Even though local poultry farms have been sold out of whole turkeys for weeks, you can still have a farm-fresh bird on your Thanksgiving table: a pasture-raised chicken is perfect for a “smalliday” celebration.
The word “smalliday” is a combination of the words “small” and “holiday” and caught on during last year’s holiday season when people began celebrating major holidays on a smaller scale due to COVID-19. While equally festive, smallidays are more intimate and may require a bit less food on the holiday table. With fewer mouths to feed when celebrating small, downsizing your main course is an option, and that’s where the humble, yet delicious, Thanksgiving chicken comes in.
After a significant number of his customers hosted smaller Thanksgiving celebrations not requiring 15-pound-plus turkeys last year, Jesse Straight, owner and lead farmer at Whiffletree Farm in Warrenton, saw a burgeoning market for larger roaster chickens as an option for smaller Thanksgiving feasts.
So, this year, for the first time, Straight raised some of his chickens larger than usual and marketed them on Wiffletree’s website as “Thanksgiving Chickens” for holiday gatherings of two to six people. Whiffletree’s Thanksgiving chickens weigh between 6 and 7.5 pounds and are “suitable for a small family feast.” The cost is $4.25 per pound and they have plenty for the holiday season.
Whiffletree’s main farm is located on 82 acres outside Warrenton, but Straight also rents another 500 acres of farmland. Both the chickens and turkeys Straight raises are never fed GMO feed or given antibiotics or chemicals; instead, they have access to fresh pasture daily.
“We’re putting beautiful, fresh, clean, lush grass in front of their faces on a consistent basis with the most palatable forages. They go crazy eating grass and bugs and that’s the game changer,” Straight said.
Straight said the flavor and texture of the poultry he raises is superior because of his farming techniques, in which he takes great pride. “How you raise an animal, their lifestyle, the food they eat, their contact, and essentially how closely you align the farming practices to what their nature’s are asking for, you're going to get different results,” Straight said.
“You have got to get pasture-raised poultry for the health of the food, the health of the land and just the eating experience. It’s a different thing,” Straight said, adding: “The farm is a noble and dignified work for us. That our customers are getting food that really benefits their health and is not a dead weight on their conscience; they can enjoy tasty, healthy food, knowing that they're supporting the system.”
Nina and Andrew Fleischauer, owners of Sunshine Honey Farm in Nokesville, also noticed the smalliday trend last year and raised larger chickens along with the 20 turkeys they raised this year. Their turkeys sold out a single week after they were released for sale. Last Saturday, they sold nine roaster chickens in one day and have about 75 left, which they believe will meet demand. Sunshine Honey’s chickens range in size from 4 to 7 pounds and cost $5 per pound.
Like Whiffletree, the Fleischauers move their pasture-raised poultry to fresh pasture daily. Sunshine Honey is a much smaller, 10-acre farm and also raises its farm animals with “regenerative agricultural practices.”
On a smaller farm, the Fleischauers provide their chickens with a Virginia-crafted, non-GMO feed and move them to fresh grass sometimes twice daily. “It allows them to forage for good nutrients for themselves, which then fuels them for our consumption,” Nina Fleischauer said.
Nina Fleischauer said that they take special care in everything they do throughout the process of raising and harvesting their poultry on their farm. “Everything we do, in the way that we handle this life that has been entrusted to us, matters in the way that the food tastes when you are eating it. And it matters in the health of what you’re eating.”
Iris Villacorta, a resident of Woodbridge, says she is happy to make the drive to Sunshine Honey to purchase its pasture-raised chicken because it tastes like “real chicken.”
“I came here when I was 14 years old. I was born in El Salvador, and I grew up in the countryside, where everything we ate was raised or planted by my grandfather, and we used to help as well. The savory [flavor] of the chicken I was used to, I never tasted in the chicken [I bought] at the grocery store here,” she said. That was until many years later when she tasted chicken from Sunshine Honey Farm. “Wow, there was that taste I have been searching for years,” she said.
While the chicken costs more than its grocery store counterpart, Villacorta says it’s more than worth it, considering the work that comes with raising the chickens on the farm, securing them from predators, keeping them healthy, and providing them shelter.
Jennifer Johnson followed Ina Garten’s “Perfect Roast Chicken” recipe and modified it by stuffing the chicken with bread cube stuffing. She used a meat thermometer and cooked it to 165 degrees, about 2 hours and 15 minutes for a 7-pound chicken, plus resting time.
Jennifer Johnson, of Bristow, recently stuffed and roasted a chicken she purchased at Sunshine Honey and said everyone in her family enjoyed it. “The chicken stayed very moist, and the flavor had much more depth and ‘butteriness’ than a chicken from the store,” she said.
Johnson said that she would buy another pasture-raised chicken for a celebration of up to six people or would prepare “two chickens for more people, which would be less cooking time than a turkey.”
“It was definitely a good value to have a locally-raised chicken that I know is healthy, had pasture access and was fed high-quality feed. If you think of all the supply issues grocery stores have had over the past couple of years and continue to have, it’s really important to have a source for local foods and support the farmers providing those goods,” Johnson said.
Both Wiffletree and Sunshine Honey will have their pasture-raised chickens available for purchase throughout the holiday season for everything from chicken soup to “smalliday” celebrations and every chicken dinner in between.
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November 13, 2021 at 02:00AM
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