. I found some barely a kilometre away. So now I’ve steeped the tiny fragrant flowers in sugar and lemon, and pretty soon I’ll be dowsing my raspberries in it when they ripen. And dowsing a little gin with it, too, no doubt, on those long summer evenings.
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Comments (24)
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21 Mar 2013 21:34 AEST
From:
Time for something new!
Just a quick suggestion for Matthew - chicken tastes off - River Cottage already covered this! Selling hotdogs out of a van - The NZ bloke already has this covered - time to get original Matthew and come up with 'your' ideas - I'm sure viewers would appreciate it - cheers!
14 Jul 2011 15:32 AEST
From:
Real chicken
We've eaten our way through lots of different breeds now. We've eaten our own farm-raised, free-range meat chickens, wyandottes, new hampshires, Indian game, Malay game. After lots of taste-testing, we have decided to keep Light Sussex which are huge, gentle and delicious. Plucking is a dream since we invested in an Easy-Pluck machine (fits on the end of a drill). Whilst the killing and preparation of your own poultry is a sad, sobering business - the eating is a joy!
19 May 2011 13:23 AEST
From:
Free range Chicken
I think its all in the way you cook it. We only ever buy Free range chicken and Lilydale is our brand of choice. It's always tender and succulent. Though like all food - it's the way you cook it that makes the difference.
12 Mar 2011 19:50 AEST
From:
Mmmm .. chicken
As a child my Dad used to kill our own chickens, and my brothers and I always helped with the plucking. I agree that mostly the chicken we buy is tasteless in comparison. I've always loved chicken, and now I do try to buy organic free range, when I can get it. You can taste the difference. Perhaps as consumers, we need to just stop buying the crappy chicken from the supermarket, and demand free range, organic chicken with flavour. Who knows, we might get rid of the production of cage chick
27 Jan 2011 16:49 AEST
From: Melbourne
Re Angela - 'Killing Chooks'
refer to www.backyardpoultry.com as an awesome resource of all things chooks..including how to breed, kill and prep Cheers
13 Jan 2011 20:34 AEST
From:
chicken
Matthew, i am in heaven watching your program. i only eat chicken thighs cos i find that not just chicken, but everything is now bland. it wasnt when i was a child in the 60's. good for you. i use spices to get flavour now, no beef in this house, its always tough if it isnt fillet. lamb is ok. chicken is ok because it takes on flavours so readily. i cook for children aged 0-5, 85 of them. i remember when venison used to taste gamey, now it doesnt. its so disappointing our food culture. thanks
07 Jan 2011 20:45 AEST
From:
Perfect flavour
great post with unique content and thoroughly written about chooks, thanks alot.
03 Jan 2011 20:41 AEST
From:
Real Chooks for Real People
after eating our first home grown chook last year, my eyes were opened - they are definatly doing something wrong to all that meat available to the public. the same can be said for lamb after we grew our own two years back. I find i can't buy either meat now from the butchers locally with that knowledge so close to home. We will have our first beef this year - looking forward to our next flavour surprise.
23 Dec 2010 14:39 AEST
From:
Truth
It has become quite a joke has'nt it?Im sure that everyone born before 1965 can remember how sweet food was! The worst thing about this is the fact that; Big businesses are "conditioning "generations into eating only what they provide! (The woman does'nt look to the husband she looks to the supermarket! ) Man always had better health when eating fresh produce. To label a date on food going "off" (to the day) means that you have done something to cause it to happen. The backyard gardener "TOPS".
17 Dec 2010 16:31 AEST
From:
Frankie
Who are these self appointed chicken experts? Obviously, not old enough to remember the wonderful, flavourful (& not quite so tender) poultry of my childhood. I also recall that it was relatively far more expensive than today's chicken, and generally a special occasion meal. Probably because they were allowed to mature at a natural pace, gathering good muscle & bone development along the way and, therefore, flavour. We get what you pay for...PS: Where can we buy Anne from Eugowra's poultry?
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About this Blog
Ever wondered what it’d be like to leave a cushy city job and set up a small farm without any experience of rural life? Join Matthew Evans as he adjusts from being a restaurant critic to learning exactly where his food is coming from, on a farmlet in Tasmania’s beautiful Huon Valley.
Matthew Evans was once trained as a chef, before crossing to the dark side of the industry and becoming a restaurant reviewer. After five years and 2,000 restaurant meals as the chief reviewer for The Sydney Morning Herald, Matthew realised that chefs don’t have the best produce in the land, normal people who live close to the land do. So he moved to Tasmania, to a small patch of earth where he’s raising pigs and sheep, milking a cow and waiting for his chickens to start laying.
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