Best Rooster Age to eat

[Rooster Don]

Just wondering if there is an ideal age to cull roosters, or male chicks, before they get that "tough meat" thing started to eat?

I had to harvest a mean rooster one time, and did the "slice the neck upside down to bleed out, boil for defeathering" and did the whole nine yards. Man that was a lot of work. I am thinking next time about just skinning them. Any thoughts on that?

Thank you.

 

[Nupe]

I think 14-16 weeks is the limit for fryers but depending on breed you might not get much meat. You can cook them at any age low and slow and still get tender meat. Normally, I make broth out of older birds and give the meat to my dogs. You can't beat the flavor.

I hope you meant scalding for defeathering. I wouldn't want to partially cook them before resting the meat. If you plan on making this a staple, you might want to invest in a chicken plucker. They really make life easy and you can rent them out for a little extra cash.

Depending on how few you have and how you plan to cook them, skinning might be your easiest option, but roasting works better with the skin.

 

[tom stohler]

I skin all my young roos,, cut in grill pices maranade and on the grill they are delicious

 

[BlueShadow]

As far as skinning, I have done birds of various ages. As they age, it gets tougher to get the skin off. Older hens are still okay to skin, but by 9 months, the rooster was HARD to skin, I would have been better scalding and plucking with as long as it took me to skin him.

We butcher our extra cockerels in the fall, so they usually are between 4 and 6 months old. The meat is starting to get a bit tough then, but it isn't too bad.

 

[JRNash]

Makes perfect gumbo or dumplings

 

[cottontail farm]

I've skinned older chickens easily as long as they're still warm. Cockpot the meat and they make awesome enchilada. Very flavorful

 

[jopheso]

we grind the meat. They have excellent flavor just tough, so if you grind them you have amazing chicken burgers/meatballs/meatloaf/etc...

IMO by the time they crow they are too old to fry

 

[Birdielee]

I ate my australorp cockerel at 8 weeks. We used him for soup but I was very pleasantly surprised at how much breast meat he had. I thought there wasn’t going to be anything. I plucked him, right there in the garden, fresh. No scalding. it was not hard at all. My plan was to skin him, although the fat and the skin are supposed to have the good stuff for fighting colds. But i grabbed a handful of feathers and pulled them off easily. I did skin his neck, and i cut off the tips of his wings because the feathers there were harder to pull out. He had been crowing for 2 weeks. Aparently australorps mature early. That’s what I read and he crowed regularly after 1 1/2 months.