You can eat any chicken of any age or sex. You have to adjust your cooking methods to their age, the older they are the longer and slower you have to cook them. Males that have entered puberty have a stronger flavor which can get stronger as they get older, the hens also but not as much. The chicken you get at the store are 6 to 8 week old chicks so they are really tender but have a much blander taste. Because that is what they are used to some people object to the older chickens we raise and butcher ourselves. Personally I prefer that flavor.
Many people find the chickens we raise too tough to fry or grill after about 12 to 15 weeks of age. It’s not because of the breed, it’s because they are older. Different chickens mature at different rates so not all reach this stage at the same time. That’s not a breed thing; it’s an individual chicken thing. There’s not a lot of meat on one of our chickens at that age.
Mom could serve a family of seven with one hen. The neck, back, heart, and sometimes liver (depending on how she cooked it) were separate pieces so it was not like something you get at Kentucky Fried. To stretch a smaller chicken when you have several mouths to feed you might want to think in terms or chicken n’ dumplings (now that is comfort food), coq au vin, or stews. These all taste better to me if the chickens are older. Over the long term, half of what you hatch will be female and you’ll have to feed them quite a while before you can tell the sex of them. To meet your dream you are going to have to eat the excess females or find a way to get rid of them, maybe by selling once you can identify them.
I don’t know how many chickens you plan to eat a year or how much freezer space you have. There’s only two of us so one chicken, even a pullet, gives us two meals a week. With visiting my granddaughter and other relatives and occasional other things that disrupt our weekly routine, I only need about 40 to 45 chickens a year. My main laying/breeding flock is one rooster and seven hens. That gives us way too many eggs but I want that many to keep genetic diversity up a bit since I raise my own replacement pullets and rooster most years, plus I play a bit with genetics. Also, I raise 3 or 4 replacement pullets every year while removing the oldest hens to keep the laying flock young enough to keep a steady flow of eggs. We all have our own systems that evolve over time. And you have to be flexible. Things never work out exactly as you plan.
Freezer space might be important. If you raise the broilers you have to process them at a certain age, no real options. With dual purpose chickens you can stagger the butchering as you wish, but you have to feed them. That costs money. With our dual purpose chickens you might consider hatching just a few at a time instead of having massive hatches so you can butcher them as they reach the level of maturity that you decide suits your unique circumstances. The downside of that is that you have to keep the incubator going a lot (which some people love, right Puddin?), you are constantly brooding chicks, and you are always integrating chickens. All this can be done but you might have to build more facilities and it may cut down on your travel time if you take many trips. It ties you down more. Everything is a tradeoff.
Fifty to sixty years ago certain breeds and colors were raised as meat birds, the Delaware, New Hampshire, and some strains of White Rock for example. With selective breeding they developed strains of these birds that could reach 4 pounds weight in 10 weeks, but that special breeding has been lost in the last several decades because of the advent of the broiler. Some people are trying to bring that back, not just size but rate of growth. If you can start with some of their stock you are going to be starting in a much better place than hatchery chickens. Hatchery chicks are bred for the mass market. You are likely to see a big difference in cost for that stock for a very good reason. It costs money to develop those strains. Unless you learn something about genetics and how to select your breeders you will probably lose that advantage is a few generations. On a simple level you need to eat the ones you don’t want to eat and breed the ones you want to eat, but it goes a bit deeper than that. There are production, health, and behavioral things you need to look for too.
Over just a few generations you can take hatchery stock and move toward your goals by carefully selecting your breeders, but you are at a much better starting point if you stock starts out closer to your goals.
If you plan to skin your chickens it doesn’t matter, but if you pluck them you might want buff or white chickens. You are going to leave some pin feathers behind in any case, but the darker ones show up a lot more than the lighter ones. You get a prettier carcass with less work if you have light colored chickens if you pluck.
Since you are not breeding for show or to preserve a breed, there is no reason to keep your chickens separated unless you just want to. Mine is a mixed breed flock. I select which chickens come closest to my goals as my breeding flock and eat the rest. I’ll never win a chicken show but I’m OK with that. I’ll never enter one. But if you are planning on selling the pullets, you can probably sell pure breeds easier than from a mutt flock like mine. I don’t sell hatching eggs or chicks either. I use what I hatch.
Your goals are doable but I think you will find that your goals change a bit as you gain experience. There are a whole lot of different ways to achieve what you want and you can get there. Along the way you will learn a lot and have some disappointments but it is a great adventure.
