Golden Ranger

This week we staggered home with the bounty typical of this season, in which we still find the produce we've been enjoying for weeks or months--such as asparagus, fennel, oranges, fava beans, and turnips--but also relatively new treats, including tomatoes, cherries and blueberries, and debuts, including the first peaches of the season.  It was a particular pleasure to find a Golden Ranger chicken at Cache Creek Meat Co. for the third week in a row.  The Golden Rangers will be available for a few more weeks, too.  This is the first kind of chicken we got from Cache Creek--several years ago now--and it remains our standard for evaluating chickens.   If you have your doubts, these pasture-raised chickens will teach you why they are both different from and better than even organic chickens, let alone those from factory farms.  One of the things we've learned about buying meat at the farmers market is that it sometimes requires us to rethink basic cooking strategies.  Cache Creek chickens are smaller and much less fatty than any other chickens we've tried.  For instance, they don't have those flaps of yellow fat that need to be cut off.  As a consequence, they tend to cook faster.  They also shed less fat so if you roast vegetables in the pan with them, you might want to add a little olive oil at the start.  In turn, Bledsoe pork tends to have more fat than the super-lean "other white meat" pork we've grown used to.  In short, you have to experiment a little with market meat and be willing to revise your methods a bit.  

The Golden Ranger is a relatively small chicken and it has a wonderfully intense flavor.  It's possible to get its skin very crisp.  Kristy at Cache Creek advised us to leave the chicken uncovered for a few hours before cooking it to make the skin even crisper.  So on the day that we roasted it, we salted it in the morning and left it uncovered on a plate in the fridge.   That night, we roasted it following the recipe for "Alice B. Toklas chicken" from Gertrude Stein by way of Peggy Knickerbocker's book Simple Soirees.  In this recipe, you preheat a cast iron skillet on the stove top (at about medium), heat a little butter and oil in it, and then start the chicken breast side down for 4-5 minutes, then flip it over for a few more minutes on the stove top before finishing it in a 400 degree oven.  After it's roasted for 35-40 minutes, pour 1/2 cup of port over it, and 10 minutes later, 1/2 cup of orange juice.  When it seems ready (the legs wiggle and the juices between leg and breast run clear), take the chicken out and let it rest.  Resting meat is always important.  But it makes a big difference with these chickens, we think.  While the chicken rested, we skimmed the fat off of the pan juices (less work than it would be with a fattier bird), boiled down the juices, and finished the sauce with a tablespoon or two of cream.  

The final chicken looked like this.  Even the stripped carcasses of these chickens remain flavorful.  We save them in the freezer and use them for stock.  This stock isn't the same as the stock we made with stew hens, described in our "bountiful stock" post.  But it is infinitely superior to canned stock, and it is a pleasure to know that it is made with what would otherwise be wasted--a carcass or two, a few onions, carrots and celery from the back of the vegetable drawer, and a rind leftover from parmagiano reggiano cheese.  We save those rinds in a bag in the freezer and put them inside a chicken as we roast it, or in soups or stocks, or even in pots of beans as they cook.

We'd thrown some of the tiny turnips we'd gotten into the roasting pan, so those were an added bonus.  We've cooked a lot of those turnips this year, especially enjoying them in vegetable melanges with carrots and fava beans.

A quick snack for the cook is raw radishes served with dipping salt.  These are beautiful and spicy purple radishes, served with a smoked salt.