Monday, June 13, 2011

Music to Pluck To

The laws of kashrut (keeping kosher) require animals to be treated humanely. So when the goyim dump their freshly killed chickens into boiling hot water, Jews don't do that because the animal can still feel it. The downside is, kosher chickens have many more feathers than non-kosher chickens. Because the scalding hot water helps the automatic pickers remove the feathers much easier.

The point of all this is, it's quite a painstaking process to clean a kosher chicken for cooking and eating. This is especially true of chicken wings. It's a near impossibility to get all the feathers off, but each time I typically spend half an hour plucking feathers and singing to myself.

Which is a better song to sing while plucking chicken wings?

"Pretty Wings" - Maxwell



"Take These Broken Wings" - Mr. Mister




3 comments:

ton said...

Wait a second...you actually get the chicken with feathers on it and have to yank em yourself?!?!?! Maybe I should have known that, but I never heard that before, and it sounds totally crazy (in the modern times anyway). Don't you just buy from a Kosher deli/butcher or something, and all of that is already done?

Paul said...

Ok, let me try to explain this better.

Non-kosher chicken: slaughtered, dumped immediately into scalding water, sent to automatic picker.

Kosher chicken: slaughtered, then no hot water. So the automatic picker doesn't do as good a job because the skin is not softened by hot water.

So the automatic picker does a very good job, but I'd say each little wing has at least 5 to 10 little feathers you'd like to remove by hand if you can.

ton said...

Ok, I see. I was picturing you in the kitchen with pieces of chicken completely covered in feathers. Makes more sense now.