Michael "Dog3" Lonergan wrote:
> From the NYT:
>
> A pic of the chicken http://i11.tinypic.com/42ul5ee.jpg
>
> PET a Silkie chicken and you understand how it got its name. The feathers
> are fine and flutter in wisps in the breeze.
>
> At Sapa, Patricia Yeo serves black-skinned chicken in a dark soy sauce.
> With a walnut-shaped crown of plumage, blue earlobes and feathers that come
> in a variety of colors, it’s a striking-looking bird that’s often raised
> for show.
>
> Breeders also like them because they will hatch other birds’ eggs.
>
> “They are such good moms,” said Frank R. Reese Jr., the founder of Good
> Shepherd Turkey Ranch in Lindsborg, Kan., who breeds Silkies for show.
> “They’ll sit on anything and hatch anything. They’ll hatch ducks, turkeys,
> chickens.”
>
> Deprived of their striking outerwear, though, Silkies are far less
> appealing. They have bluish-gray skin, pitch-black bones and dark beige
> flesh (they’re sometimes called black-skinned chickens). They’re a scrawny
> pound or two, plucked, and are usually sold with the head and feet attached
> (with five toes, not the usual four).
>
> Yet Asian cooks love them for their deep, gamy flavor, even in the breast
> meat. And with the nation’s Asian population growing, sales have soared.
>
> Murray McMurray Hatchery in Webster City, Iowa, sells about 10,000 Silkies
> a year, up from a few hundred 10 years ago, when the hatchery first started
> raising the little birds, said Bud Wood, an owner.
>
> “The majority are sold for ornamental purposes, but there’s a big market in
> San Francisco, where there are Asians, and in Minneapolis, where there’s a
> Hmong market,” Mr. Wood said. Japanese, Cambodians and Koreans also eat the
> Silkie, he said.
>
> At K. K. Live Poultry in Brooklyn’s main Chinatown, Danny Wu, the owner,
> said he sells, butchers and cleans 3,000 Silkies a week, up from 400 a week
> 10 years ago. He attributes the growth to the number of Chinese moving from
> China and Taiwan to New York City.
>
>
> “They make it for soup, or for the broth for Mongolian hot pot,” he said,
> “and sometimes they make a curry.” For chefs outside Chinatown, though, it
> is not the easiest dish to sell.
>
> “It’s a scary-looking creature,” said Patricia Yeo, of Sapa in Chelsea. She
> said she has her staff describe it as a deeply flavored, lean, free-range
> chicken.
>
> She compares the Silkie to the blue-foot chicken, the domestic version of
> the poulet de Bresse of France; the blue-foot costs twice as much as the
> Silkie, she said. And unlike the blue-foot, the Silkie is rarely roasted.
>
> In an Asian home, most often a Silkie will be made into a deeply flavored,
> aromatic, amber-colored soup, simmered or steamed with ginger, ginseng,
> dried wolfberries and dried red dates, also known as jujubes. The broth is
> usually served clear, but occasionally it has bits of meat in it. (A recipe
> can be found at nytimes.com/dining.)
>
> In China, the Silkie is called wu gu ji — black-boned chicken. It has been
> prized for its medicinal value since the seventh or eighth century, said Yu
> Ying-Shih, a retired professor of Chinese and East Asian studies at
> Princeton University. Women who have just given birth eat it for energy.
> But its curative powers are not necessarily gender-specific.
>
> When Professor Yu was a small boy growing up in Anhui, in southeastern
> China, he said, because he had constant headaches, he was given bowls of
> Silkie chicken soup to make the headache go away.
>
> Did the soup work?
>
> “I don’t know,” he said, “but probably it helped.”
>
> That same soup can be ordered a day in advance at some restaurants in
> Manhattan’s Chinatown, like Oriental Garden and Danny Ng’s.
>
> Cooked in the traditional way, with ginseng, the soup has a hint of
> bitterness. Without ginseng, it is simply an addictive, intensely flavored
> broth.
>
> Yvonne L. C. Wong, an art consultant and trustee of the China Institute,
> makes her variation of the soup with Virginia ham, wolfberries, dried white
> yam, preserved orange peel and ginger. It may be to the Chinese what
> chicken soup is to Jews — liquid penicillin.
>
> Ms. Yeo slow-cooks the chickens in curries and other braises. When she was
> growing up in Cambridge, England, she remembers, her grandmother visited
> from Kuala Lumpur and made the family the traditional Chinese soup in a
> clay pot.
>
> For her black-skinned chicken slow-cooked in dark soy sauce at Sapa, Ms.
> Yeo braises the quartered chicken in a dark, aromatic sauce that includes
> onions, garlic, ginger, galangal, chilies, wolfberries, Chinese dried red
> dates, soy sauce and star anise.
>
> “My secret ingredient?” she said, as she ran upstairs from the restaurant
> pantry to the kitchen. “Coke!” She said she substitutes it for the
> traditional rock sugar, because she likes Coke’s caramel flavor. She
> braises the chicken the night before she puts it on the menu, as a special,
> because it, like nearly all braised dishes, tastes better the next day.
>
> At the Jefferson Restaurant in Greenwich Village, Simpson Wong takes an
> even more European turn. He cooks the Silkie leg and thigh as a confit in
> olive oil, seasoned with garlic and rosemary, for six hours, and does a
> quick sauté of the tender breast meat in a savory sauce of garlic, ginger,
> rice wine lees, oyster sauce and lemon balm.
>
> At Chow Bar in Greenwich Village, Peter Klein serves slow-cooked black
> chicken in red Thai coconut sauce. He also slow-cooks it, shreds the meat
> and mixes it with an Asian barbecue sauce. Then he stuffs it into toasted
> Chinese bread, along with paper-thin slices of cucumber and a sprinkle of
> fresh cilantro leaves.
>
> Mr. Klein asks his staff to describe the chicken as particularly fresh and
> lean.
>
> “We try not to go into great detail,” he said. “The American public is a
> little squeamish.”
>
> Where to Buy
>
> Silkie chickens can be found in the following shops:
>
> BAYARD MEAT MARKET 57 Bayard Street, (212) 619-6206.
>
> DELUXE FOOD MARKET 79 Elizabeth Street, (212) 925-5766.
>
> DYNASTY SUPERMARKET 68 Elizabeth Street, (212) 966-4943. Also sells all the
> other ingredients needed for the soup.
>
> K. K. LIVE POULTRY 6221 Sixth Avenue, Brooklyn, (718) 439-3838.
>
> Michael

Very interesting, Michael...I think that I am a lil squeamish too...
Aloha...tutu