If you have a regular type farm with free range chickens, you know chickens that just walk around in the yard and eat chicken feed, then scratch around the rest of the day eating rocks and bugs and whatever they come across.
What if you have hens and a rooster and for dinner you want chicken. If you kill a hen and eat it will it taste a lot better than if you killed a rooster subject to the same conditons?
Or doesn’t it matter. I still remember the time when I was 5 or 6 and we visited a farm and my mum and her friend were discussing dinner and they decided on chicken and my mum walked out to the farm yard and grabbed a chicken and calmly rung it’s neck. Yech!!!
Well, as coq au vin was explained to me, the reason for all the stewing and simmering and added flavors was that rooster meat was tough and gamy if unadorned.
Though I havent eaten meat in 15+ years, I like to watch cooking shows and seem to remember hearing that the meat of a rooster that had not been castrated would indeed be extra tough and gamey tasting, but that a castrated rooster (a capon) will be more tender, while also having the benefit of growing much larger than a hen…
I have a slow cooker Coq Au Vin recipe that is wonderful. We use supermarket chicken, but it involves slow cooking to break down all the toughness of a rooster.
Where I grew up when mum decided on chicken she would send me out to the farm yard to grab a chicken and calmly ring it’s neck.
Young roosters* were always harvested because they would not grow up to lay eggs. They were never allowed to grow old. Hens were only harvested after they were too old to lay eggs and were slow cooked.
*I believe some may call a young rooster a “cockerel”. My remote rural US family never used that terminology so I am sure of it.
