[Sca-cooks] stewing chickens?

[Bill Fisher]

I snuck up on this site and caught them unawares:

http://en.mimi.hu/gastronomy/stewing_chicken.html

Stewing Chicken - A size classification for chicken. A stewing chicken
is over 10 months old and weighs from 4 to 6 pounds.

Stewing Chickens: This chicken (also called a hen) weighs 4 1/2 to 6
pounds and provides a generous amount of meat. It's a mature,
less-tender bird and is best cooked in stew and soup recipes.

So it basicially amount to a big heavy chicken with a good bit of 
heft to them and
a lack of tenderness.  An older, tougher, yardwise bird you are not
going to want to roast.


I used to get them from the amish folks.

Cadoc


On Mon, 13 Sep 2004 10:06:13 -0400, Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius
<adamantius.magister at verizon.net> wrote:
> 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?"
>         -- Susan Sheybani, assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry
> Holt, 07/29/04
> 
> 
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