[local eating] Turkey
Nov. 25th, 2009 11:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
magidI'd heard about a group in Newton that arranged for local, organic, free-range chickens to be slaughtered by a shochet, and got on their email list. I'd missed all the chickens for the year, but had the chance to get a turkey through Loko (Local Kosher). I thought for a bit: the cost was not cheap. But I decided that I needed to put my money where my ideals are (as it were), and pony up. In addition to the money, there was a four-hour work shift, which, as it turned out, was mostly spent plucking birds.
I showed up at the farm in Rutland in good time for the 9 A.M. shift. The farm is a small one, with goats, chickens, ducks, cows (some curly-haired!) and a Shetland pony in addition to the Holland White turkeys he'd raised for us since early August. Before anything happened, I got to hear about how these turkeys had lived, with fields of grain grown for them to forage on in addition to the turkey feed, their house moved weekly to avoid possible issues. Then the shochet, Naftali Zvi Hanau, described what the process would be during our shift.
First, the farmer brought each turkey in, holding it upside down, with the neck in the right place for the shochet's cut. Before the first bird, the shochet said the bracha over shechita.
Once the neck was cut, each turkey rested upside down to let the blood drain out. There was a lot of sawdust around to soak up any that spilled (since we're supposed to cover the blood, and apparently sawdust counts). (I keep thinkiing "the cone of shame," even though I know it's a frustum...)
Once this first pass of getting the blood out was done, it was time to pluck the turkey. This is what the rest of us spent our time doing.
What I learned about turkey feathers: the flight fleathers on the outside of the wing and the tail feathers (which I suppose are also used for flight) are the hardest to pull out, requiring a lot of hand strength, even pulled individually. These are useful for quills, and I took a few for the sofer I know (though I know she won't use them until they've sat for a year: only found feathers can be used immediately, while feathers from killed birds have a wait time of a year, to show that the birds were not killed for the feathers that will be used to write ritual objects). The rest of the feathers are much easier, and some were quite downy. Still, there were usually some left after we'd pulled what we could by hand, that required pliers or similar tools.
Also, nonkosher birds are dipped in hot water before plucking, to loosen the feathers, making it easier to get them fairly perfectly plucked. However, this is not allowed in Jewish law, since the hot water would be considered to cook the bird while there is still some blood in it, rendering it unkosher.
Oh, and there are a lot of feathers on 24 birds (the morning shift plucked 24 of the 40 birds in the batch).
Once a bird was plucked (except for the neck near the head and the last joint of the wing), they went for evisceration. First the last joint of the wing, the head, and the feet* were cut off, then the innards taken out, the intestines and lungs looked over for punctures, which would render the bird nonkosher. Most of the things removed from the bird went out of the process at that point, except for the rest of the necks, and the liver (which was available to those who showed that they knew how to deal with cooking fresh liver**).
It was at this point that they really started to look like turkey, the ingredient, familiar from supermarkets all over. The plucking had started that, but once the extremities were off and the cavity was a cavity, it looked like something I could cook. (Note the liver being scored on the right.)
Next up was soaking (for an hour, if I'm remembering correctly) in huge barrels, and salting (for half an hour, ditto), in containers with holes on the bottom. This is another part of the kashering process I've never done at home; I was glad not to have to do it in my own kitchen (*cue modern privilege*). This shows the salting stage (foreground), with more turkeys being processed in the background.
Once the salting was done, the salt was rinsed off, and the turkey was put in a bag and weighed.
I always get the smallest turkey I can find, figuring it is more easily cooked without drying out the white meat, aiming for as close to 10 pounds as I can. No one expected the turkeys to turn out to have grown as much as they did: they were mostly 30 pounders (and that's at the end of the whole process; I have to assume they started out a couple of pounds heavier). I did get the smallest one ready by the end of my shift, which was 23 pounds. Tomorrow's going to be interesting.
* I've heard of chicken feet being used for soup, and asked about that, though they looked extremely... nonedible, with scaly extremities and nails at the end. I was told that I'd have to peel the feet (er, somehow?) if I wanted to make soup, and I was welcome to take how many I wanted (presumably after soaking and salting). I decided that while this might happen some day, it wasn't going to happen at this time.
** Raw liver is problematic from a kosher perspective, since it has so much blood in it. The only acceptable way to prepare it is to salt it, then broil it, and the utensils used for this are separate from anything else in the kitchen. Once it's roasted, it can be used however (like, say, in chopped liver). I've never prepared fresh liver in my kitchen, and felt no need to deal with the extra hassle, especially since there were other people who were interested and prepared.
Tangential: there's been some buzz about Loko (see this Globe article, for instance), and there was a reporter there from the Christian Science Monitor, asking questions about the process and about why people chose to be there, and taking lots of photos. Hopefully we'll be getting an email once the story goes up (though since it's not hard news, I'm unsure how soon it will be).
Tangential 2: I noticed some aftereffects of plucking: the nail of my right index finger was sore and dented/cut from pulling the difficult feathers, and the next day some muscles in my lower back gave notice that they'd worked hard the previous day, and I should appreciate them.
eta next morning:
1. I don't know why the second photo, which is a vertical one, was stretched to be a horizontal one, and I'm not motivated enough to figure it out.
2. The one thing I should have mentioned but forgot was how warm the turkeys were while we plucked. The wings cooled fastest (which is part of why it was suggested that we start with them), but the rest stayed quite warm to the touch, despite the cool temperatures outside (well, in the barn, but that was shelter from the wind, not the temperature).
/edit
I showed up at the farm in Rutland in good time for the 9 A.M. shift. The farm is a small one, with goats, chickens, ducks, cows (some curly-haired!) and a Shetland pony in addition to the Holland White turkeys he'd raised for us since early August. Before anything happened, I got to hear about how these turkeys had lived, with fields of grain grown for them to forage on in addition to the turkey feed, their house moved weekly to avoid possible issues. Then the shochet, Naftali Zvi Hanau, described what the process would be during our shift.
First, the farmer brought each turkey in, holding it upside down, with the neck in the right place for the shochet's cut. Before the first bird, the shochet said the bracha over shechita.
Once the neck was cut, each turkey rested upside down to let the blood drain out. There was a lot of sawdust around to soak up any that spilled (since we're supposed to cover the blood, and apparently sawdust counts). (I keep thinkiing "the cone of shame," even though I know it's a frustum...)
Once this first pass of getting the blood out was done, it was time to pluck the turkey. This is what the rest of us spent our time doing.
What I learned about turkey feathers: the flight fleathers on the outside of the wing and the tail feathers (which I suppose are also used for flight) are the hardest to pull out, requiring a lot of hand strength, even pulled individually. These are useful for quills, and I took a few for the sofer I know (though I know she won't use them until they've sat for a year: only found feathers can be used immediately, while feathers from killed birds have a wait time of a year, to show that the birds were not killed for the feathers that will be used to write ritual objects). The rest of the feathers are much easier, and some were quite downy. Still, there were usually some left after we'd pulled what we could by hand, that required pliers or similar tools.
Also, nonkosher birds are dipped in hot water before plucking, to loosen the feathers, making it easier to get them fairly perfectly plucked. However, this is not allowed in Jewish law, since the hot water would be considered to cook the bird while there is still some blood in it, rendering it unkosher.
Oh, and there are a lot of feathers on 24 birds (the morning shift plucked 24 of the 40 birds in the batch).
Once a bird was plucked (except for the neck near the head and the last joint of the wing), they went for evisceration. First the last joint of the wing, the head, and the feet* were cut off, then the innards taken out, the intestines and lungs looked over for punctures, which would render the bird nonkosher. Most of the things removed from the bird went out of the process at that point, except for the rest of the necks, and the liver (which was available to those who showed that they knew how to deal with cooking fresh liver**).
It was at this point that they really started to look like turkey, the ingredient, familiar from supermarkets all over. The plucking had started that, but once the extremities were off and the cavity was a cavity, it looked like something I could cook. (Note the liver being scored on the right.)
Next up was soaking (for an hour, if I'm remembering correctly) in huge barrels, and salting (for half an hour, ditto), in containers with holes on the bottom. This is another part of the kashering process I've never done at home; I was glad not to have to do it in my own kitchen (*cue modern privilege*). This shows the salting stage (foreground), with more turkeys being processed in the background.
Once the salting was done, the salt was rinsed off, and the turkey was put in a bag and weighed.
I always get the smallest turkey I can find, figuring it is more easily cooked without drying out the white meat, aiming for as close to 10 pounds as I can. No one expected the turkeys to turn out to have grown as much as they did: they were mostly 30 pounders (and that's at the end of the whole process; I have to assume they started out a couple of pounds heavier). I did get the smallest one ready by the end of my shift, which was 23 pounds. Tomorrow's going to be interesting.
* I've heard of chicken feet being used for soup, and asked about that, though they looked extremely... nonedible, with scaly extremities and nails at the end. I was told that I'd have to peel the feet (er, somehow?) if I wanted to make soup, and I was welcome to take how many I wanted (presumably after soaking and salting). I decided that while this might happen some day, it wasn't going to happen at this time.
** Raw liver is problematic from a kosher perspective, since it has so much blood in it. The only acceptable way to prepare it is to salt it, then broil it, and the utensils used for this are separate from anything else in the kitchen. Once it's roasted, it can be used however (like, say, in chopped liver). I've never prepared fresh liver in my kitchen, and felt no need to deal with the extra hassle, especially since there were other people who were interested and prepared.
Tangential: there's been some buzz about Loko (see this Globe article, for instance), and there was a reporter there from the Christian Science Monitor, asking questions about the process and about why people chose to be there, and taking lots of photos. Hopefully we'll be getting an email once the story goes up (though since it's not hard news, I'm unsure how soon it will be).
Tangential 2: I noticed some aftereffects of plucking: the nail of my right index finger was sore and dented/cut from pulling the difficult feathers, and the next day some muscles in my lower back gave notice that they'd worked hard the previous day, and I should appreciate them.
eta next morning:
1. I don't know why the second photo, which is a vertical one, was stretched to be a horizontal one, and I'm not motivated enough to figure it out.
2. The one thing I should have mentioned but forgot was how warm the turkeys were while we plucked. The wings cooled fastest (which is part of why it was suggested that we start with them), but the rest stayed quite warm to the touch, despite the cool temperatures outside (well, in the barn, but that was shelter from the wind, not the temperature).
/edit
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no subject
Date: 2009-11-26 04:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-26 01:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-26 05:22 am (UTC)23 pounds! Wow, good luck. :-)
no subject
Date: 2009-11-26 01:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-26 01:32 pm (UTC)In any case good luck! It was amazing to me the first time I roasted poultry without stuffing how much faster it cooked (growing up I don't think we ever roasted chicken or turkey without putting stuffing inside, so I always believed that such things just had to take forever to cook). So I think your plan to not stuff is a good one.
Enjoy!
Me, at the moment I'm roasting squash and sweet potatoes to turn into soup later.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-26 01:41 pm (UTC)My usual plan is to cook the bird at as low a temperature as possible most of the time, covered, then uncover and raise the heat at the end. (This may change if some friends' oven remains flaky today...)
Sounds like it will be a lovely soup!
no subject
Date: 2009-11-26 06:04 pm (UTC)You can cook in a non-kosher oven by double-wrapping in foil. What is the principle there, and could you use a pareve tray (and keep it pareve) if you double-wrapped it in foil? If not, what's the relevant difference?
I assume you don't have the reach to pull the entire oven rack out instead of moving the roaster pan off of it? (I could in my too-small oven, but I don't think I could cook a 23-pound bird in it!)
no subject
Date: 2009-11-26 06:39 pm (UTC)I think taking the whole rack out would be problematic because they're the kind of racks that curve a bit at the other end, necessitating pulling them out mostly straight, then tipping up just a bit to remove. However, I can get the rack much of the way out, so it will be an easier lift (and I can likely recruit extra hands to help).
I'm really glad I didn't end up with a 30 pounder: no clue what I'd've cooked it in, nor whether it would have fit in the oven!
no subject
Date: 2009-11-29 06:21 pm (UTC)I hope getting your bird from oven to table was adventure-free!
no subject
Date: 2009-11-30 12:51 pm (UTC)And I did get it out safely: I got a friend to help support the roaster from underneath (which was an even greater challenge because the fat from the bird was within a half an inch of the rim).
I found out from later emails that many other people, who'd gotten 30-pounders, had quartered their birds and cooked them that way. I realized that though I know how to carve a cooked bird, I've never done much of anything in the way of changing the form of raw poultry. I think I should acquire poultry shears before I get more large birds. (Someone mentioned that the chickens processed earlier this year averaged around 7 lb, so butterflying was useful. I'd need to figure out where to put a chest freezer before I could do much with the chicken processing, though.)
no subject
Date: 2009-11-26 12:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-26 01:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-26 01:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-26 01:43 pm (UTC)I'm sure that it's a very different process commercially (kosher or non-), especially if there's a machine big enough to pluck the birds. The farmer had one that didn't heat up (the issue with a similar device), but turned out to be designed for smaller birds than these turkeys.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-26 02:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-26 02:21 pm (UTC)(I know that at the Hazon food conference a couple of years ago, when they shechted a goat, there were carnivores who wouldn't eat it, because the process disturbed them so much, and vegetarians who did, because they'd met the farmer and shochet and confirmed that this was ethically done throughout.)
no subject
Date: 2009-11-26 03:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-26 04:17 pm (UTC)The shochet who works with Loko is someone who went to the Adamah program at the Isabella Freedman center, and realized he could no longer eat factory meat, given the process. That's what inspired him to learn shechita in the first place.
Obviously, not the same thing at all, but I thought it interesting.
(Also, he's going to be the one shechting the birds at this year's Hazon conference.)
no subject
Date: 2009-11-29 05:02 pm (UTC)This, and all of your food-and-kashrut-related posts, make me really miss cooking more, and cherish the moments I do - when food preparation is meaningful from start to finish.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-30 12:53 pm (UTC)Part of why this felt like something I might be able to handle was because of the fish share, getting used to dealing with food that came with heads and tails and such, though fish have a lot fewer kashrut issues and are just easier to deal with. Finding sources of local and kosher proteins is making me very happy.
I hope you'll have time for all the cooking you want, sometime soon. (Over the summer, maybe?)