"Tastes like chicken" is a phrase that plagues American cuisine. I've heard it used in describing seafood, crocodile, pork and veal. If memory serves, it also lassos in tofu and ricotta -- anything not immediately identifiable.

Whoever utters the phrase is condemning chicken and chicken consumers to the nether regions of gastronomy. It generally means bland, neutral and characterless -- in other words, a whitewash.

Chef Paul Canales takes exception. Canales heads the kitchen of Oliveto, the well-regarded Italian restaurant in Oakland's Rockridge neighborhood.

Last fall, he produced a "Fare Is Fowl" dinner, a feast intended to let all things fowl take flight. That Canales would headline poultry in the way Oliveto has annually celebrated themed dinners around exalted truffles and beloved tomatoes, for examples, made a clear statement about the importance of the bird.

For Canales, poultry is not dull and certainly not characterless. To him, the phrase "tastes like chicken" means just that -- something that clearly has the clean but meaty flavors of carefully raised poultry, with the differentiated textures of white and dark meat.

A hands-on executive chef, Canales uses the special dinners to teach his staff new techniques, ideas, recipes and tastes. From his in-depth lesson in bird cuisine, home cooks also can take away some important pointers for the country's favorite meat that are perfect for preparing mid-winter meals.

Canales runs his kitchen as a professor might run a seminar, or a coach a workout. In the week before the special dinners, an avalanche of fowl varieties streamed through the kitchen. Most of them arrived completely intact, with heads and feet attached. Cooks smoked pheasant, cured chicken, stuffed quail, ground turkey, skewered pigeons, marinated hens, dried ducks, crushed bones and extracted rich stock.

But even before all that came the task of choosing the birds themselves. If chicken is fed well and slaughtered and cooled in the right manner, it will taste better, he says. Buying a high-quality, well-treated bird is the first step to ensuring a delicious dish.

Hoffman Game Birds of Manteca, for example, dries its birds in cool air in the style of the poultry farmers of Brest, France, rather than according to the American mass-produced technique of dropping them in an ice-water bath.

Commercially raised chicken "tastes like nothing. They're bland. Their texture is wrong; it's mushy," Canales says.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture advises consumers to cook poultry until it reaches an internal temperature of 180 degrees, which can turn it dry and flavorless. The high internal temperature is designed to eliminate all traces of bacteria that could potentially cause salmonella and other illnesses.

However, chefs and other food professionals say potential for salmonella stems from the way in which commercial chickens are raised -- in crowded conditions, given steroids and feed that contains antibiotics and possibly animal by-products. Canales' recipes, which use artisan poultry, call for an internal temperature around 145 degrees. After resting, the internal temperature rises about 5 degrees.

The bottom line, Canales says, is "starting with a good bird. That's the price of admission."

The second lesson for cooks, Canales says, is to "start with the whole damn bird." The reason? "The minute a bird is cut, it starts to purge." Juices and enzymes begin to leak out -- and with them, flavor, moisture and likely nutrition.

Canales points to the toweling at the bottom of meat trays that absorbs the liquids from cut meats, poultry and seafood. In most trays of packaged poultry, the towel is completely saturated with liquid.

His advice: Buy the whole bird and have it cut by the butcher. Better still, cut it yourself just before cooking (see photos above and next page).

When cutting, or just when preparing the bird for cooking, be sure to follow safe handling instructions (see accompanying safety recommendations).

Artisan birds can also differ in other ways. Heirlooms -- traditional breeds of chickens and turkeys that have not been hybridized for high-volume commercial production -- are raised in conditions that allow them to run and move. That means they have well-developed thigh and leg muscles; the breast muscles are typically smaller than those of mass-produced chickens.

That reverses the commercial producers' goal of raising closely confined birds with a broader and bigger breast and small legs.

Just as different cuts of beef, lamb and pork cook differently, so do different parts of a chicken. For example, in the accompanying recipe for Barbera-Braised Young Hen, an Italian version of a coq au vin, Canales advises lifting the white meat out after 20 to 25 minutes of stewing. The dark meat continues for another 20 minutes, and the two cuts are combined just before serving.

In Cabbage Rolls with Turkey Stuffing & Pevra Sauce, the three parts of turkey are cut in three different ways. The leg and thigh meats, more moist, are put through a medium grind. The breast meat, drier and less marbled, is cut by hand into cubes. Finally, the delicate tenderloin is pureed and moistened with cream and made into a mousse.

The three are folded together and highlighted with chestnuts before the mixture is rolled into cabbage leaves. A gentle heat, steam, cooks the rolls for mere minutes before they are served.

Canales finds dark meat to be more versatile than white meat, and uses the dark meat in a dozen braised or stewed dishes, such as meatballs. Because he uses game birds that are marbled and hearty-flavored, Canales' chicken meatballs are delicate yet full of character. Simple fresh breadcrumbs and egg hold the meat together, while the flavor is spiked with Parmesan.

As for roasting the whole bird, Canales puts chickens, pigeons and pheasants on a spit and roasts them over wood, seasoning just with salt and pepper. By rotisserie-cooking the birds, the juice and fat of the bird evenly baste the entire bird under the skin throughout the cooking process. He says it's not necessary to brine a bird if it is raised by an artisanal grower since the flavor is already there.

It isn't hard to replicate the cooking method at home, even without a spit. Simply put the bird on a roasting rack, and rotate it four times in the cooking and pre-carving process. Begin with the breast side down, which allows the thickest part, the thighs, to be at the highest place and pointed toward the hottest part of the oven, the back wall. After 20 minutes, turn the bird on one wing side, then the other side and lastly breast side up (see accompanying recipe). Finally, if you wish, Canales says, rest the chicken with the breast side down before carving to allow juices to flow to the drier white meat.

When we tried the method in The Chronicle's test kitchen, the Hoffman hen was moist, evenly cooked and tender.

During the Fare to Fowl dinners, Canales and his staff turned out platters of whole pigeon stuffed with pancetta and red cabbage, pastas with eight kinds of poultry ragus and cracklings, and cabbage rolls and many poultry sausages, among other dishes -- all meant to show that poultry is by itself a delicacy, yet full of character, and adaptable to an impressive range of culinary treatments.

As Canales and his staff tasted some of the bird dishes, he could say, with pleasure, "Tastes like chicken."

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