Chicken Experiment

Since we started eating meat again we've been extremely picky about where it comes from, who's raising it, and how. I touched more on our thoughts in the post On Meat Eating so I won't go into them here. Regardless we found a couple raising chickens that fit our criteria, for chicken the criteria is:
1. Local
2. Organic or better
3. Harvested Humanely
4. Not Cornish Cross

I will hand it to the Cornish Cross chicken and it's genetic engineers, they know how to make a bird PACK on the meat. These are the birds they show in the movie Food Inc. Birds that have so many health issues they are impossible to list, and for the most part if you eat chicken in the USA this is the bird you eat. It's the most cost effective, the 'CC' chicken can be harvested at 2 months of age, it takes normal chickens 4 months to come close to the same weight. But you also ingest all that animals health issues, um no thank you. So I decided to run an experiment. I purchased a chicken from Rocky Ridge Ranch that fit all the criteria accept that last one. Then Jake and I picked up our chickens from the Halpern's a local couple raising Delaware or RedStar's for meat. The difference's were obvious even before cooking.

The chicken on the left is a "real" chicken, what chickens are supposed to look like. Long legs that can support the body weight, proportional leg and breast meat. The chicken on the right is the Cornish Cross, short fat legs that can't walk far or at all, and giant breast meat. I affectionately refer to the CC chicken as the freak show chicken. We wanted to see if we could taste the difference in the meat. Being solid vegetarians for 3+ years and only eating "real" chicken not freak show chicken when ever we did eat meat. We wanted to know, can we taste a difference between them? So I decided to slow cook each one.

With a resounding YES we can taste the difference! The CC fell apart, that was sure nice but I am wondering if it's because through tampering with it's genetics it's joints and ligaments were weakened. Or is it just because this bird didn't walk much in it's life. In any case the meat has NO flavor of it's own, and if it weren't cooked in anything would be really yucky. But what was truly bad about this bird was the texture of the meat. Mushy, soft, and lacking any firmness at all. The 'real' chicken had a much richer taste like mushrooms. That might not make sense but, that's the closest taste I could come up with. I wonder if that's what people mean by "gamey" when referring to meat. Maybe we are all so used to the mush flavor of CC meat that if it's not breast meat it's gamey? I don't know. The real chicken didn't fall apart however, but retained much of it's consistency and was lovely to cut into. It didn't produce as much meat as the CC did, but I knew it wouldn't. Nothing can compare with mutant tampering.

It was a good experiment to run, eye opening for sure. For a much more through Cornish Cross vs. Heritage chicken experiment see Antiquity Oaks Chicken for dinner?: part one, part two, part three.