Roast chicken and rigor mortis
I didn't want you all to
think we had a bad taste in our mouth about Dark
Cornish chickens.
Sure, they're
inefficient at converting feed to meat and can't forage to save their
lives, but the
flavor is phenomenal! We roasted up one of our cockerels, and
it turned out as juicy and tender as those rotisserie chickens in the
grocery store.
The last couple of times
we've killed and eaten our own chickens, we thought we'd get the best
flavor by eating the meat as fresh as possible. Since then, I've
read that it's best to let the chicken sit in the refrigerator for a
couple of days so that rigor mortis can relax, tenderizing the
meat. I suspect the two day wait was part of the reason our
latest home grown chicken was the best I've ever tasted.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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I love your story!
When it comes to chickens, I feel like our grandparents knew so much that hasn't carried down through books to the current generation. I find it odd that all of the tutorials I've read about butchering chickens haven't mentioned rigor mortis!