What do you mean by “best”? Best can have so many different meanings to different people that it really means nothing until you tell us what you mean by “best”. Just asking what is best without telling us what you mean is like asking what color is prettiest. Everyone has an opinion and it’s going to be different.
If you mean pure volume you can’t beat he specialists, the Cornish X for meat and the commercial hybrid laying hens for eggs. The Cornish X are designed to put on a lot of meat really quickly and to be very efficient converting what they eat to meat. But there are restrictions. They pack on weight so fast they have to be eaten at a pretty young age or fed a greatly restricted diet or their heart just quits or their skeleton breaks down. You have to process them when they are ready. They taste like store chicken because that is what they are. The older they are the more flavor they have. The flavor of cockerels especially change too once they hit puberty. Since they are used to them many people prefer the flavor of store chicken and don’t like the stronger flavor with older chickens. The texture changes with age too so you have to change your cooking methods to slower and with more moisture. What they eat and how much exercise they get has some effect but the biggest part of flavor and texture is age.
The commercial hybrid layers are designed to produce a lot of large eggs, efficiently converting feed to eggs. They have smaller bodies so they don’t have to use much feed to maintain a larger body. They are so finely tuned to produce a lot of large eggs that they can develop medical problems, especially later in life or if you feed them a high protein diet. The higher protein diet the larger egg they lay which can lead to medical problems. But if you feed them right and manage them right you just can’t beat them for egg production.
I prefer the dual purpose chickens for meat. I like the flavor of the older chickens. Since mine forage for a reasonable amount of their food they are not as expensive as where people have to buy all they eat. I like that I can butcher when I want, they are not going to eat themselves to death. I get a lot more eggs than I can use from just a few hens. They don’t lay as many or as large an egg as the commercial hybrids but mine forage quite well so efficiency in feed isn’t that important to me. I also like that I can hatch my own replacement chicks. You can’t do that with the Cornish X unless you greatly restrict what they eat. You can do that with the commercial hybrid layers but they are so small there is not much meat on them when it comes to eating them.
So tell us what you want and we may be able to answer the question for you.
Welcome to the forum, by the way.
