Processing Young Roos - Non Meat Bird Breed

[Pele]

Hi all,

We just recently had a hatch that produced an obscene amount of roosters, and cannot keep them due to ordinances in the neighborhood.

Rather than stressing about re-locating so many mixed roosters, we have decided to process them. Because they need to be processed before they crow. That means that they'll be very small, which is not ideal, but better than complaints from the neighbors.

My question is: will the processing be much different than normal due to their size? They are about 10 weeks old now, and are a laying mix, so they don't weigh a lot. Likely they will be only good for slow cooker recipes.

 

[AlienChick]

Yeah, you process them the same.
Won't be much meat on them.
I'm thinking you can feed them a lot of corn/grain to fatten them up since you're gonna eat them anyway.
Just a thought.

 

[Nimblefreckle]

We did that with some roosters of regular breeds. They had good meat everywhere except the breast meat. They had very little breast meat. But they were good tasting and not too tough.

 

[Pele]

Thanks for the input everyone! We did go ahead and process them this weekend. Everything went fairly well and they ended up being a tad heavier than I would have expected.

This all was especially amusing for me because we technically got these chickens from the grocery store. Our local Whole Foods sells fertilized eggs (some health food craze), so I incubated them to get these roos. A very roundabout way to get a crockpot chicken!

 

[countrygirl74]

We processed our extra roos too. Nobody really liked the dark meat as much, but the breast meat was wonderful - melt in your mouth. Ours were 16 weeks old when we did it. We did process a family member's 8-month-old roo and the breast meat was especially flavorful on him but the dark meat was no good at all. I did slow-cooker on all of them.

 

[jjparke]

Makes good stock too

 

[AlienChick]

Yeah!
All day in a slow cooker makes the 'tough' meat awesome!