Adventures in Local Eating - Chicken

It's been 6 months since I watched Food Inc. and decided to make some big changes in the way we approached food and eating. I've found a wonderful local beef and pork raised on pasture. I've had a lot of fun making our own snacks and a lot of our own bread and rolls. Local fruits and veggies are pretty easy thanks to the huge farmer's market. The one missing food that I was having a hard time finding is locally raised pastured chicken.

I recently found a farm that raises their chickens much like Polyface farm. The family was very nice and I was happy with what I saw at their farm. I was excited to take the chickens home and enjoy the first chicken dinner that we had had in a while. It's gorgeous, right? Those are local potatoes in the bottom (stored from last year by the grower).

It looks beautiful and it tasted good (not over the top wonderful, but good)... but there was one problem. This farm raises "Freedom Rangers" instead of the widely used Cornish X broilers. A lot of homesteaders are starting to raise Freedom Rangers because they feel they're able to forage better since they don't grow as large and grow slower. The Cornish X's are a fast growing breed that we're used to seeing on the grocery store shelves. Some people will say that these birds grow so fast that they can't forage well but my sister's Cornish X's last year did very well free-ranging.

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So, I thawed my 5 pound Freedom Ranger and noticed immediately how different it looked from every other chicken I've cooked. The breast meat was about half the size and the legs looked scrawny. After it cooked and I was dividing it up onto our plates, I was disappointed to realize that this chicken would hardly make two meals for our family of four (the kids only eat half of a portion.. if that). I was planning to get 3 meals from this chicken like I do with most chickens I roast. Getting only 2 small meals from this one bird meant that each meal was going to be more expensive then our budget will allow.

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5 pound Freedom Ranger at $3.10 a pound = $15.50 / 2 meals = $7.75 worth of chicken per meal.

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Our meals usually cost less then $7 total for the entire meal. Spending almost $8 for just the protein portion of our meal isn't practical for us.

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So, I'll ration the 2 chickens I have left in the freezer carefully. My sister is very generously raising 25 broiler chickens for me this summer. I'll be helping her to process them in August when I go visit her in Maryland. We figured that with the cost of the chicks plus the cost of feed (they'll be on pasture too) the end cost will be about $6 per bird. Knowing that these chickens will be large enough for 3 meals makes them an incredible bargain! Thanks Katie!