.Chicken Info
Source of Recipe
Cooking for Graduate Students & Other Beginning Kitchen Dwellers (James W. Cooper)
Recipe Link: http://wywahoos.org/wahoos/cookbook/cover.htm
Selecting a Chicken
A chicken should be fresh, of good color and should not smell sour. If you buy a fresh chicken, you should plan to use it within 24 hours or freeze it. Frozen chickens have somewhat less taste than fresh since many cell walls deteriorate with freezing and thawing. A frozen chicken will have darker bones in the drumstick and thigh but will taste nearly as good as fresh. If you have to thaw a frozen chicken, do it over night in the refrigerator or in a microwave oven to avoid salmonella growth.
In preparing raw chicken, you need to be careful of possible salmonella contamination. Wash all knives and cutting boards in hot soapy water after cutting chicken and do not use the tools for any other purpose before they are washed.
Modern chickens seem to be quite fatty. In all the following recipes, you should pull the skin from the breasts and thighs. You can pull it from the drumsticks as well, but this is more difficult. Leave the skin on the wings, as it is seldom very fat there.
Blood in Cooked Dark Meat
One of the great panics new (and even experienced) cooks encounter is cooking chicken to perfection, only to find that the leg or thighs are still red or bloody inside near the bone. While this may be unsightly in some dishes, it is actually relatively harmless. Chicken bones, particularly from frozen chickens, contain hemoglobin which leaches out of the bone during cooking. You want to cook long enough to avoid this, for cosmetic reasons, but the chicken meat is perfectly well cooked.
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