Birds of a yellow feather
A chicken is not just a chicken in Chinatown
American chicken these days, food lovers like to complain, is barely more flavorful than a block of tofu. The Cornish Rock cross that most of us recognize as a chicken is a model of counter-Darwinist breeding, engineered into mutant proportions. Its breasts are so big its legs can barely support its weight. The average bird is slaughtered at 6 to 8 weeks of age — veal with feathers, really.
While heritage turkeys are making inroads in the butcher cases of high-end markets, their chicken counterparts — breeds like Buff Orpington and Polish — still seem to be destined for hobby farms and backyard coops, not the market. But shoppers at Chinese meat markets and barbecue shops have long had access to a breed or two of chickens that taste far better than Foster Farms drum-
feather chickens are everywhere, once you look for their distinctive shape or the characters wong
mo gai.
At Guangdong Barbecue Tea House on Irving Street, which sells two varieties of an aromatic cola-colored chicken braised with soy sauce, sugar and star anise, you have to specify that you want the “Chinese chicken.” The reward: less meat, definitely, but it doesn’t taste as if you were chewing cotton.
One of the city’s best barbecue shops, Ming Kee on Ocean Avenue, sells yellow-feather “princess chicken,” simmered with rice wine and served cold; you dip shreds of cream-colored meat into a potent ginger-scallion oil. The shop also offers two varieties of soy sauce chicken: The fatter, cheaper chicken costs $3.95 a pound, while the yellow-feathered version costs $16.50 for a whole bird. American-born customers, the owner tells my Cantonese translator, prefer the white birds because they want lots of meat. Recent immigrants, who give higher priority to taste, know better. sticks. The most common appears on some menus as “yellow feather chicken” and others as “free run chicken” or even “Chinese chicken.”
Locavores may question the provenance of these yellowfeathered chickens. Their doubts may be misplaced.
Take the chickens for sale at San Francisco Poultry on Grant Avenue, one of two state-certified slaughterhouses in the Bay Area. (The sign, in Chinese, advertises “Killed While You Wait,” though state laws render the message symbolic rather than literal. Still, the bird you buy was likely clucking just a few hours earlier.)
For the past 31⁄ years, Tomas Wong has managed the business — which is, incidentally, immaculate, with a window behind the counter giving customers a chance to inspect white-aproned workers snipping and washing fresh birds.
Last week, Wong guided me through the birds in his case: There were a few fat white American chickens, of course, as well as numerous black-skinned silkies, whose broth is treasured for its healing qualities. Wong’s biggest seller, though, is what the sign calls “brown chicken” in English and “yellow-feathered chicken” in Chinese characters — wong mo gai in Cantonese,
huang mao ji in Mandarin. The yellow-feathered chickens are slimmer and smaller than conventional ones, with a high, arched backbone and breast meat no thicker than the thighs or drumsticks. They’re much older, too, Wong says, raised for 16 weeks. “Because of the age, this chicken is more tasty,” he says. “It’s the equivalent of comparing a New York strip steak to a rib eye. The rib eye is a little more tender; the New York strip is tougher, but has a more meaty flavor.”
San Francisco Poultry’s customers buy the yellow-feather chickens to steam or braise, both gentle-heat methods that can yield silky, soft meat. If you want to roast a chicken, Wong sells a cross-breed of the yellow and the white he calls kuei fei, slightly plumper and more tender, since it only takes 12 weeks to come to market. In English, these chickens are labeled as “free range.”
Wong points to the only picture on the wall: an open barn with hundreds of brown birds wandering around. “This is exactly the way they are raising them on the farms,” he says. His supplier is Pitman Farms — the same producer of the wellknown organic Mary’s Chickens.
David Pitman confirms that his family business does supply chickens to San Francisco Poultry. These birds don’t come from his organically certified facilities, but they are raised in openplan barns on vegetarian diets and given no antibiotics. Rather than importing the original breeds from China, his yellowfeathered chickens are simply Rhode Island Reds, Pitman says, which have golden-brown feathers.
Though they may not come from Pitman Farms, yellow-