Rooster Roasting

[hipchef99]

jeff sends:

This PM is to avoid creating conflicts which sometime get out of hand. Plenty of people do indeed know that cockerals (roosters) are delicious with various methods of cooking. Home grown chicken (non-CX) is prepared in methods from your Grandmother's old cook book. Age of bird determines the available methods:
up to 12 weeks is broiler, up to 16 weeks is a fryer, up to 22 weeks you have roasters. As ageing continues and the high use muscles get darker, leaner, and tougher, the required moisture increases, and the amount of heat decreases, while the cooking time also increases.

There are also numerous reasons why many people do not like roosters, noise ordinance restrictions, in-fighting if there are hens present, human aggressive birds, and finally that the carcass does not look like the commercial chicken at the store.

Since you are enjoying your cockerals now, and think they are pretty good, imagine that you can improve the texture, taste, marbled fat content and increase the number of preparation methods. I would always eat our cockerals, but for the last two years they are all now caponized when they reach one pound. Delicious! At 26 weeks still tender, at 45 weeks still tender though if your purchasing all your feed they tend to get expensive. I process at 22 weeks. At any point during the year we have 40 capons of various stages for our use, I process 10 at a time. Where most people are looking to get rid of cockerals, I get rid of pullets! If their not going to get big and fat they can't get fed here. There are several threads on BYC for caponizing if your interested.

As to using a traffic cone, an alternative is to make your own restriction cone. Instructional link below,
https://www.backyardchickens.com/t/389035/how-to-build-a-killing-cone towards the end of the link I noted the use of sheet vinyl.

Good luck with your cooking.

jeff

Hi Jeff, thx for the insight on the cockerals, capons and Roosters. It helps me out a lot trying to figure out how old is to old to still cook with dry heat. In order to get the full flavor of the chicken, I would always want to Roast or Rotesserie. I have about 10 to 12 cockerals in the 16 to 18 week range that I will process when the oldest gets about 22 weeks old.I have a large corn field, they are all eating real well now, these should finish out at a nice weigh. I took care of the feed expense by sell 25 chickens for $300. I also have them out on free range. I would like to learn more about caponizing, it looks like a nice way to keep the chicken on pasture during Spring, Summer and process in the Fall...........Thx Jeff.....Bill