BristolUK

My local shop is selling Stewing Hens this week.

I thought I might get one and bung it in the slow cooker. But is there any part of it that might cook like a 'normal' chicken?

I know I roasted one once and some of it was okay but I can't remember what the some was.

Anyone got any tips?

Pulaski

Coq au vin! You can't make a proper coq au vin with a chicken, it will fall apart while cooking.

BristolUK

You can using this.

Oakvillian

Absolutely. Needs an old broiler hen or cockerel to be properly authentic. Any of those classic French casserole recipes would work well with a stewing hen - Chasseur being another one of my favourites.

As with any older, tougher, animal like mutton or goat, a stewing hen benefits from being cooked low and slow. If you have a slow cooker, that's perfect... fry up some onions, garlic, mushrooms and a rasher or two of chopped bacon, throw that and the chicken into the crock pot with about a third of a bottle of red, some herbs (rosemary, thyme, a bay leaf maybe) and leave it to do its thing for a few hours. You can joint the chicken first if you like, or put it in whole. Thicken the sauce with cornflour near the end of cooking if it needs it. Mmmm, hungry now...

Pulaski

Damn that sounds good!

It's still a long time until dinner, and in any case what I will be throwing together won't be half as good as that.

dbd33

This thread is putting lives in danger. The lives of my older, no longer laying, hens.

Pulaski

Building a hen house and keeping chickens is one of my "one day" projects. I have the space, and some of the timber, I just need the time to build then hen house, and the time to care for the chickens.

dbd33

Time to care is less than five minutes a day + half an hour to clean the coop whenever conscience dictates; quarterly in my case. After years of eggs from the garden, and selling eggs from the garden, I'm perplexed at anyone not keeping chickens.

It makes me chuckle when, on Escape to the Country, people say they hope to keep chickens; it's not a complex enterprise like, say, keeping a cat, and the benefit in terms of egg quality is huge.

Pulaski

That's certainly encouraging, but unfortunately my problem is "being there every day" as my ongoing travel commitments currently make that impossible. And I don't currently have a neighbour I would trust with frequent requests to care for "the girls".

BristolUK

If everyone kept them for eggs who would you sell eggs to?

dbd33

Ah yes, pre-WebEx I could not have had chickens, dogs or horses. In those days I had to make do with children and cats.

For future reference, good advice here:

Raising BackYard Chickens, Build a Chicken Coop, Pictures of Breeds

Pulaski

Thank you. I shall read that, jealously, and bookmark it for reference.

BristolUK

That's fairly close to what I was intending. Any particular reason for frying and adding onions etc rather than just having them cook with everything else?

When I first starting seeing these things their price was considerably less than ordinary chicken. These are $1.69lb and considering there have been a few $1.99lb offers on chicken lately (I bought two a week ago) it doesn't seem that great a price.

Pulaski

The intense heat of the oil will develop additional flavour, carmelizing any sugars and the searing the surface, otherwise you will effectively have boiled onion and boiled mushrooms in your stew.

Oakvillian

Wot 'e said. Also, if you joint the chicken instead of cooking it whole, you might want to flour the jointed pieces and brown them a bit first, too. I don't have a slow cooker, so all these before-throwing-it-all-in-the-oven steps are done in the same ancient enamelled cast-iron casserole which then gets the lid put on and goes in the oven. Otherwise you'll have an extra pan to wash up... unless your slow cooker vessel goes on the hob? Somehow that sounds unlikely

edited to add: it's chemistry, innit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maillard_reaction explains what's going on and why it's important to brown casserole ingredients