For quite some time, I’ve been trying to unravel a mystery. A few months ago, Shai told me that his mom used to cook something called “kurkevanei ouf”, which means navels of chickens.
Chickens don’t really have navels…at least nothing like mammal navels, but I took his word for it, and went out to buy some. Sure enough, the butcher had them…piles of them, and they looked like good pieces of red chicken meat. They seemed familiar, but I didn’t want to make any assumptions.
Those who sold them to me, and others who saw them hanging off of my “agalah” or pull-cart, were full of suggestions and recipes. Some were vaguely familiar, and some not. For confirmation, I decided to search the internet. I found nothing about how to cook them.
I found that they were called “pupik” which is Yiddish for navel. I didn’t find any recipes or instructions at all. I was stumped. I didn’t understand this at all. I knew southern folks in the U.S. have cooked every edible part of chickens for centuries, and this just didn’t add up. Had the U.S. become so yuppified that there was nothing in English on how to cook chicken navels? What are they anyway?
Then I got a clue in a comment on a cooking site. Someone said that they were chicken butts, but the chicken butt and other muscles around the “output” areas don’t look anything like what I have in the freezer. Then I thought to myself: What parts are the butchers here not giving us when we buy a whole chicken? That’s the liver and the gizzards.
So I looked up gizzards, and sure enough, that’s what they are. I know these. So tomorrow, I’m going to make them. I already took out some ground chicken for meatballs tonight, so I have to wait for the gizzards.
The thing about gizzards is that they are a very condensed piece of meat. They’re also the part that the chicken uses to grind up their food. Chickens don’t have teeth, so they eat rocks and sand that get trapped in the crooks and crannies of the organ, and help them grind food up. So you must rinse, pre-boil for 15 minutes, and then mildly rinse again.
Another thing that’s good to know is to not save the pre-boiling water. Don’t pour the gizzards through a strainer. Dip them out with a slotted spoon. Totally discard the water, and clean the pot well before using it again. This is because all the dirt and stuff that didn’t get removed during the butchering process is in that water.
Pre-boiling also helps to make them more tender, since by other methods, they cook very quickly, and can be like trying to eat rubber balls.
So…wish me luck. I haven’t made chicken gizzards since the morning my daughter was conceived on Thanksgiving 2002. I think it’ll go well though. We’ll see.
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Comments
This entry was posted on Sunday, July 27th, 2008 at 3:51 pm and is filed under Expatriate Kitchen, Moderate Voluntary Austerity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Hi. So this was a long time ago, your post. I’m curious. How was it? My grandma used to make chicken soup with pupik – “It’s the bellybutton,” she would say, and my small brain thought nothing of it- that was strange and gray and sort of boingy. I’d tuck into those chunks of gray like no one’s business. After she died, I never had it again. I don’t think I ever want to. Did they taste a little dirty? [I mean that, really. I recall a strange dirty flavor. I guess that was all the stomach by-product stuff.] Did your daughter eat it?