I'm not quite ready for chicken's just yet but I'm hoping to learn as much as I can for when that time comes. Is there a difference between meat chicken's and laying chicken's? How old should a chicken be before it is ready to harvest? I've been told that after a certain age a chicken would be too tough for eating. It sounds silly to me but I'm new to this. Thank you in advance for any help
You can eat a chicken at any age. They are more tough as they get older, but they are never too tough to grind for sausage. I've never actually done that, but I have done long simmering for soup, followed by chopping the meat into small pieces.
After you kill the chicken and butcher it out, it will go into rigor mortis (the body gets stiff.) It will be more tough if you cook & eat it then, and less tough if you cook it before that, or if you keep it in the refrigerator until the rigor (stiffness) goes away again. That can take a few days-- just try wiggling the joints and see when they move easily again.
The "best" meat chickens are the ones that quickly grow to a large size. That lets you have more meat when they are still young enough to be very tender. "Cornish Game Hens" in the store are chickens too, just butchered at a smaller size/younger age.
The "best" laying hens are the ones that lay large numbers of eggs and have small skinny bodies (so they eat less food.) If you butcher them, you do not get much meat per hen, but what you do get is just as edible as the meat from a larger chicken.
But any adult hen will lay eggs if she is reasonably healthy, and any chicken can be eaten. We are used to thinking of meat chickens as being a certain size, but some people eat much smaller birds (examples: pigeons and quail.) Butchering chickens at those sizes is fine too.
When I was growing up, my mom like the White Rock breed of chicken. We kept a flock of hens to lay eggs, plus a rooster. Each spring we would hatch some eggs in an incubator. As those chicks grew, we butchered most of the males about 8 weeks old. They were physically smaller than grocery-store chickens, but they tasted fine, and they were tender enough to cook on the grill. If there were extra females, or females with any kind of problem, we butchered & ate them too. After we raised a new generation of pullets & a cockerel, we ate the old hens and the old rooster too (chicken soup or chicken & dumplings.)
We didn't always do it exactly the same way: sometimes we kept the old hens & rooster for another year and skipped raising chicks one year. Other times we wanted more meat, so we raised more batches of chicks in a year, and butchered both males and females in those extra batches. Or we might buy some chicks of a different breed, either to raise for meat or to have some different color hens in the laying flock.
But the basic pattern was that we ate any chicken that we didn't want to continue keeping as a layer or a breeding rooster, we adjusted cooking methods to work with the chickens we had, and if that didn't make enough chicken meat we raised some specifically for the purpose (sometimes Cornish Cross meat chicks, the ones that grow fastest, because they really are the best if you want lots of meat fast.)
