[Sca-cooks] stewing chickens?

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Jadwiga Zajaczkowa / Jenne Heise:
>  > >Chickens I can get in the store but I don't think I've ever seen
>>  >them labeled as "stewing chicken", although perhaps I just haven't
>>  >noticed. So, for this use, what should I look for?
>>
>>  Sometimes known as a baking chicken or hen. Generic "fowl", in
>>  marketing terms, are, as far as I can tell, even older, stringier,
>>  and significantly smaller than those labelled "baking chicken".
>
>Hm... I've never seen baking chickens. (One imagines them in little
>Julia Child/King Arthur Flour outfits...)

They call them baking chickens or hens; I'm pretty sure Bell & Evans 
market one labelled as such; once upon a time, they may have been 
considered suitable for pies, but now I assume they'd be most 
commonly braised, which a lot of people do in the oven, which I 
suspect is why the term is still used.

Here's a link to some poultry packers' site with terms and 
definitions, including some stuff about baking hens and soup/stewing 
chickens:

http://www.goldkist.com/consumer/types.asp

Naturally, the Bell & Evans website now makes no mention of soup 
chickens, baking hens, etc. They no doubt monitor this list and 
removed all incriminating content seconds before I went to it...

>  We sometimes get 'roasting
>chickens'-- what my Christopher calls "Purdue Turrrkey-Chickens!" but I
>wouldn't use them for this recipe. The person who wrote up this recipe--
>we redacted it together--, Sarah bas Mordechai, is Jewish and a lot more
>experienced with cooking chicken than I, so I just copied her term.

It's a perfectly good term. I also think Sarah, if you're speaking of 
the person I _think_ you're speaking of, is originally from my neck 
of the woods, so perhaps she speaks the same dialect of English as I 
do...

>I'd just go to the store and buy some chicken thighs, I believe that's
>what I did. But if you have a choice between roasters and non-roasters,
>get non-roasters. :)

If the choice is between roasters (as in "oven-stuffers", I assume, 
and not the old-style, pre-mutant, non-steroid-laced roaster) and 
non-roasters, you might want to steer clear of little fryer/broiler 
types if that's your only alternative.

Then again, chicken thighs make a perfectly good bruet, too.

Adamantius

-- 
  "Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?"
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Holt, 07/29/04