Tag Archives: river cottage meat book

Beer and Chicken

A while back I wrote about Beer and Meat and I have once again started pouring over the The River Cottage Meat Book by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.  I picked up the book recently to learn about the cuts of lamb (Erik and I are splitting a whole one!), but, having just watched Jamie Oliver’s Fowl Dinners, I started reading about chickens instead.  It turns out that the average chicken has it pretty rough.  Some facts I learned about chicken from Jamie and Hugh:

  • The average westerner eats 15 chickens a year.
  • The average chicken lives for 41 days before slaughter.
  • During those 41 days, the broiler house (where the chickens live) is not cleaned.
  • Of the chickens we eat, 98% are intensively farmed (i.e. live at Chicken Auschwitz and never see the sun).
  • Between 6-30% of a batch of broiler chickens die before slaughter.
  • Chicken density in a broiler house can reach 38kg per square meter (at 2kg per chicken, that means almost twenty chickens in a square meter!).
  • The Ross Cobb chicken breed (the breed we mostly eat) is genetically obese and can’t reach sexual maturity without being starved so it doesn’t get too fat and die.
  • Around 25% of broiler chickens can’t walk because they get too fat and don’t have enough room to walk around and develop muscles.  Ever had a drumstick where the foot end was a bit black?  That is a result of acid from the chicken’s own feces seeping into the bone because the chicken was walking on its knees.

Pretty gross, eh?  I was shocked to learn about how bad chickens really have it.  I really recommend watching Fowl Dinners for a crash course in chicken provenance.  Jamie even slaughters a chicken in front of the live studio audience, who looked on with abject horror.  I don’t understand why we pay to watch people die in movies, but can’t tolerate watching our food die.  If we are eating 15 chickens a year each, we should be prepared to slaughter a chicken.  Obviously all non crazy people won’t enjoy taking the life of an animal, but not being able to do it yourself is the ultimate in hypocrisy.

I also learned from Jamie and Hugh that happy, healthy chickens who are able to grow slowly and vary their diet with natural forage taste better!  I can attest to this first hand.  My wife recently acquired a chicken from one of her coworker’s hobby farm.  The chicken was free range, organically fed (no medicated protein soup), and likely led a pretty good life.  We cooked the bird using Erik’s Beer Butt Chicken recipe and it was the most delicious chicken I’ve ever had in my entire life.  Here’s the recipe:

  1. Season the whole chicken (skin on) with salt and pepper.  Chop some rosemary and thyme and rub it on the dry chicken.  Take a few rosemary springs and shove it under the breast skin.
  2. Drink one and a half beers (minimum) – leave half of one beer in the can and put some of the fresh herbs used in the rub into the can.
  3. Get a chicken stand and put the beer can into it.  Shove the stand with the can in it into the chicken’s butt.
  4. Turn one side of your BBQ on and leave the other side off – you want a convection oven effect. Once up to 350F put the bird on the off side of the grill.  Cook for one and a half hours or when you hit 165F internal temperature.  Rotate the bird once or twice during the cooking process.

You will not regret trying the above recipe.  Make sure you drink at least one and a half beers!  You’ll also find that your chicken will taste better if it had a good life.  I implore you to ignore most chicken products unless you can gain some assurance that they had a good life.  Even if you don’t like chickens as birds (they are pretty dumb), think of how great a happy chicken will taste!

Cheers,

Chris

Beer and Meat

I am not much of a cook, except when it comes to meat.  I am not particularly skilled at cooking meat, I just enjoy spending time with my BBQ.  I asked for a meat cookbook for Christmas this year and my wife really came through for me.  She bought me The River Cottage Meat Book by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, who you may recognize as the dude from the F Word who helps Gordon Ramsey raise his turkeys and his pigs.  The book itself is over five hundred pages, half filled with recipes and half filled with information about meat.  I have most enjoyed reading the informative chapters.

I absolutely love this book.  I am obsessed with learning about farming practices, how to spot quality meat, and about all of the different cuts of meat.  I was shocked and appalled at what are considered industry farming practices, which are intensive to say the least.  What I found the most interesting is that healthy, happy, animals produce better quality meat that tastes better.  While obviously not a vegetarian, I do love animals and have since undertaken to buy my beef from a local farm where the cows are likely to have lived good lives.

My search for local beef lead me to a few farms nearby.  Sadly, like Hugh warns of in the book, it seems our culture is obsessed with lean beef, which is debatably healthier, but less tasty.  The first farm I looked into was Mount Lehman’s Grass-Only Beef Farm.  I spoke to a woman there who boasted of her lean beef, but also stated that her slaughtered beef was only hung for two weeks because it is so lean that it would dry out.  High recommends at least three weeks of hanging time, so I kept looking.

Erik recommended we look into Painted River Farm, who advertised three weeks of hanging time.  They also feed their beef organic grain as well as grass, to help fatten them up a bit.  Sounded tasty to me.  Erik and I decided to split a 30lb box of various beef cuts for starters, just to make sure we liked it.  Our original goal was to purchase a half or quarter cow!

The first cut of beef I attempted to prepare was a rib steak on the BBQ.  Upon opening the package, I was a little disappointed by the lack of marbling in the beef.  I was hoping for more, but who was I to judge without tasting.  The only seasoning I used was a Pride of Szeged Steak Rub.  I decided to pair by first steak with a Driftwood Blackstone Porter, which may or may not go well with steak depending on your tastes.  I’d usually recommend a Pale Ale or an IPA.

Sadly, I overcooked the first steak.  This never happens to me, I swear!  I was highly distraught and very disappointed in myself.  If you are going to kill and eat an animal, you had better prepare it properly, right vegetarians?  Luckily, there was a second steak, which I managed to cook well, although not as rare as I would have liked.  The second one was delicious.  I really thought it tasted sweeter and more beefy, which is weird to say, but that’s what beef tastes like.  Talking to Erik later on, I found that he overcooked his first t-bone also.  We think this beef somehow cooks faster, maybe due to the lack of fat?  I’ve learned my lesson in any case.

What does all of this have to do with beer?  Well, I love drinking beer with beef, or any meal for that matter.  There is also a beer recipe in the book, a recipe for a stew that Hugh calls “beef in stout”, which I hope to make soon.  If you are an animal lover and you want to get the most out of your meat, I really recommend The River Cottage Meat Book. It is a fascinating book.

Cheers,

Chris