connective tissue from a pot of chicken bones and scraps.
This isn’t a problem when you’re in the kitchen all day
anyway: just keep a lazy eye on the huge stockpot on the
back burner simmering away for six hours. But for a home
cook? Forget it. A couple Sundays a year I’ll give in and
throw together a really traditional duck or veal stock, but for
the other 363 days, I wanted to figure out a faster, better
way.
What’s a Chicken?
As usual, I started with the basics, and in this case, the
basics are a chicken. Once you’ve stripped away the
feathers and the cluck, a chicken is actually a remarkably
simple beast in culinary terms. Its matter can be divided into
roughly four different parts:
- Muscle is what we think of as the meat on the chicken.
It’s the fleshy stuff that twitches and makes the bird go,
and it can be further divided into two categories: slow
twitch and fast twitch. - Slow-twitch muscles are meant for sustained movement—
i.e., the legs and thighs that keep the chicken standing,
walking, and bending down or up. Because slow-twitch
muscles are aerobic (they require oxygen to function),
they are typically dense with capillaries carrying oxygen-
rich red blood cells. That’s why they appear to be darker. - Fast-twitch muscles are used for short bursts of intense
energy—they’re the muscles that are found in chicken
breasts, used to power the wings when a frightened
chicken needs to escape from a dangerous situation.