![]() This black silky chicken was slaughtered according to "Buddhist Style" specifications, wherein the neck is slit but remains whole I got the sense that Anita is on a mission to educate herself about her own cultural history as much as she was helping to teach me. The amount of research she had available for me to look at, including ingredients, Chinese books on traditional medicine, and handwritten recipe notes from her cousin and grandmother was impressive. A former architect who stepped in to help run the family business when her father became ill, Anita brings her passion for good food, learning, and a love of family to the work she does. The way Anita sees it, her work is helping to preserve Chinese culture and share it with a wider audience. From Anita's collection, a book from Hong Kong about Chinese medicine Bo Bo’s farms even invite area farmers to pick up their chicken manure and use it as fertilizer. Importantly, Bo Bo customers know where the chickens come from - Bo Bo farms are spread throughout Sullivan and Ulster counties in New York State - and they can check the freshness of every detail, including the clearness of its eyes. For example, Bo Bo’s chickens grow at their natural pace - anywhere from 12 to 20 weeks, depending on the type of chicken - in contrast to industrially raised birds that are generally boosted to full size in just 4-5 weeks. Their chickens contain no hormones or antibiotics, and unlike more “efficient” American breeds that have unnaturally large breasts, Bo Bo’s chickens have smaller breasts with meatier legs and thighs.Īlthough the chickens are not pasture-raised - Anita believes there is too much risk for them to contract diseases in the outdoors - there are other ways that Bo Bo’s chickens are raised with more care than the average store-bought chicken. Bo Bo’s “heritage breeds” taste like what New York’s Chinese immigrants grew up eating. The chickens that Bo Bo raises are meant to provide an alternative to the chicken sold in American supermarkets, which are usually not fresh, often contain chemicals and hormones, and are sold without the feet and head. Anita peels ginger for the soup using a Chinese cleaverĪs Anita prepared the herbs and chicken for the soup, she told me about the philosophy behind the family business. The broth is also meant to help stabilize low blood pressure and dizziness, and to warm the body by invigorating the blood. According to Bo Bo’s website, “Silkies can be boiled into a tonic soup that Asians believe can strengthen the sick, elderly, and pregnant due to its high iron content.” The particular combination of herbs that Anita showed me is for helping women get pregnant it’s Anita’s grandmother’s recipe (someone has an agenda!). Silky chickens have black skin, black meat and black bones, and are covered in snowy white feathers. (Close-ups below)įirst off, she explained that Chinese medicine uses your own strength to heal you, and that soups made with silky chickens are believed to strengthen the blood. Brown paper: Red Dates, Ginger, Poor Man's Ginseng, Wolfberries. Blue paper: Angelica Dahura, Dried Black Beans. Yellow paper: Dong Quai, Chinese Yam, Rhizoma Chuanxiong. It turns out that Anita lives two blocks away from me in Williamsburg, and when I arrived at her apartment I was delighted to see that she had laid out all of the herbs for the soup on colored pieces of paper. I asked if Anita would show me her recipe for chicken stock. I could not believe that someone was selling the chickens north of Grand Street - along with a packet of medicinal Chinese herbs, no less. I met Anita, VP of Sales for Bo Bo Chicken - a grower and distributor of poultry - during last October’s New York Food and Wine Festival she was selling black chickens and other birds at a promotional event in Chelsea. With all of the hassle, and the anonymity of the chickens, I stopped making the stock.Įnter Anita Lee and Bo Bo Chicken. In the case of meat, I look for humanely raised animals from small, local farms. I like to know a food’s origins, and try to eat food grown with environmentally friendly practices. What’s more, I had no idea where these chickens came from. I liked drinking the stock, but making it took work, and though I now live in New York, Chinatown is out of my way. I went to Chinatown and found the frozen black chickens, and, per the recipe, I put one in a pot with ginger, scallions, and water, let it simmer for 3-4 hours, and strained out the rich stock. Wu advised me to strengthen my constitution by drinking soup stock made from “black silky chicken.” Now, I rarely eat meat of any kind, but I did my best to follow her instructions. ![]() When I lived in San Francisco, I had a wonderful acupuncturist named Dr. Anita Lee of Bo Bo Chicken with a salted duck egg she cooked for me
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