nooka

You can definitely taste the difference between free range and factory chicken.

dbd33

Yes. But chopping the head off the chicken is an ugly business and eviscerating it more so. Then there's the issue of volume, if it's a meat bird it can't free range, so, if you want the free range flavour, you're stuck with skinny chickens. Free range isn't a choice for everyone.

nooka

No, especially given the significant price difference. We just had a roast at the weekend and were struck by how tasteless it was. On the whole I find free range chickens have bigger legs and smaller breasts, although I wouldn't say they were particularly skinny. Plenty of meat for a hungry family of four from an average free range chicken. Same weight battery farmed would just be a lot cheaper.

dboy

free range chickens have bigger legs and smaller breasts,

Sounds like the birds around here!

dbd33

I guess it depends how much the family expects to eat. I think the taste of free range birds comes from their mixed diet, grass, bugs, whatever. Birds that wander all around pecking at stuff tend to be layers or mixed use breeds and not especially heavy. A chicken of more than, say, 5lbs, is almost certainly a meat bird.

In our experiments with meat birds we've found them impossible to free range, the problem is that from about three weeks they're too fat to move around, you can put them in a shed with an open door but they can't waddle to the door, for the other nine weeks or so of their lives they eat what they're fed. I believe that "free range" as a legal term just means that, at some point in the creature's life, there was an opening that it could have gone through to the outdoors, not that it did.

We feed the chickens organic grains and only lock them in at night. They're not "organic" because the ones that can move go out and eat whatever they might find, pesticides, industrial waste, beakally separated factory farmed meats, all sorts. The wandering chickens (more accurately the wandering surplus roosters) taste way better than the immobile meat birds. Distressingly though, even the grain fed meat birds taste way better than supermarket chickens. I think the reason for the difference is twofold:

- commercial chickens eat a lot of drugs, stuff to keep them passive, stuff to keep them alive in a sea of shit, stuff to boost their weight. I suspect the drugs make for flaccid and tasteless meat.

- commercial chickens are injected with water to boost the weight. This dilutes the flavour and gives the meat the consistency of blotting paper.

If you're getting your chickens from a farm and see them grazing then, of course, it's different. If you're getting big chickens that are raised in that manner please find out what breed they are.