Tyson chicken recall

Comment made elsewhere:

Wow! This is a massive USDA Tyson frozen fried chicken strip recall – over 11 Million lbs! Ironically, I was thinking about making fried chicken strips last week (I make mine from scratch).

Tyson Foods, Inc. Recalls Chicken Strip Products Due to Possible Foreign Matter Contamination

The scratch part got me. Because genuine free-range chickens such as you have on a farm scratch the ground for things to eat like seeds, grubs, roly-polies, centipedes, lizards, spiders, worms, baby snakes, corn kernels. And when you cook such a bird and eat it, you're amazed how gamey it tastes. Like pheasant. Or some such wild thing. Really wild.

One time I cooked four, when I was in my mid-twenties, purchased from a downtown health food store, in their weird little freezer section, then at home, each baked in their own glass casserole dish, for a dinner party of ten people, and our minds were blown. Very very wild.

American chickens are grown as blank slates so that you add your own flavor to them, through herbs, or spices, or alliums, or citrus, whatever. You can do whatever you want, but this type of true free range chicken cannot be helped in this way. They're way too gamey.

And Whole Foods offers very good clean birds that they term free-range, while actually mass produced with limited access to limited scratching, and some that are both free range and organic, but none of that comes close to genuine farm-raised free ranging chickens that go around scratching up food.

And if you try to buy such a chicken from speciality shops, they are outrageously expensive, about $30.00 each, and they still don't come anything close to those first gamey birds. I'm convinced they no longer exist.

Such a disappointment.

I'm imagining her chicken strips from scratch begin with raw chicken strips from the grocery store. And that's what makes them scratch.

Recipe for true chicken strips from scratch.

Step 1: Kill a chicken.

Usually by stretching its neck through two penny nails hammered into a flat side of an upright log. The chicken resists this abuse although it has no idea the horror that comes next. Then use a hatchet to chop off its head. WHAP! One good clean stroke.

The beheaded chicken goes running around the yard flapping its wings wildly spraying blood all over the place out of its neck hole until it drops, but still flapping. It does take awhile for the chicken to actually die and stop moving. This might be a bit disconcerting because you have to keep track of where it goes as it flaps around horribly and then go over to where it drops and trembles and shakes and watch it until it finally stops, and then pick it up.

With your hands.

Or possibly with a shovel.

Put the children up before you do this, the sight of it can harm their tender psychologies for years.

Ask me how I know that.

Step 2: Blanch the chicken in hot water to simmering to loosen its feathers.

Step 3: Pluck the feathers inside a barrel so you don't make a mess of the whole porch. Or, place the chicken inside a barrel lined inside with rubber fingers and set on rollers attached to an electric motor, such that the rubber fingers pull off the feathers as the wet beheaded bird tumbles inside the barrel, until the chicken is denuded of all of its feathers. An unholy spectacle if ever there was one.

Sing the Hebrew chicken song.

Step 4: Cut the chicken open and remove all its guts, reserving its heart, gizzard, liver and neck.

Step 5: Chop off its feet. Reserve for stew or toss into a stir fry as Asian people do.

Step 6: Pour a full pound of kosher salt inside and outside of the chicken, coating it completely. We're making a kosher chicken, not a gentile chicken.

Step 7: Later, rinse off all the salt. And soak. This will pull out some of the salt that the chicken absorbed. It's an equilibrium thing. Salt will move from the moisture inside chicken to the water outside the chicken until the salinity levels between them are equal. Discard the salty water and do this again with fresh water to further reduce the salt inside the chicken.

Step 8: Butcher the chicken.

Step 9: Cut the breast meat into strips.

Sing the Hebrew chicken song.

Step 10: prepare three flat dishes such as pie pans with:

1) seasoned flour
2) beaten egg mixed with milk
3) bread crumbs

Step 11: By dredge and drench method, dip the chicken strips in flour so that they are lightly coated so that the egg and milk adhere. Then dip each strip in the egg/milk mixture and allow excess to drain off. Then roll each chicken strip in bread crumbs.

Step 11: Chill the coated chicken strips so all that coating really takes hold. You can skip this part if you want to but some of your coating will come off if you do skip.

Step 12 : Fry the coated chicken strips in vegetable oil heated to 350℉ until golden brown. They'll cook fairly quickly since the meat is cut into strips. No worry about undercooked chicken. Concern yourself with the color of the fried breading.

Step 13: Drain on a paper grocery bag, paper towels, or wire rack.

Chicken Soup 1973