Seasonal Roasting Cockerels & Raising Chickens The Traditional Way

As many of you know, we breed a lot of hens on the farm to help replenish our laying flocks. Which, as egg producers go, is unusual (even amongst the pastured / free range / organic fraternity, who mostly buy point-of-lay pullets from commercial sources).

There are several reasons we do this: 
 
-    Keeping control of the genetics and not being over reliant on giant corporates. (Did you know that most of the chickens living worldwide today were bred by only two or three giant companies? We said two or three because one of the two kind of owns the third.)

-    Preserving productive, healthy examples of traditional breeds - which are very hard to find nowadays, and we have spent a lot of years locating, acquiring and improving the few remaining good bloodlines (most died out when commercially bred hybrids came onto the scene).

-    Breeding from birds that are proven to be productive and healthy over a long lifespan without the use of drugs, vaccinations or medications that commercial breeding stock will be subject to. Far too much antibiotics and medications are used on livestock worldwide and this has widespread ramifications (resistance and microbiome damage etc.).
 
-    Epigenetic priming - breeding drug-free birds kept with correct diet and environment breeds hens that suit our farm and express their genetics to the best of their potential. We know this from experience - the same with our cows - the more generations on our farm, the better they get.

-    Also, I (Matt) have been a complete chicken nerd since a young age and if we didn't breed our own hens on the farm, I'd only be doing it as a ridiculously time-consuming hobby anyway.
 
-    Breeding our own means, we can rear the male chicks to maturity and give them a good purpose in life (in commercial layer hen production most males are killed as day olds).
 
This last point brings us to the subject of this blog. Our birds are from traditional 'dual purpose' breeds, which means they are suitable for both meat and eggs. 'Rhode Island Red' is our main breed, which was the most common breed across farms in the UK 100 years ago (we also have smaller breeding programmes for a few other breeds). Now, they don't provide massively excessive volumes of production in either department (meat or eggs), but just enough, and we feel the quality is far better this way.
 
What's really encouraging is that this issue is now getting more attention and more people are beginning to talk about the revival of dual-purpose traditional breeds, potentially even for commercial production. This is music to my ears, as way back when I was a teenager, breeding 'utility' traditional breeds (utility meaning bred for practical production not for showing), I often had potential buyers turning them down, saying "ah but I can buy a warren for £2" ('warren' is the term used to describe brown commercial laying hens). I didn't bother selling many of these but instead focused on breeding them for our own use (and breeding fancy bantams to sell instead for a while). However now, we've had the pleasure of setting up a few people up and down the country with their own breeding flocks, and it's great that more people are showing interest in this!
 
Of course, breeding lots of hens also generates an equal number of cockerels. We use old-style dual-purpose breeds, mostly Rhode Island Red and Light Sussex, which were once the most popular breeds in this country, up until the 1950's. In the commercial egg world, these males are seen as a waste product as they're not fast growing or 'efficient' to keep, because they don't grow as quickly as the freakishly bred meat chickens of today. However - we rear our male birds all the way to maturity and turn them into what we think is a pretty special product that really does justice to them (it's the same thinking behind how we rear all the male calves from our dairy herd to make great quality beef).
 
These boys are grown slowly with ample access to good pasture, and fed on an organic, GM free, soya free diet, complemented with surplus whey and skim milk from our dairy - important for that extra depth of flavour. They live for 6 months, which is well past maturity - contrast this with your average meat chicken bought elsewhere, most of which are only 6 weeks.
 
They make an amazing meal - it'll be like no other chicken you've tried before. We're not aware of anyone else in the country breeding and feeding this way - make no mistake these are gourmet-level chickens of the quality you will only find if you know the right places to look in France.
 
Don't expect our birds to arrive looking like the meat chickens you are probably familiar with - these are not a round, proud lump of breast meat... Ours have a higher breast bone, and instead of nearly all of the meat being on the breast of the bird, you'll find a reasonable amount there, but also a higher proportion around the sides, back and legs. A lot of this is a darker meat, with a stronger, more 'chickeny' flavour than you're perhaps used to. 
 
The meat is tender and exquisite but needs cooking gently with a lid on the roasting pot (or covered with foil) - because the muscles of these birds have seen plenty of exercise, the meat is denser with a lower water content than most chicken. These are actually what 'normal' chickens used to be, and we often get feedback from older customers, that this is how chicken used to taste when they were young!
 
Because we only hatch chicks in the springtime (which seems most natural) we only have these cockerels available in the autumn. How long they're available will depend how fast they sell - we'd expect our stocks to last a few weeks, but we can't make any promises, that's up to you hungry folks!