Cooking Heritage Poultry
When you buy meat chickens and raise them yourself, they will be ready to butcher in just six weeks. After six weeks you will have a six pound bird. The meat is very tender even when fried or grilled. But raising meat birds like this isn't very sustainable. That's why here at Abbott Farms we raise heritage, dual-purpose chickens. These birds take six months to get big enough to butcher and as a result, the meat is not as tender. This isn't really a problem, though, once you learn how to cook heritage poultry. Many people will try heritage poultry once and never again because they don't know how to cook it and find the meat to be tough. The real secret to cooking heritage poultry is low and slow. Cook the meat on low heat for a long time. We usually eat our poultry roasted or boil it to make soup. Once the meat is roasted, you can pick it off the bones and can it or use it in any recipe as you would boneless, skinless chicken breasts. The only thing you cannot do is fry or grill the chicken without parboiling it first. Then it will be too tough to eat. One other difference when cooking heritage poultry is that the skin is much tougher, so you cannot eat the skin (at least not very easily). Cooking heritage poultry is not difficult, it is just a little different from what many people are used to and takes a little planning ahead. Here are a few basic recipes for cooking heritage poultry (or cooking with the roasted meat).
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