8 week old Barred Rock/ Cochin Rooster

[hangin'witthepeeps]

He's not big enough for one person to eat, but after a search on here some one posted an article about cooking home raised chicken.

"Historic poultry breeds are, in contrast, very flexible as to butchering age. Any historic pure breed can be
butchered between 7 to 12 weeks for use as broilers, 12 to 20 weeks for use as fryers, 5 to 12 months for
roasters, and over 12 months for stewing fowl."

What are broilers and roasters? I know fryers would be fried in grease and stewing fowl would be for soups.

We ate a NHR rooster that was 22 weeks old and he was awful tasting and stringy/tough. I boiled him in salt and then made a chicken vegetable soup. I want to do this one right, after he grows a bit more.

TIA, Melissa

ETA: I just went through the picture thread of "How to process a chicken" and may be we didn't clean him up enough or cut his tail off. I'm ready to try again. I have10 Plymouth Rock eggs in the incubator and I want to grow out the roosters for freezer camp.

 

[Brunty_Farms]

With todays chickens it has very little to do with age as it does with weight. A broiler is considered a meat bird and the classes that you have are... cornish game hens, fryers, and roasters. Roughly they are a pound and a quarter, 2.5-4, 4.5 +.

This is typically what that means.... it's not technically necessarily right but if you were to buy chicken in the store those are the three you would get. Obviously if you went to a specialty store they may have the older stewing type as well. Even the broiler breeders have dominated that market as well. Companies used to use the old layers.... anymore they simply use the broiler breeders because they have way more meat than the typical commercial layer.

Broilers are technically any chicken used for meat however the majority of people use broilers to classify a cross breed such as the cornish x rock.