Different countries, different rules for sure. Growth hormones were banned in chickens in the USA in the late 1950’s. They were not necessary due to selective breeding and they are not practical. They are still allowed in other animals but not chickens.
Feeding growth hormones does not work, they have to be injected. If they are eaten the digestive process destroys the hormones before they are adsorbed by the body. Next time someone tells you growth hormones are used in chickens think about someone paying good money for a human’s salary to go around injecting an expensive product into thousands of chickens that does no good. To me this kind of fails the common sense test. Other animals, such as beef, are different, they often do inject hormones, but not chickens.
Again, I know you are in a different country and they may do things differently, but here there are extremely simple reasons store chicken tastes different from the chickens you raise, especially dual purpose chickens. The store chickens are the hybrid broilers developed by selective breeding to be butchered around 6 to 8 weeks of age. Our chickens are normally much older when they are butchered because they take so much longer to reach butcher age. Baby animals are tenderer and generally blander tasting than older animals. They are going to taste different and have different textures, not because of hormones but because of age.
There may be another factor. Much of the chicken sold in the stores here is injected with brine. Brine is a salt water mixture, but I don’t know what other spices, flavors, or anything else might be in the brine they use. Some people that butcher their own chickens brine them, I don’t. But if you add things that affect the flavor of chickens, it stands to reason they may taste differently.
For thousands of years people have been keeping chickens for meat and/or eggs. Some flocks that specialize in meat have been developed, some specialize in eggs. But farmers and people in town often kept flocks for both. A lot of the time these were flocks that pretty much fed themselves in good weather by foraging, hatched and raised chicks, laid eggs for the family, and provided meat for the table. Since they often foraged for their food instead being fed a rich diet, they were often not all that big, they seemed to have a lot of “game” chicken in them.
I grew up on one of those farms. We ate a lot of eggs and Mom could turn one of those scrawny stringy chickens into some really good eating and feed a family with five kids off of one of them. If she fried it, the breading and gravy helped stretch the meat plus she put pieces like neck, back, gizzard, and liver on the platter. Chicken and dumplings was a way to stretch a chicken and make real comfort food out of an old chicken. Older chicken needs to be cooked in a way to match its age. The older it is the slower and with more moisture it needs to be coked to avoid it being touch as leather.
There certainly is a difference in how my chicken tastes and how store chicken tastes. Texture can vary too. Some people can’t handle those differences, I prefer mine.
I forgot to mention. Here in the USA for a chicken to be “certified organic” it does not matter what the parents ate. The only thing that matters is what the chick eats after it hatches. Plants are different, the plant the seeds comes from has to be organic. But that is not the case with animals.
