No Additional Animals Harmed

A guest post from Claire

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Altitude adjustments

Fran here, back from Sundance and only the slightest bit altitude poisoned. (Not really — but consider that I live in a fourth floor walk-up in New York and can go up all those stairs without getting window, but one second floor walk-up VRBO in Park City knocked me on my ass multiple times a day.) Some news: Sunday Dispatch returns this Sunday. Okay, it’s been so long, so I’ll pick and choose from some recent stuff as well as keep you abreast of the three best movies I saw at Sundance last week.

In the meantime, I have a guest post from Claire, who has so wonderfully written for the magazine before about dog movies and The Eternal Daughter. This week she’s here to talk about eating meat. Thank you Claire and thank you Fran Magazine readers. I’ll see you on Sunday!

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No additional animals harmed

I have a saying that sums up how I feel about waste: every tomato sauce comes with a free jar. I reuse absolutely everything possible; I save tissue paper. I compost. I care, if anybody does. And I also eat meat.

It is my earnest belief that ethical animal consumption is impossible for most people in the Western world. From an environmental and a humanitarian perspective, this is an indisputable truth. But put simply, I’m not ready to go vegetarian or vegan. Many of us aren’t, but we still acknowledge the problems with eating meat, and want to do better. So, what’s next best to quitting meat? Eating less, of course. But let’s say I’m already doing that; let’s say I’ve cut meat out of one meal a day, or one day a week, or ordered a vegetarian dish from one restaurant, one single time. What’s next?

A thought experiment: at what point are you personally responsible for harming an animal?

Unless you’re a corporate overlord or some kind of farm worker, you may think it happens when you eat meat. However, I would argue the moment happens sooner, not when you take a bite of meat, but when you buy it. As a consumer, your contribution to the factory farm system is in creating demand, and financially supporting the businesses that harm animals on your behalf. If you bought a package of sausage only to get home and, overcome with guilt, throw it away, you would not have accomplished anything except food waste. You will have eaten less meat, but done the same harm, or more. But this example also proves that there is a less harmful way to eat animals; rather than aiming to eat less, we can aim to buy less.

Because most of us can only eat meat if we buy it, these two goals seem to be one and the same. But this is where harm reduction comes in: after the harmful act of purchasing meat, how can I make that single purchase go as far as possible so I don’t have to do it again? There is a space for cooking meat that does not require the purchase of meat, and I call this no additional animals harmed, NAAH.

Chicken Math

To me, NAAH means repurposing an animal product I already have, rather than buying something new. For example, my risotto is not vegetarian because it contains chicken stock, but it is NAAH, because I made the stock with leftover chicken scraps I already had; the same number of chickens were harmed as if I’d used veggie stock from the store. Of course, it doesn’t work that way if you go out and buy chicken just to make the stock at home. NAAH is about diverting waste, turning what would be a byproduct into a replacement for a meat purchase. An added benefit of this is saving money as well as, in many cases, improving your cooking overall.

For the following examples, I’m going to focus on chicken for a few reasons: its affordability, deliciousness, lower environmental impact (compared to large mammals), and the availability of whole chickens at supermarkets. Chickens, like most of us, have two breasts, which means buying a three or four pack to cook for dinner puts at least two animal deaths on your hands. Buying a whole chicken will allow us to make the most use of the harm we’re doing with our purchase, plus save some money, and give us access to a wider variety of chicken parts, and all they can do. When I say “chicken parts,” you are probably thinking primarily about meat, the breasts, thighs, drums, and wings, but meat is only the beginning of what this purchase actually nets us. Instead, I want to think about the whole chicken in terms of meat, fat, and bones.

A few notes on meat

First and simplest, I strongly recommend that you try roasting the whole chicken if you haven’t before. Many people I’ve spoken to who aren’t “into” cooking find the idea intimidating, but in practice you will find it much easier, and requiring much less active cooking time, than most other chicken dishes. Trust me when I say that if you have salt, pepper, an oven, and two hours, you can make delicious roast chicken. Once you get the basics down, there are infinite ways to iterate and improve. Virtually any spice combination you enjoy will taste good as a rub. Spatchcocking, or removing the spine and laying the chicken flat, requires some practice on the butchery end, but makes the cooking itself even faster and easier. This article isn’t about specific recipes, but here’s how Kenji does it.

There are also plenty of YouTube videos that will teach you how to break down a whole chicken. You can then cook the pieces however you usually do, or even freeze some for later if you don’t need all of the meat at once. If the thought of cutting up a whole, raw chicken makes you squeamish, with all due respect, get over it. If you can conscientiously eat an animal, you can stomach touching a raw one. My sincere advice is to get disposable vinyl gloves, like they use at the deli, which will make the process much easier and more enjoyable.

Schmaltz and giggles

Where chicken meat often gets wasted, I’ve found, is in the leftovers. Yesterday’s juicy breasts are now dry, the color of the thighs is unappetizing, and the skin, which was crispy, has become a layer of rubber. It’s hard to reach into the fridge for leftovers when the bodega’s chicken sandwiches are so good, but we must, for NAAH. And the secret to making leftover chicken shine once more is before your eyes, in that layer of rubber.

I’m shocked how few people realize that if you put the chicken skin, flabby from the fridge, back into a hot skillet, it will crisp up all over again, creating a delicious snack and leaving a little of its rendered fat behind. Put your leftover chicken (thinly sliced) in that same pan next, with another round of salt and pepper, and you will find it golden brown and newly delicious within minutes — it may be even better than before. That’s because chicken fat, or schmaltz, is a luxurious cooking oil, expensive from the store but free with your whole chicken.

Here’s how to make more: when a recipe calls for two skinless chicken thighs, use the thighs from your whole chicken and save the skin in the fridge. When you’re ready, dock the skin all over with a fork, then cook it over medium-low heat in a small non-stick pot, flipping when the edges start to turn brown. Don’t walk away, because it will turn from golden brown to burnt quickly, and you’ll ruin both the snack and the schmaltz. When it’s done, salt the skin immediately and drain the oil into a glass jar. You now have homemade cracklins — great on their own or a delightful topping for sandwiches and tacos — and a couple tablespoons of schmaltz, which will solidify in the fridge. That’s “rendering fat,” there’s nothing more to it. Add to the jar whenever you have extra chicken skin and soon you’ll have enough to cook with any time you like and can freely impress your friends with things like “schmaltz-fried potatoes.” If you’ve never cooked with animal fat before, think of it kind of like butter: solid when cold, soft at room temp, and liquid when hot. Each type of fat has its own flavor profile, so save them all but keep them separate, and pull one out when you want to add a savory punch to your dish, or if you’re out of olive oil.

stock and schmaltz, respectively

Here is a trick I use when making certain vegetables: my mom would often sauté green beans in a pot used for bacon, then sprinkle the bacon bits on top. When trying this on my own, I discovered that, aside from missing a little crunch, which could be added elsewhere, the dish tasted exactly the same when I used pre-rendered bacon fat I’d saved in the fridge, instead of frying new bacon to go with it. Animal fat has huge potential to bring rich, “meaty” flavor to dishes without necessarily adding meat. The green beans, technically, aren’t vegetarian anymore, but since I’m not a vegetarian, that doesn’t matter to me; what matters is that instead of buying bacon, I just saved the grease from last time, and got to taste it all over again, NAAH.

Bones about it

Everyone knows “you should make your own chicken stock,” so I won’t bore you with yet another pitch about how much better it makes your food. But if everyone knows all that, why don’t more people do it? Is it because it seems too hard? Too time consuming? Maybe you just can’t be bothered? The basis of my “make your own stock” pitch is this: you already have the ingredients, and you are otherwise going to throw them away.

There are a million World’s Best Chicken Stock recipes out there and I am not interested in creating another. The best chicken stock, in my opinion, is the one made of what’s in your fridge and your freezer, plus water. From now on, every time you eat chicken, whether it’s the whole ones you’ve been buying once a week, or picked over wings, put those bones in a giant bag in your freezer. When the bag fills up, the following Sunday is Stock Day. Thaw out the bones in your biggest pot, throw in whatever random onions, carrots, or celery are languishing in your fridge drawer, and fill the rest with water. Watch two hours of TV, strain it, and you’ve got probably eight to twelve cups of chicken stock. It costs no money, it costs barely any active time, and it diverts waste — the fact that it’s also an improvement over the best chicken stock you could otherwise buy makes it almost too good to be true. Certainly too good for the trash. Throwing away chicken bones is like throwing away tomato sauce jars. And you’d never do that… would you?

The first time you make chicken stock, you’ll have more than you know what to do with. That is, until you realize just how versatile of an ingredient it is. Chicken stock can be the basis of sauce, the basis of soup, it can enrich your rice, cure your depression… you get it. Using bones is a fundamental tenet of NAAH and I will confess I am completely, utterly, obsessed. I have not one but three giant bags in my freezer, for bones of chicken, pork, and beef, the latter two i use for ramen and stew, respectively. Becoming a bone-saver, more than anything else I’ve mentioned, will drive home the value of making use of what you have, and will completely transform your culinary life. A splash of improvement to virtually any dish will be forever at your fingertips, and buying stock will become unthinkable. And then you will finally know why people won’t shut up about making chicken stock.

One last freebie

Confession: I glossed over something earlier. Besides the meat, bones, and fat that your whole chicken comes with, there will usually be a few bonuses stuffed in the cavity: the neck, which should go into your stock, and a little baggy of weird reddish brown stuff. Those are the chicken’s organs, and do not throw them away! Organ meats are somewhat of an acquired taste, and though there’s a lot you can do with them, I’ll admit they are not my favorite. But that doesn’t mean they have to go to waste. I cut them up into roughly one inch chunks and leave them in an ice cube tray overnight — these are as healthy for your dog as the best treats money can buy at no cost to you, not to mention NAAH. Don’t have a dog? I’m sure you have a friend with one who would love to take them off your hands.

After the stock — a note on composting

If you’ve been doing this right, there should be absolutely nothing left of the whole chicken you bought at the start of the article except soggy bones, and you should have been able to create at least four to six meat-inclusive meals, plus potentially a dozen more meat-adjacent ones with the schmaltz and stock, from that single purchase. It now comes time to lay those soggy bones to rest. Luckily for me, Brooklyn’s compost program accepts animal bones. It’s a whole other topic on which I am not an expert, but composting has far more environmental impact than anything I’ve mentioned here, so look into your local guidelines and please consider composting when you have used your food to its fullest.

Conclusion — hypocrisy?

I love meat, that’s no secret; I love cooking it and I love eating it, as I’m sure you can tell. You might think that a blog like this, which celebrates everything you can do with a chicken, is a far cry from the condemnation of meat eating that it should be. And maybe I am just coping; what difference does reusing some kitchen scraps make, if I’m still feeding the beast, so to speak?

I like to think there is still room, for those of us who aren’t the best, to do some good. To think about what we eat, the energy that goes into it, the pain, the true cost. NAAH isn’t going to change our dependency on factory farms, and cutting meat out of a meal here and there is never going to be enough. But that’s where it ends for many of us: I can’t give up meat all the way, so I won’t try. I can’t do everything, so I won’t do anything. Frankly, I think that stinks. Instead of policing each others’ wrongs, I would rather celebrate small victories, start with what I know I can do and aim to constantly improve. If you eat meat, next time you want to buy some, see if you can use what you already have instead. If you don’t eat meat, next time you want to convince someone to quit it, share a meat-free recipe you love or a technique for reducing kitchen waste. Keep it positive, and if you can, keep it NAAH.