Bigger Chickens, Better Flavor

My friend Chrissie Zaerpoor at Kookoolan Farms sends out a monthly newsletter about her farm and the practices that make it a very different place from most conventional farm operations. She recently announced that her chickens are once again available at New Seasons Markets and every Sunday through October at the Hillsdale Farmers' Market. Most important of all, she provided a recipe that will have you swearing to never go back to industrially raised chickens again.

Here’s a secret about chickens: the big ones have the best texture and flavor.

When we set out as new farmers to raise our own meats, from the beginning our goal was to produce the best food available anywhere, period. We had read about the difference in flavor and nutrition possible with pasture-raised meats and poultry in some of the books by Dr. Andrew Weill, but although he strongly recommended and endorsed the nutritional and health benefits of eating pasture-raised meats, at the time he advocated a mostly vegetarian diet as an alternative for most people, because pasture-raised meats were nearly impossible to find. We couldn’t find pasture-raised meats at the time either, so we decided to do it ourselves. That was six years ago.

We also decided to wait to slaughter our chickens until they reach age of nine weeks, compared to 45 days old for most confinement/industrially raised chickens. And we think that because they're raised outdoors, our birds have a better quality of life and that at some level they must appreciate having longer lives than they would if we kept them indoors.

More mature birds, finished at a larger size and who get more exercise, not surprisingly have better muscle development, better flavor and better texture, resulting in better tasting poultry than we’ve ever had anywhere. It also makes for more efficient weeknight cooking: roast a chicken for a luxe Sunday night dinner. Slice the leftovers for Monday night sandwiches. Dice what’s left for Tuesday curry. And then simmer the carcass for comfort food chicken soup.

Perfect Roast Chicken

Adapted from The Grassfed Gourmet Cookbookby Shannon Hayes

This simple recipe will fill your house with great smells. The pan juices are wonderful served plain or made into a gravy. Pull the leftover chicken for chicken salad or sandwiches, and make stock from the carcass.

1 Tbsp. coarse sea salt
1 Tbsp freshly-ground black pepper
1 Tbsp dried thyme
2 Tbsp dried oregano
1 clove garlic (or one Tbsp minced bottled garlic)
¼ cup olive oil

1 whole chicken

Preheat the oven to 350°. Make the herb paste in a food processor or mortar and pestle by mixing together the salt, pepper, thyme, oregano, garlic and olive oil.

Rinse the chicken and pat dry with paper towels. Rub the herb paste all over the chicken, being sure to get underneath as well as on top of the skin. Allow to sit for two hours uncovered in the refrigerator, or roast immediately, roughly 90 minutes for a 4-to-5 pound chicken, or closer to 2 hours for a 6-to-7 pound chicken.* Secret farmer tip: bigger chickens really do have better texture and flavor compared to small birds!

Check for doneness any of these three ways: the legs are loose, the juices run clear (not pink) when the skin is pricked at the point where the leg attaches to the body, or when the internal temperature of the thigh reads more than 165° (some people prefer 170°; 165° is the safe minimum). Let the bird rest 10-15 minutes before carving.

* This would also be fantastic roasted over indirect heat in your charcoal grill.

Top photo from Kookoolan Farms, photo of baby chick by Fredrick Joe for The Oregonian.

Land of Milk and Honey

It's kind of like that PBS show "Connections" with James Burke, whose comb-over was third in line to that of "Guns, Germs and Steel" author Jared Diamond and former Portland TV newsman Boyd Levet back in the Mt. St. Helens days. But I digress.

The connection I'm talking about is the one between the price of farm-produced raw milk and the vacation schedules of middle-class Portlanders. Got it? Well, as explained by Chrissie Zaerpoor of Kookoolan Farms, it has to do with the reduced demand for the milk her cows produce due to the fact that many of us city folk go on vacation in July just as the cows' production is peaking. This makes for a glut of milk for not enough buyers, which causes her to lower her prices to compensate.

So if you're a lover of raw milk, you can make an appointment to pick up a gallon or ten from her farm store in Yamhill. And what to do with all that milk? Well, for starters, if you're the DIY type she has local cheesemakers teach classes at the farm (and sells cheesemaking supplies, as well), and she also has recipes for making your own butter and ice cream from the milk (see below).

Also, if you're feeling particularly motivated and you're interested in starting your own herd, she's selling two of her best producers, Token and Glitter, to good homes. For milk or the cows it comes from, get in touch by e-mail or by phone at 503-730-7535.

Farmer Chrissie's Best Ice Cream

To make ice cream, combine 3 cups cream; 1/2 cup sweetener such as sugar, Rapidura, honey or maple syrup; four raw egg yolks; and 1 tsp arrowroot powder in a blender. Add whatever flavoring you desire, such as 1 tsp. vanilla extract. Then process in your ice cream maker. Variation: replace sweetener and flavoring with one jar of Ayers Creek berry jam. Homemade ice cream keeps well in the freezer for up to a year. 

Farmer Chrissie's Best Butter

To make butter, let cream set out at room temperature for about six hours to warm up and ripen, then mix it in your food processor until butter comes together in granules. Drain off the buttermilk for use in biscuits or pancakes. Rinse the butter granules in ice-cold water until the water runs clear, then use a damp towel to press out the excess water. Salt the butter if desired, roll into logs, wrap in clear plastic wrap and freeze almost indefinitely. Raw butter spoils very quickly in your refrigerator or at room temperature because hand-processing does not remove all the casein from the butterfat, so keep frozen until ready to use.

Thoughts On: Winter Eggs

The boundless energy of some of my women farmer friends puts my lazybones writer gig to shame (as I sit here in my bathrobe typing away). I've posted bulletins by Chrissie Zaerpoor of Kookoolan Farms before, and I thought her recent piece on the seasonal variation in the price of farm eggs would be worth sharing.

Why are "winter eggs" so expensive? Eggs are a commodity product evenly available year-round, right?

Our chickens are raised exclusively outdoors, in open-air houses with no proper doors. The chickens come and go at will, and have free reign over our entire 3.5 acres of pasture (well, except we fence them out of the vegetable garden). When we occasionally have a flighty bird that insists on breaking into the vegetable garden, we clip her wings and confine her for a few weeks to "rehabilitate" her. Through this process we have confirmed that confined hens lay about twice as many eggs as wild-pastured hens, and because of their lower activity they actually consume less feed. In other words, just feeding the hens costs twice as much per egg when the hens are truly free-ranged. And that's just the beginning.

Wild birds only lay eggs in the spring. Because eggs are so nutritious, chickens were among the earliest animals to be domesticated. Thousands of years of chicken-keeping has selected for birds that lay continuously for most of the year, but this is not their natural pattern.

So how do birds know when it's spring? They are sensitive to the number of daylight hours, and to the rate of change of the number of daylight hours. In the spring, when daylight hours are rapidly increasing, chickens lay the most eggs. Consider Easter egg hunts: they're timed for the peak harvest of eggs! Conversely, in late October and November, when the days are rapidly shortening and darkening, egg production drops off dramatically.

In early September we collected two buckets of eggs a day. Now we collect a half bucket of eggs a day. By the winter solstice on December 21st, we'll pick up about five eggs a day. From over 500 laying hens. Of course, we still have to feed them all winter—and in fact they eat more to keep up their body heat. This seasonal "molting" is a natural conservation and renewal process: next spring the same hens will lay lots of eggs, and bigger eggs than they laid this year. We generally keep our hens three to four years.

In factory farms, they both keep the hens confined indoors, usually in small cages, to reduce the calories they consume and thereby reduce their feed costs. They keep the light on 24/7 so the hens have no idea what season it is. Most of these hens never spend a moment of their lives outdoors. And as soon as an individual's egg production drops off, she gets gassed, generally around age 16 months. These measures are "necessary" for keeping egg prices down.

If we put up factory houses, we could easily keep 100,000 hens on our 3.5 acres. Instead we have 500 hens free-ranging and eating lots of grass and bugs. By not taking all these incremental cost cutting measures, we bring you the finest-quality, high-omega-3, free-ranged, pasture-fed, humanely raised eggs you can buy anywhere in Oregon. Our eggs are $6 a dozen in winter, $5 a dozen in summer.

You can find Chrissie's eggs, cheesemaking supplies, milk and so many other good things at her farm store in Yamhill. Make an appointment or sign up for a cheesemaking class by calling the farm at 503-730-7535.

Photo at top by Fredrick D. Joe for The Oregonian.

Thoughts On: Birth and Death on a Farm, Pt. 2

Chrissie Zaerpoor of Kookoolan Farms continues the series (part one is here) about trade-offs, transitions and new beginnings on their farm in Yamhill:

It always seems that just when you think you have everything figured out and under control that nature reminds you otherwise. Earlier this spring, we were milking cows one morning and one was missing. After almost an hour of searching, we found her drowned in our little creek.

Chrissie in her farm store.

The cows have had continuous access to this creek for more than two years and have never had any trouble with it; the water was not particularly high; it's a very small creek, only six feet wide or so and no deeper than boots for most of its length, but it does have one deep swimming hole in it. Poor thing, if she had found her way a few feet up or downstream, she would've been fine.

But finding a pet cow dead is just the beginning: hauling a 900-pound carcass out of a creek is a serious engineering challenge requiring heavy equipment and almost a whole day's work to remove her body, bring it up the hill, dig a deep hole, and bury her. Thank goodness for good neighbors and their backhoe. We replaced her with a new cow, "Token," who is just a lovely, lovely, gentle cow. We wouldn't have met Token if not for the other drowned cow.

We have built two very large greenhouses (top photo) with our own hands: 30 by 144 feet, and 30 by 98 feet, and have had Mother Nature crush them both, first by wind and then by snow. We thought we needed the greenhouses for hay storage and for meat chicken shelters; instead, we replaced the greenhouses with an irrigation system that uses our gray water from the milking parlor and poultry processing plant to irrigate our new 100-tree mixed fruit orchard that we planted this spring. We wouldn't have the orchard if it weren't for the end of the greenhouses.



Similarly, some of you may remember our dreadful behemoth first delivery turck, the Snap-On Tool truck. This truck cost $4,000 when we bought it, had only one seat and seatbelt, no heating, no air conditioning, and numerous mechanical problems and failures that cost over $5,000 to repair in the first year and added nothing to its value.

Deciding to retire the dreaded beast and purchase a much nicer and newer Isuzu NPR commercial truck with three seats and seatbelts, heater and air conditioning, and a 14-foot delivery box, felt very scary in October, 2008: nobody was buying cars or trucks then, remember? But the new truck has been wonderfully reliable, and when we filed our taxes we were surprised to find we had been "stimulated" to the tune of being able to write down 50% depreciation the first year for a business vehicle purchase.

That stimulus bonus funded the stainless steel wall remodelling of our poultry processing plant, hopefully opening up the possibility of having it licensed half of the year for poultry processing, and half of the year as a winery for meadmaking: this became a big factor in making our biggest "new beginnings" decision of all: to transition away from Cornish cross chickens.

Top photo by Frederick Joe, The Oregonian.

Thoughts On: Home Dairying

In this second in a series of essays reflecting on her life as a small-scale farmer in Yamhill, Oregon, Chrissie Zaerpoor of Kookoolan Farms shares her education in the joys of dairy cow ownership.

Back in the day, one supposes it must have been pretty straightforward: You obtain a cow, you milk the cow, you drink the milk. If the cow is making more milk than you can drink, then you share it with your friends or culture it up as yogurt or cheese to preserve it for later when there will be less milk available.

When we decided to buy a family cow, the first thing I did was read The Family Cow by Dirk Van Loon,an excellent book. He suggested that one of the best ways to get a cow is to go to a dairy and ask for one. So, during the weeks when we were out driving around looking for a farm, at some point we drove past a dairy where we could see not only cows but people, too. We stopped and asked about buying a cow.

The cows were all Holsteins: giant, gentle behemoths that produce huge quantities of milk. All of the cows on this dairy were quite young; the worker explained that cows only live four or five years. He was treating a bad knee on one of the cows with an antibiotic. We commented that it must be unusual to have such an injury; he explained that no, lots of the cows had bad knees. We asked what other kinds of problems cows might have (since we were new to the whole thing and genuinely curious and concerned about what we might be getting ourselves into). He listed a scary litany of ailments, and finished the list by asserting, "You can't raise cows without antibiotics. We use 'em for everything." And with that statement ringing in our ears, we left.

Well, later we found our farm, and some months after that, we found our cow, the lovely Jersey pet Ariba (top and left). She had been a pet show cow as a heifer (that's the word us farmer types use for a cow that hasn't yet had her first calf). But after she had her first calf, her udder was droopy, so she was retired from showing. For me, her most attractive characteristic was that she was currently being milked by hand by an 8-year-old child. I figured if a little kid could do it, I could do it too.

We brought Ariba home and waited two dry months for her calf to be born. And then I started milking by hand. It took a good two hours to get all the milk out of her mammoth udder, a good five gallons a day. Within a week I was looking in the refrigerator at more than 25 gallons of gorgeous, raw, grass-fed Jersey cow milk, loaded with cream that filled one third of each bottle.

I've been a home winemaker and beermaker for years, so, unintimidated, I started calling homebrew supply shops to find some cheesemaking supplies. There were none to be had anywhere. Finally I found the New England Cheesemaking Supply Company, from which it's possible to buy almost anything for home cheesemaking. However, shipping it overnight proved to be cost prohibitive, and shipping it by ground took more than a week. Next thing I knew, I was pouring out almost 30 gallons of hand-milked milk for the laying hens to drink.

Thus we started carrying a few basic cheesemaking supplies as a natural adjunct to milk. And within several months, we were carrying nearly the entire product line from the New England Cheesemaking Supply Company. Now our farm store always has in stock pretty much every single ingredient or supply you'd need to make any kind of cheese you can think of.

Still, the milk comes in waves, with new lactations producing copious quantities of milk, and dry cows dropping out of the milk pool and reducing the volume of milk by a third or a half.

This week we have the newly-lactating "Caramel" producing enormous quantities of rich, creamy milk, and once again we find ourselves well, almost swimming in milk, or at least considering the possibility of bathing in it. Tonight I made a gallon of vanilla ice cream and a gallon of egg nog ice cream. Yesterday I churned two quarts of cream into butter. So now it's time to make cheese. I favor soft fresh raw cheeses, which are considered health foods in Europe, but in America the USDA has turned them into suspicious cousins of heroin. (Check the website for the schedule of upcoming cheesemaking classes.)

As to the adventures of dairy farming, I have been stepped on and kicked. We have participated in the births of two of the calves. We've bottle-fed calves. We've given shots, taken out stitches and retrieved wayward cows from the other side of the highway. We've bought alfalfa hay $8,000 at a time, learned how to milk cows, how to test milk and learned what the hygiene standards are for raw and pasteurized milk in three states which, by itself, could be a whole other essay.

Basic Vanilla Ice Cream Recipe

1 qt. cream
4 egg yolks
1/2 c. maple syrup (Grade B preferred)
1 Tbsp. arrowroot powder
2 tsp. vanilla

Blend all ingredients together in blender, then pour into ice cram maker. (Tip: Get a new ice cream maker in Sept. when they're on sale for 50% off. I bought a new ice cream maker a couple of months ago and the new ones are WAY better than the old wood-barrel design. The new ice cream makers are a smooth, self-contained unit that you store in the freezer: no more ice and salt!)

For egg nog ice cream, add 1/2 tsp. ground cinnamon, a little mace, a little nutmeg, and 1/4 c. of brandy or rum.

Basic Fromage Blanc (soft fresh cheese)

Warm a quart of whole milk up to 86 degrees farenheit. Add Fromage Blanc culture (available from Kookoolan Farms or online) and stir or shake. Leave the milk on the kitchen counter at room temperature for 6 to 12 hours, until a firm curd sets up. Put a colander on top of a mixing bowl and line the colander with a cheesecloth. Pour the curd through the cheesecloth and tie up the cheesecloth to drain. Drain for 1 to 4 hours, leaving the bowl under the cheesecloth to catch the whey. (Save the whey for later. You can use it to soak dry beans and grains. That's a whole other topic: lactofermentation.)

Fromage blanc can be used fresh for about ten days, or frozen. You can stir garlic and herbs into it and form it into a festive log for holiday parties. Or stir dried cranberries, honey and crushed nuts into it and spread on bagels.

A Trio of Holiday Gift Suggestions

There's nothing better than a self-liquidating gift. One that doesn't hang around or, heaven forfend, need to be dusted. Which explains the popularity of the calendar as the perfect practical gift. It's useful, doesn't take up much space and you can recycle it when the year's up, yet while it lasts you can enjoy a new piece of art on your wall every month. This year's edition of the Artisan Cheese Calendar from our friend Tami Parr at the Pacific Northwest Cheese Project is made to order for the cheese lover on your list, with its new, larger size (13.5" by 9") and great photos of Northwest artisan cheeses for only $28.99. Order it online, and note that 25% of all profits from sales benefit the Oregon Food Bank.

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Though I was never able to convince my mother of the idea, I happen believe that a gift certificate is the ideal gift. These little slips of paper (or plastic as is often the case these days) allow the giftee to choose the object of their desire rather than what the gifter thinks they want. So if you've got a foodie friend who's been pining over classes in making cheese or artisan meats, Chrissie Zaerpoor at Kookoolan Farms in Yamhill has just announced a virtual laundry list of upcoming classes from Basic Soft Cheeses to Blue Cheese to Charcuterie for Beginners. I've attended a class and they're informative, not to mention tasty, even for those of us who are more interested in consumption than production. Check out the list of classes, or call 503-730-7535 for more information.

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And, last but not least, what better way to let someone know how much you care than giving them the gift of health? Kristin Jackson of Take It Outside Fitness is offering gift certificates for group classes, personal training, or lifestyle and weight management either in her studio or outside in the fresh air. I've taken her classes for awhile now and found them not only affordable but downright fun. She's able to gear the workout to your ability level, so if you're fit or not you'll get a good workout and have fun at the same time. To quote The Monkees, "I'm A Believer." Check the website for gift certificate details.