These chickens are top notch for soups and stews. They are very lean and not suited for roasting - you will likely be disappointed should you roast this hen as you would a broiler chicken. They require low, slow cooking in a pot of water, and the result is a nutritious full flavored soup stock. Hens also have more collagen than males, which are typically raised for the meat market.
Keep frozen or use within 1 week of moving to the refrigerator. To thaw meat that has been frozen, place in a sealed bag in a bowl of cool water. Allow at least a day to thaw your poultry prior to cooking.
Black Dirt Farm's chickens forage on active compost and pasture and are fed non GMO, locally milled grain, certified organic minerals, and oyster shells.
To prepare a stew hen, simply simmer in a stock pot on the stove top, or in a crock pot with vegetable scraps, bay leaves, salt, pepper and a dash of apple cider vinegar. Simmer for 4 - 24 hours. Strain, pull the meat off the bones. Season and use in a dish, or enjoy on its own.
I had to read up on stewing hens and how to cook them but this was well worth the new experience! Stewed most of a day until the lean meet was falling off and made a risotto with some of the veggies from the stewing process, the broth, and chicken meat. The broth is completely opaque and a deep golden color and so much more flavorful that when I make a broth from regular chicken. Score!
We cooked this hen in our instant pot the same we would for chicken stock. Then we boned the meat, put it back in the stock with some stew veggies and dumplings. Incredibly delicious. The stock these hens makes is out of this world, and in the pressure cooker, the meat is also tender and flavorful.
As advertised, the hen has to be stewed for a long while before you can eat the meat. It's really a hen for making excellent, flavorful, long-simmered chicken soup with carrots, cabbage, celery, onion etc. We added bite-size chunks of boneless chicken to have meat with the vegetables and then only ate the meat from the hen after about the third time we had heated it up.
