{"id":243993,"date":"2010-11-12T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2010-11-12T08:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sdnews.com\/turkey-tales-snagging-the-elusive-womach-turkey\/"},"modified":"2010-11-12T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2010-11-12T08:00:00","slug":"turkey-tales-snagging-the-elusive-womach-turkey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/turkey-tales-snagging-the-elusive-womach-turkey\/","title":{"rendered":"Turkey tales: Snagging the elusive Womach turkey"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Brook Larios<\/strong> | SDUN Columnist<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t stride, skip or jog anywhere these days without hearing someone bemoan the fact that, this year, they missed out on a Womach turkey. With little fanfare from the public, local rancher Curtis Womach took his last Thanksgiving 2010 bird order in March, leaving people who can hardly plan their lives a week out scratching their heads in disbelief.<\/p>\n

\"Turkey<\/a>
Local rancher and Talmadge resident, Curtis Womach. (Courtesy of Karen Womach Photography)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Womach divides his time between his Talmadge home and a 13-acre Boulevard ranch, near Ramona, where, in addition to his turkeys, he humanely raises hormone-free goats, Red Wattle hogs, rabbits and about 1,400 of his ever-popular chickens. And he bats not an eye when relaying the disappointing \u201cno turkey\u201d news to his followers.<\/p>\n

Juan Miron, a former employee of North Park\u2019s The Linkery, who with friend and former co-worker Kevin Ho owns the popular roving MIHO Gastrotruck, nearly<\/p>\n

missed his window of turkey opportunity last year. Intent on sitting down to a hand-raised turkey meal, he helped Womach slaughter the birds just so he could purchase one after the deadline.<\/p>\n

Most of us will not be dining on a Womach turkey, but there\u2019s hope yet. Every Friday, Womach hand-slaughters about 60 chickens, giving the birds to those that pray to the avian altar two days later for $20 a pop at the Hillcrest Farmers Market (9 a.m. to 2 p.m. every Sunday in the DMV parking lot). There, chicken seekers will meet the purveyor of their food face to face. How cool is that?<\/p>\n

\u201cAlmost every week I feel bad with the last one I can catch,\u201d Womach said. \u201cThis guy, out of all of those chickens, he escaped me the longest.\u201d<\/p>\n

Arrive at 1 p.m. and you\u2019ll be sorely disappointed; the popularity of these fowl friends is trumped only by the hulking chartreuse one that talks on national TV. And you get the giblets, feet and head\u2014if you want\u2014so one chicken can get you through nearly an entire work week.<\/p>\n

While $20 might seem steep, these are birds of another feather. Our nation\u2019s taste for breast meat guided the chicken industry into solely breeding the Cornish Cross, a fast growing, bigger-breasted hybrid, many of which can barely walk, much less live out their days stress-free. Likewise, they\u2019re mass-produced, often treated as commodities. Alternately, Womach raises a slow-growing heritage breed that\u2019s visibly more well proportioned. The birds are free to wander and he uses temporary electric netting to deter them from flying the coop.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey can get out if they want to,\u201d he admitted. \u201cBut typically they don\u2019t because it\u2019s their home and they feel safe within the net.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Linkery and El Take it Easy, both owned by Jay Porter, are reputedly the only two restaurants in the world that serve Womach chicken. The latter, whose exotic menu was co-created with Chef Jair T\u00e9llez of Laja fame, features Womach chicken prepared as hot wings, taquitos nuggets with mol\u00e9 (a chocolate-based sauce popular in Oaxacan cooking), saut\u00e9ed chicken spleens and sweet and sour chicken heads. Fried chicken appears on The Linkery\u2019s menu most nights.<\/p>\n

And that elusive turkey of Womach\u2019s that\u2019s so difficult to come by? It\u2019s a Midget White\u2014another heritage breed that contributes to genetic diversity. (Breeding the likes of these, even for food, keeps the species in the mix.) So, squawk at the price if you must ($5 per pound), but recognize that raising and processing animals humanely costs a wing and a leg, which is why factory farms opt otherwise.<\/p>\n

For Brook\u2019s Womach chicken soup recipe, e-mail her at brook@foodhuddle.com.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Brook Larios | SDUN Columnist I can\u2019t stride, skip or jog anywhere these days without hearing someone bemoan the fact that, this year, they missed out on a Womach turkey. With little fanfare from the public, local rancher Curtis Womach took his last Thanksgiving 2010 bird order in March, leaving people who can hardly […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1330,"featured_media":243994,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"11555","_seopress_titles_title":"Turkey tales: Snagging the elusive Womach turkey","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[11551,11555],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-243993","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-uptown-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243993","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1330"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=243993"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243993\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/243994"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=243993"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=243993"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=243993"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}