June is crazy, that seems to be the mantra these days. Like any good mantra the meaning continues to unfold and evolve as we say it and embody it. I am remembering that crazy is also fun, silly, and playful. I took this crazy, fun and playful juneness to the kitchen this week and began crafting some chicken sausage flavors. Above is June in the kitchen — no crafted photos, no staged prep pics…just the controlled chaos of spices, cutting boards and mixing bowls.
We have some exciting new products that I would like to highlight:
- Chicken Wing Tips
- Boneless Chicken Thighs
- Chicken Liver Pate
- Chicken Apple Sausage
- Chicken Curry Sausage
We always are looking for ways to reduce waste and honor the whole animal. Recently we had a customer ask us what we do with the wing tips? Wing tips are just what they sound like, the tips of the wings, which we cut off when we prepare our chicken wings.
Did you know that the chicken wing has 3 parts? The drumette, the flat and the tip. Our chicken wing packages have 4 drumettes and 4 wing flats, our party wings are just the wing flats, and now you can get just the wing tips! They are full of crunch and flavor, great for the air fryer or oven roasting.
We’ve had many requests over the years to bone out our popular chicken thighs. Now you can try our thighs without the bone! They have the skin on but are completely boneless. So you can cube them for kabobs, grill them whole or make pulled chicken without worrying about the bone.
I’ve already made many pate converts while sampling at the farmers markets. I am met with a wide variety of reactions to my offer to sample pate, ranging from curiosity to outright disgust and refusal. Of course I understand that pate is not for everyone, nevertheless I am biased and I want everyone to try it:)
Our good friend and culinary artist Taylor Lefleur spent weeks this past winter developing a recipe that was tasty, used as many local and organic ingredients as possible and held up to the freezer. Pate can be frozen and there is a slight texture change, so we worked on the recipe to ensure the best results knowing we would sell most of our pate frozen.
It is a crowd favorite, often eliciting comments like is this pate, I don’t usually like pate… consider adding a jar to your next order.
Chicken Sausage!
I love sausage, I love eating it, I love making it and I love experimenting with recipes.
This summer I am excited to play with crafting and developing some chicken sausages. We have an extra day planned in our processing facility just to make extra fun things like Pate, chicken sausage and maybe some pre-marinated chicken cuts. YUM.
My process starts in the kitchen with a package of ground chicken. I take 1 lb of ground chicken and add about 1 tsp of salt, and spices to test a recipe. I’ve made enough sausages to know approximately how much of certain spices go into a lb, and I have a long spreadsheet of notes on each spice and what percentage by weight is appropriate for what level of flavor.
Feeling prepared with my spreadsheets and spice knowledge, the first big leap is crafting the flavor profile. Last year we tried a chicken curry, which I really loved. So I tweaked that recipe and tested a batch, enlisting Hiedi, Rheema, Shelly and Marie as willing taste testers with discerning palates and strong opinions.
Next we debated some new flavors and we settled on Chicken Apple, so I went back to the kitchen the next day and began to experiment. We stock our farm store with delicious honey crisp apples from Northern Orchards just up the road in Peru, NY. They are not Organic, and we do not have an organic apple orchard within 200 miles (as far as I know). Northern Orchards does use what is called Integrated Pest Management (IPM) which is a commitment to using a diversity of methods to naturally avoid the need for pesticide use, such as management practices that encourage a pest’s natural enemies to disrupting a pest’s life cycle, careful weather monitoring, and scouting for pest populations.
With some grated apple, some fun spices like cinnamon, nutmeg and sage, I tried a new ingredient and added some fresh diced onion to round out the apple sweetness. In the picture above you can see I have multiple versions of the recipe cooking with plates and labels ready for taste testing. I tried adding some maple syrup (too sweet), extra apple (too watery) and some added sage (yum savory) and we settled on the recipe you can try today.
Chicken Curry is a mild and flavorful curry sausage. As one tester put it: I don’t like curry, but I like this sausage. I crafted the recipe with our kids in mind, not too strong, not too spicy because you can always add those in, but you can’t take them out of the sausage.
Chicken Apple is a favorite in our house! The kids love it. With subtle hints of cinnamon, nutmeg and sage behind the gentle sweetness of fresh apples this sausage is both a breakfast sausage and a savory addition to any meal. I will have both sausages fresh at the farmers markets this week. Come find me at Keene Valley starting at 9:30 on Sundays.
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