It’s chicken season again! Which also means it’s the season when I start hearing one question over and over again… Our farm, and all the other small farms like ours are busy moving chickens to greener pastures, picking up more chickens at the post office, and planning on turning those chickens into family meals. We’re feeding American families one chicken at a time.
Once our job is done, and that chicken is now in your kitchen, how do you handle it? Do you wash it? Pat it dry? How do you properly care for this bird, or the cuts you’ve carefully chosen?
I honestly had never heard this phrase uttered. Not even from my grandparents. To be fair, they’re from the old country, Italy, and I’m 99% sure it’s still a completely different world. I mean, most countries around the world sell eggs in Grocery store aisles rather than refrigerators.
Also to be fair, my grampa (not a typo, it’s how we spell it), never fully cooked chicken a day in my life, he always undercooked it. You’d think from that I’d have a stomach of steel.
So when I became a farmer and questions like, “do I need to wash this chicken”, were asked, I honestly didn’t know how to answer. Why would someone wash chicken? I searched my brain to remember how I grew up, and while we definitely practiced some potentially germ growing practices, like leaving frozen meat in the sink to defrost all day rather than in the fridge, or in cold water in the sink. Nothing came to mind.
As it turns out, washing chicken before cooking was a normal practice, it was even in some older Betty Crocker cookbooks. The reason was, for many families who raised or processed their own chickens, rinsing the bird was part of cleaning away feathers, bits of debris, or blood after processing.
Here at Fluffy Butt Farms we do wash chickens during the butchering process, it’s also the same practice our butchers use. So there’s no need for you to take that extra step that is now ironically considered a germ spreading practice. Funny how things change huh? What was once considered good kitchen practice has become something we’re told to avoid—not because our grandparents were wrong, but because our kitchens, food systems, and understanding of food safety have changed.
The biggest thing I learned was that the advice didn’t really change because chicken changed. It changed because our kitchens changed. Years ago, rinsing a freshly processed chicken made sense. Today, when you’re bringing home a properly processed chicken from a farm or grocery store, the safest thing to do is leave the rinsing to us and focus on cooking it to the proper temperature.
Whether you choose our fresh, never-frozen chickens or one of our frozen birds, they’re already cleaned and ready for your kitchen. There’s no need to rinse them before cooking—just season them, cook them to the proper internal temperature, and enjoy.
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