PINAKBET REPUBLIC: panangisagana iti mailuto a kamanokan, native chicken preparation

[Warning: Graphic photos of slaughtered fowl, maybe disturbing to some, please view with discretion. Thank you.]

Cut native chicken ready for cooking.

Preparing chicken for cooking into your favorite chicken dishes entails a lot of labor, so to speak, you’ll be obliged to know and apply some bits of slaughtering, quartering, cutting, cleaning techniques. Especially if you butcher kamanokan or that so-called “native” free range chicken. Of course, there’s an added thrill if you yourself will the one to prepare the chicken, unlike buying already cut “white” and “untasty” chicken from your meatshop or suki meat vendor for choice cuts like drumstick, thight, breast, back, neck, wings, head, feet, isaw. Not so with kamanokan because you buy it “live” as nobody sells dressed or pre-cut kamanokan. Even if you do not have native chickens in your backyard, there are available ones for sale in most public markets, but it’s sure expensive, from PhP200 a kilo and up.

A kamanokan for sale in a roadside talipapa.

I’m used to butchering kamanokan since I was a child in the barrio. Farm, okey, peasant, boys are expert butchers of native fowl, be it chicken, duck, goose, turkey and those wild birds caught in the ricefields and forested areas.

For one, I can prepare a native chicken all by myself, grasp and hold it so it can’t move (a chicken is so strong, moreso when it’s dying, it trembles so hard in its spasmic last it’s like having a violent seizure), then kill it by slashing its neck for that precious dara (blood, for sapsapuriket or dinardaraan later or as a delicious coagulated blood in the savory tinola) to gush out and then trickle down your malukong (bowl) with a ready little suka (vinegar) and/or diket a bagas (sticky rice grains).

Then, the dressing, (or is it really undressing?) the plucking out of its feathers after immersing the bird in hot water (to loosen the feather in the skin), a somewhat painstaking labor but worth the effort later for that promise of a tasty digo (soup) that only a kamanokan can assure.

And then, you’ve got to get rid of the tiny hair-like feathers which cannot be pulled out so easily from the skin, by making sarabasab (put over fire) the dressed bird into an open fire or flame, to burn the muldot (hair):

The sarabasab.

Chicken with its “hairs” burnt.

Then, the washing of the dressed chicken. Wash it thoroughly and vigorously in nagarasawan (ricewash water). Some even scrub and rub it with salt. Get rid of all dirt and burnt feather ends. Remove also the scales of its feet. Then wash it again and rinse it many times in tap or running water.

After which, the opening up and cutting up. Remove the kinarakaran (crop) and its esophagus as well as the wind pipe in the neck area. The gizzard connects to the batikuleng (gizzard), do not cut off the “connecting tube” at this juncture, remove them at once later, kinarakaran and batikuleng and the other organs (liver, heart, lungs, etc.) and the intestines:

Then open it up. There’s a little trick or technique on how to open up the bird like this:

Remove the butt with the intestine connecting into it intact. Be careful in doing this, you might cut it wrong and it will make a mess with chicken shit, errrr:

Here’s the bunch of the removed organs and intestines (notice that there also the “balls”, the testicles; yes these are male kamanokans, roosters), ready for cleaning: