Can you eat roosters?

[oldrooster]

I'm willing to bet roughly half of the chickens in the supermarket case is roosters.... In fact some people pay premium bucks for Tom (male) turkeys to eat from the store and I don't know of any way for certain how one can really tell what gender a butchered turkey or chicken is at the store....

 

[locoguru]

Quote:

I'm willing to bet roughly half of the chickens in the supermarket case is roosters.... In fact some people pay premium bucks for Tom (male) turkeys to eat from the store and I don't know of any way for certain how one can really tell what gender a butchered turkey or chicken is at the store....

Love the profile picture!

 

[KendyF]

I went from 0 to 5 roosters, most just chicks at this point, so we are going to have a nice freezer of chicken.

 

[zion11]

I am not surprised to hear this question, and OP, don't feel bad for asking. I have a local friend who asked me the same thing - she was just not thinking of chickens in terms of being a bird, as opposed to a mammal. She asked, "Wouldn't you only eat the hens since they'd have bigger breasts?" Well, that would be the case if a chicken nursed their young, but they don't, and besides you want muscle to eat, not mammary glands

Roosters and hens are the basically the same make-up, except roosters are larger and have tiny little balls.

 

[Ridgerunner]

You can eat any chicken of any sex and age, you just have to adjust the cooking methods to suit the sex and age. The older the chicken the more mature the meat, both in texture and flavor. Cockerels mature faster than pullets in both of these. The older the chicken the slower you have to cook it and the more you need to up the moisture.

There are a lot of age-appropriate ways to cook chickens. You can find several threads in the meat bird section on that. To show that you can eat an old mature rooster, Coq au Vin is the traditional French way to cook an extremely old mature rooster. That’s considered fine dining by many people in fancy restaurants.

When is a personal choice. Some people butcher cockerels at 12 weeks so they can fry or grill the birds before they mature so much they start to get tough if you use these methods. Of course, different ones of us have different definitions of “tough” too. A lot of that depends on what you are used to. There is very little meat in a bird this age but if you live where you can’t have roosters, you might need to butcher pretty early.

I try really hard to never butcher before 16 weeks and much prefer to wait until later. Some cockerels grow faster than others. A few are getting pretty good at 18 weeks but some need another month or even more to fill out to a decent carcass.

Dual purpose chickens are those that have been developed to provide both meat and eggs. The Cornish X, Cornish Cross, Broilers, Freedom Rangers and such have been developed purely for meat. They are not dual purpose. The commercial hybrid egg layers were developed purely for egg laying. They don’t have much meat on their body. You can eat them but you won’t get much meat. Bantams are not considered dual purpose although you can eat them. There’s just not much meat there. Many decorative breeds are not considered dual purpose, as much because they don’t lay very well as having anything to do with eating them.

Dual purpose can mean different things to different people. Game chickens are often fairly small so to many people they would not be considered dual purpose, but many small farmers for thousands of years have kept free ranging flocks of games to provide their families with meat and eggs while foraging for most of their own food.

 

[KristineY]

I've experimented with a few techniques for cooking older Roos. I butchered most at about a year old (after a breeding season) and more recently I culled a 2+ yo roo that became too aggressive. I found that if you cook an old roo, let it sit in a ziplock bag in the fridge for a few days (to loosen up the rigor) and then quarter and put in another bag with a quart of buttermilk and let that sit another couple days (the acid in the buttermilk break down the proteins and tenderize the meat). When I'm ready to cook, I do it in a crock pot (haven't tried a pressure cooker yet but I'm tempted!). I season flour and brown the quarters and add that to a crock pot with white wine, chicken stock, some carrots and browned onion, garlic and shallots. Sprinkle about 3 tbs of the leftover seasoned flour in the pot and cook for 12 hrs on lowest setting. I usually have to add more liquid at about 6 hrs in (stock or wine, your preference. (Mine being the white wine). Don't cheap out on the wine either! Like Julia said. Never cook with a wine you wouldn't drink!). The Sauvignon varietal of two buck chuck from Trader Joes isn't bad but by all means don't use "cooking wine"!!

Our nasty old EE roo went out with a low and slow "bang" and made a fantastic meal replete with grandma's drop dumplings. We Blanche and freeze the carcasses for soup and when I get 3 or 4 good sized, I make a 10 qt pot of stock. Nothing goes to waste!

For anyone in central NJ, we have our birds processed for us at an abattoir in Morganville, NJ (Godek's Farm). They charge $2 a bird and bring a cooler with ice water to bring them home in (cools the meat quickly and keeps the skin from darkening)

 

[jgfetter]

The only difference between rooster and roaster is a single vowel. e

 

[rosie1991]

I apparently have Cornish X chickens and I am wanting to get to butcher one of the roosters they are roughly around 7 months... Would he be good for frying or in chicken and dumplings??

 

[KristineY]

You can certainly eat him, but the older ones would have to be cooked low and slow. I've made coq au vin and chicken and dumplings with the older Roos (quarter them before cooking) and cook in the crock pot (5 hrs on "low") and they were great either way!

 

[enola]

By the way, you can eat old hens, too.......