Is Meat From RIR's Tough?

[cowboyclayt]

I have some really old Rhode Island Red's. Will the meat be tough?

I'm also thinking about doing meat birds, but I don't like the idea of having chickens that can't walk after a couple of weeks... Is there a breed that can still walk around until butchering?

Thanks!

 

[Parront]

Yes, older dual-purpose chickens are tougher. You might consider cooking them in a pressure cooker. I have some scanned copies of my cookbook in an article you might be interested in. When tender, they have a great flavor. De-bone the meat for chicken salad, chicken and dumplings are good, too.
I have raised Cornish-X and they were able to walk. They could not keep up with the other chickens after about 8 weeks old. They liked to station themselves by the food and hog it, they were so much bigger. 2 feeders was the solution to that. Cornish-X are so much bigger, I would raise them for meat.

 

[Ridgerunner]

I have some really old Rhode Island Red's. Will the meat be tough?

I'm also thinking about doing meat birds, but I don't like the idea of having chickens that can't walk after a couple of weeks... Is there a breed that can still walk around until butchering?

Thanks!

You can get a lot of wrong impressions on here but at the same time you need to know how to do things. Personal preference comes into play too. You can cook and eat any chicken of any age and any sex but if you are expecting meat like you get from the store you can be greatly disappointed. How you cook them is tremendously important.

The older the chicken the more flavor and texture it has, especially old roosters with the hormones. Old hens can have flavor and texture too, just usually not as much as a rooster. Other than a pressure cooker which works, cooking older chickens generally means with moisture and relatively low temperatures. Coq au Vin is how the French make a gourmet meal out of an ole rooster. An old hen in chicken and dumplings is pure comfort food. Old hens make great chicken soup. But you need the traditional recipes, not the ones for the chicken meat you buy at the store.

What I like to do with an old hen or rooster is to make broth with them. Put them in a crock pot with rough chopped onion, garlic, carrot, and celery. Put in a bay leaf and a few peppercorns. Add herbs like oregano and basil, whatever and however much you like. Cover with water. The cook that on low overnight, 14 to 20 hours is great. Then strain out the chunks, de-fat the liquid, and you have great broth. Then go through the chunks you strained out and separate the meat. Be careful, there will be small bones. That cooked chicken meat is great on tacos, chicken salad, stew or soup. I often use it for a sandwich for lunch.

There are plenty of other ways to cook an old chicken and get a great meal. But if you try to cook it fast or at high heat it will almost certainly be too tough to eat. Steak can become shoe leather too if you don't cook it right. If you try frying, grilling, or maybe roasting it or cooking it at a full boil instead of barely at a simmer I probably would not like it either.

People successfully raise Cornish X all the time. Many people raise them on pasture but do supplement their feed. On pasture they walk around. There are different ways to raise them. You may need to restrict their feed some to keep them from growing too fast. Like everything else there are techniques that allow you do do fine with Cornish X. One of the big keys is to butcher them when they are ready instead of trying to wait. Depending on how you feed them that is usually around 6 to 8 weeks of age.

 

[A_Fowl_Guy]

I raise RIR for meat and eggs. They need to be cooked low and slow to get it super tender. I fry after I marinate them. That keeps them juicy.

 

[Kessel23]

Cornish X can walk after a couple of weeks, months, even years. I kept several behind this last summer to cross breed with other chickens in the spring, they made it very far and just recently they got killed by a dog. The cockerels were crowing and the pullets started laying. They are very unhealthy compared to other breeds though, health problems are very common. I picked the healthiest looking birds out of 50 to keep.