First real chicken

[SandraMort]

I bought a supposedly free ranged organic chicken from a farmstand last week and finally finished cooking the whole thing, though not having eaten it all. The sauteed boneless breast was disappointing - it tasted exactly like supermarket chicken to me, though fresh enough so I wasn't grossed out by it. The leg thigh quarters were pretty similar to supermarket meat, though possibly a bit firmer. The big difference was the stock I made from the bones -- it was almost as dark as beef stock and much more collageny (errr... collagenous?). I am looking forward to cooking with it!

 

[dancingbear]

All chicken pretty much just tastes like chicken, to me, but older birds have more intense chicken flavor. Often, the supermarket birds have a blander, more indistinct flavor. Maybe because they're even younger (6 weeks, I think) than most of us butcher at home, usually 8-10 weeks. The free range birds have darker, richer broth, it's great to cook with. I love it. Sometimes with a roasted or baked chicken, I like to have a small dish of the hot broth ( from the drippings, with most of the fat skimmed off) to dip each bite in.

Breed makes a difference, too. The Cornish X are less flavorful than some of the others. They don't taste bad, just not as much flavor as some of the others.

With a young meat breed, regardless of how it's raised, they pretty much taste the same. But if it's home grown and processed, you know what it ate, and that it was processed cleanly, not soaked in contaminated water with hundreds of other birds, and not chlorinated to kill the germs from the unsanitary handling.

You'll also know it's not a genetically modified bird. Those haven't been approved yet, but there's currently an attempt to add these to our food supply, and to NOT label them, so that we won't know which ones they are.

It seems warped to me, that in a country that requires nutritional info on labels on everything, even plain water, they want to sell us genetically modified food, and tell us we are not allowed the right to choose whether to buy it or not. The reason? They say they're afraid that if the public knows what's in it, they might not buy it. So the solution is to trick us by not labeling the stuff.

 

[Peruvian]

Out of curiousity, what was your expectation for the difference in flavor?

 

[SandraMort]

I dunno. I was expecting to go WOW! It's chicken, it didn't taste off, so I'm content. But it wasn't anything exciting. That said, I had some other chicken tonight and it was not as fresh tasting.

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