Ready for a culinary journey to discover the true taste of chicken? Today, we’ll uncover why that store-bought bird lacks flavor and how heritage dual-purpose breeds enrich your palate with authentic depth of flavor. We’ll travel back to the 1940s, tracing the decline of flavor when uniformity stormed the food scene. You'll get a front-row seat to the world of terroir - the environmental factors affecting the taste of poultry. So, forget generic, join us in celebrating the diverse and delicious world of heritage chickens.
Now, brace yourself for a controversial trip into the world of poultry farming. Ever wondered about the astonishing feed conversion rates of Cornish cross breed? It's a marvel, but not one without its dark side. We guide you through the complex breeding process behind these birds, the worrying health issues, and why their natural behavior is compromised. Explore the ethical conundrum of Cornish crosses and dig deep into the world of feed conversion. Strap in, this is going to be a captivating conversation!
Ready for a culinary journey to discover the true taste of chicken? Today, we’ll uncover why that store-bought bird lacks flavor and how heritage dual-purpose breeds enrich your palate with authentic depth of flavor. We’ll travel back to the 1940s, tracing the decline of flavor when uniformity stormed the food scene. You'll get a front-row seat to the world of terroir - the environmental factors affecting the taste of poultry. So, forget generic, join us in celebrating the diverse and delicious world of heritage chickens.
Now, brace yourself for a controversial trip into the world of poultry farming. Ever wondered about the astonishing feed conversion rates of Cornish cross breed? It's a marvel, but not one without its dark side. We guide you through the complex breeding process behind these birds, the worrying health issues, and why their natural behavior is compromised. Explore the ethical conundrum of Cornish crosses and dig deep into the world of feed conversion. Strap in, this is going to be a captivating conversation!
Hi, welcome to the Poetry Keepers podcast. I'm Rip Stalvi and, together with Mandolin Royal and John Gunnerman, we're your co-hosts for this show and it's our mission to help you have a happy, healthy and productive flop. I've got a question for you folks Is there really a difference between a commercial meat bird and a heritage type dual-purpose bird? Is there a difference in flavor? Why? Why not? Well, coming up, we're going to explain it all to you. You know we hear so many times that other meats taste like chickens. I hear that's a lot about the alligator down here Tastes like chicken. That's not really a compliment because to me, the chickens you get in the store don't have any flavor to them.
Speaker 2:
None at all.
Speaker 1:
I had the pleasure to talk with Frank Rees at the APA National one year in Knoxville, tennessee. He and I were talking and he related a story to me that just kind of brought it all together about chicken flavor. He said that several years ago, probably 10 or 15 years ago now, this lady was talking to him in the grocery store and she was just beside herself. She said I just don't know what to do.
Speaker 1:
My husband keeps telling me he wants chicken like chicken and dumplings like my grandmother used to make, and I've tried every recipe I can find and he keeps saying it's not what I remember. It's not what I remember. And Frank told her. He said it's not the recipe you're using or how you're cooking it, it's the chicken that you're using. And he wound up giving her one of his barred rock chickens that the store handled there in Kansas. And she called him up the very next day and she said look, I would hug you next. She said for the first time. My husband said that tastes exactly like what I remember as a kid. He said it's the kind of chicken and the length of time they're grown before they're processed. Let me ask you a question for Mandolin and for John and they probably know the answer. I hope they know the answer, but how old are modern day parolers when they're processed?
Speaker 2:
Isn't there a range from six to 10 weeks, all depending on what they were going to use them for and if they were going to part them out or use them whole?
Speaker 3:
John, when you say modern day, I think of the Cornish Cross, and that's what I'm talking about. Yeah, we're chucking them in the freezer eight, nine weeks.
Speaker 1:
Most of those birds are six to eight weeks old when they're processed. Occasionally they go out beyond that.
Speaker 3:
Well, it doesn't make any financial sense to carry them past eight weeks. They're waking and everything just falls off dramatically, and you're lucky to keep them alive.
Speaker 1:
There's also the health issues that go along with those birds. I'll talk about that in just a little bit. When you look at the science of flavor profiles in a chicken, john, you're probably aware of this, being a chef, but chickens don't begin to develop much of a flavor until they're about nine weeks old. So they're processing these birds before they can develop any flavor. So the flavor of chicken modern day chickens, the Cornish cross is almost solely dependent on how they're prepared and what you season them with.
Speaker 3:
Definitely. The roosters don't have time for their testes to come in, and that hormone definitely changes the flavor of the meat as well. That's why recipes like Cocoa Ven exist, because that's your old, tough, really strong tasting rooster. You're going to simmer that for a long time in red wine and shallots and mushrooms.
Speaker 2:
Oh, and that recipe is worth it too. There's a real good one from Julia Childs.
Speaker 3:
I grew up on that and the first time, even in culinary school, we were using commercially available chickens from Cisco and Monarch and same in the restaurants. It wasn't until I did these classical preparations with a heritage bird that it was a whole different world. I went oh, this is what it's supposed to taste like.
Speaker 2:
I had tasted it before for my great-grandmother's chicken and dumplings, and then there was a long time where, after she passed away, no one was cooking chicken like that, and I probably made it 20 years before I got to taste a heritage bird again and I had forgotten all about that nuance to the flavor profile. It could taste like chicken, but it's like here Is that a word Chicken?
Speaker 3:
or steroids. Well, you also pick up what we call in the culinary world, terroir or taste of place, which directly translates into the flavoring of the meat, the protein sources that the animals are foraging on.
Speaker 2:
So if they're out in my yard that and the micronutrients that are in the soil that end up in the plant that end up in the bird.
Speaker 3:
Or end up in the bird's digestive tract, because that's all part of an ecosystem.
Speaker 1:
All the way through and all of that is a whole science in itself that you could spend a lot of time digesting on with that. But when did chicken flavor start to go south in this country? When the chicken changed oh well, yeah.
Speaker 3:
I think that was back in the 1950s, wasn't it? There was a chicken of tomorrow.
Speaker 1:
contest sponsored by a grocery store chain. You've been doing your homework. You know which grocery store chain.
Speaker 3:
For some reason I want to say Piggly, wiggly, just because I've been doing some research on them recently.
Speaker 1:
on another topic, Actually it was the Atlantic and Pacific TECOM A&P. A&p A&P markets I remember this and the first chicken at Tamar contest was held in 1946.
Speaker 3:
Earlier than I thought Okay.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, earlier than I thought when I looked it up. But the reason they started that chicken at Tamar contest actually it's us, that consumers, that was to blame for that because, starting after World War II, there was a real demand for groceries or vegetables and meat products that were all uniform in the way they looked and the way they prepared them. And it was not. I mean the chickens back then, fried sized chickens. They're dressed out about two, two and a quarter pounds, not these big behemoths that we get in the Cornish Cross birds now.
Speaker 3:
So well, you would purchase the bird for the intention that you had. Yeah, you were going to be making fried chicken. You'd buy a couple of smaller fries. If you were going to make a roast chicken dinner for your you know larger family, then you would get a roaster.
Speaker 1:
One of the size birds that threw me I was. I was got into a 1940s poultry cookbook and I looked at the different size categories of birds and I guess this would kind of equate to our modern Cornish game hands on the market. But they had a bird that they called a pigeon bird. Well, in the pigeon it was, it was the size of a pigeon, but it wasn't a squab, it was not a squab, it was a chicken.
Speaker 3:
So I was always wondering where did the the rock hen come in?
Speaker 1:
You know honestly, john, I haven't. I've looked for that and I don't have a good answer for you, but I think that it was a marketing ploy. They called them Cornish game hens because they were Cornish cross birds they were working with and they were about the size of a small Cornish game. Ban them, just my supposition. I can't back that.
Speaker 3:
We as a grocery clerk back in the late seventies stocking shelves, we called them rock hens because they were hard as a rock. They were always frozen.
Speaker 1:
They were never frozen, always frozen, yeah, yeah, and most of the chickens that our ancestors bought were always fresh.
Speaker 2:
They weren't frozen Sometimes they weren't even plucked yet.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, that's right. You could go into big cities like New York and Chicago had large live poultry markets where you could go down and walk down the rows of cages and you could pick out the birds you actually wanted and they would process them and you'd take them home and eat them. But you know, sadly, if we stop and think about it, we've only had about two generations or we've had not only, but we've had two generations of people who grew up not knowing what real chicken can taste like.
Speaker 2:
There is a pretty big difference too when you compare, like a six, seven, eight week old Cornish cross even to something a little longer grown like a red ranger. There's taste differences there.
Speaker 1:
Oh yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:
So when you're at the past 12 weeks of age, then the flavor really starts amping up. I'm not sure when it peaks, probably something like 20, 22 weeks.
Speaker 1:
About 20 weeks. 20, 21 weeks is when they say the flavor profile speak.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, and if you time it right and they're on rich pasture at that time of year, you can negate the additional costs and feed for keeping them longer past. You know most people are processing 18 to 20. But if they're outdoors they shouldn't in theory be consuming less of your ration and more of what's available for forage and developing more flavor in the process. It's almost. You know it's like pasture finishing does make a difference in beef, in chicken, you can taste the difference.
Speaker 1:
Absolutely, and you're aware of an animal that I really can taste the differences in pasture pork.
Speaker 2:
Oh yeah. Absolutely, I was so surprised when we processed a pig and that meat was red. What?
Speaker 1:
Well, I, the pork that I like the best, is the one that's been fattened in the fall and allowed to forage on acorns.
Speaker 2:
Oh yeah, acorn finish.
Speaker 1:
That is delicious.
Speaker 3:
We've got a couple of well-faced oak trees. Those ankle breaking acorns.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, just put the pigs on it, they'll clean it up in no time.
Speaker 1:
Yep, okay, this is a chicken. Back to chicken.
Speaker 3:
We've been talking about food and it's so easy for me to digress.
Speaker 1:
Oh, ain't that the truth? We talked a little bit about the grow out time and processing ages, and but let's compare that to feed conversions. So it takes about six to eight weeks to get a Cornish cross broiler up to market size. I hear this breed much longer than that 16 to 21 weeks of age. The average market size weight for Cornish cross six to six and maybe almost six and a half pounds. That's processed weight. But when we look at the feed conversion, that's what really grabs your attention. What we're talking about, feed conversion, it's how many pounds of feed does it take to put a pound of weight on those birds Right? The Cornish cross industry claims that they get about a two to one feed conversion rate. So for every pound of chickens they're feeding two pounds of feed to do it. That's astronomical.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, there's not a bird on the planet that can do that better?
Speaker 1:
No, but now we've got to remember too that this is under pretty tightly controlled conditions. High quality feed, air quality is controlled, water quality is controlled. They're controlling everything to give them the optimum environment and the optimum nutrition to grow those birds out in a hurry. John, you were talking about pasture poultry. I found a site and the feed conversion for Cornish cross on pasture situations 3.5 to one for every pound of flesh. The feed input three and a half pounds. That's an optimum weather.
Speaker 3:
That's pretty good by most standards.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, really is. And, mandolin, you were talking about freedom rangers, which is a. It's a modern meat cross but it's a slower growing meat cross than Cornish cross. That feed conversion is 5.2 to one. They also did a study where they compared heritage dark Cornish standard bread bird is 6.2 to one feed conversion rate. So people want to know why folks who sell pasture poultry get so much for the heritage birds they have to. I mean they can't, they cannot compete with the Cornish cross birds. They just simply can't do it. They've got a lot more feed and bring a heritage bird to market than they do the Cornish cross.
Speaker 3:
And time. Oh yes, I mean the Cornish cross. You could run three Cornish cross harvest in the same time. It would take to run two maybe Absolutely In the same space.
Speaker 2:
And with the same amount of feed.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, the flavor.
Speaker 2:
You don't get that I mean and the differences between them is why we're doing what we're doing with the American breast. It takes longer, but not too terribly long, but that flavor.
Speaker 3:
And the fact that we're not dependent upon the poultry industry to provide us. Yeah, you can't. Somebody just can't go out and get some Cornish cross chicks and start their own line. That's doomed for failure. It's designed to fail to protect the investment on the part of the breeder. We can keep our birds going indefinitely. As long as we provide, you know, sound breeding and husbandry practices, we're good. We don't need to keep going back to the well for more.
Speaker 2:
Well, on the Cornish cross, the breeding that's behind them, it's incredibly complex and they added in several different traits to end up with that. What are they? A four-way terminal cross hybrid. So there's four different parent flocks 16 way cross 16.
Speaker 1:
16 crosses have gone into making the modern Cornish cross that we eat.
Speaker 2:
Well, and that's to get the dwarf gene to shorten the bones up to get the expression of the double muscle gene. So they have twice as much meat on a frame that's half the size. And you can't reproduce that unless you do all of the steps they did to create it in the first place. You can't just go buy Cornish and White Rock, cross those together and get a Cornish cross. It's not going to be the same kind of bird.
Speaker 1:
Not at all. Not at all. And you were talking about the dwarfism gene. If you look at a Cornish cross carcass compared to one of Mandy's breasts, you're going to see right off that the breast has bigger legs and it has bigger wings. Yes, well, that's because a Cornish cross has a dwarf gene bred into it. Why did they do that? Well, they did it because the consumers demand for a meteor carcass, not so much legs, but they wanted more breast meat, wanted more breast meat. I always want the bigger breast meat. And not only did they breed in the dwarfism gene, they bred in an obesity gene. If you put those Cornish cross, if you're breeding them, you'll notice that a lot of them don't move very far at all from the feeder. Yeah, they just sit there and they eat and they eat and they eat and they eat. Well, that was by design. The more they eat, the faster they grow. The faster they grow, the sooner you can harvest them.
Speaker 2:
And the sooner you can harvest them, the more rotations you can run through the buildings, the more profit you can make within the year, sure, the more people who get fed.
Speaker 1:
And sadly, with the dwarfism gene, you're going to find that you get these shorter legs like we talked about in the shorter wings. Well, there's where all the leg problems in Cornish cross come from. They've got a small leg structure. They can't support that huge, obese body. That's why they have mobility issues. That's why they have heart issues.
Speaker 3:
That's why when you're moving your poultry mobile coupes, you actually have to go into the pan and move your Cornish crosses to the head of the coop. So they don't get rolled over by their apparatus, because a lot of times they're not even capable of locomotion.
Speaker 3:
Well, it's kind of sad to see they're just laying listless with their head in the feeder or the water room all day versus a healthy, vibrant, vigorous heritage poultry that's running around in the exact same pasture, these Cornish crosses at least in our case we had the doors wide open on their cages. They wouldn't even come out during the day. That vitality, I think, definitely translates to the meat and to the consumer.
Speaker 1:
I think Mandy would explain it. Here I go, putting words in her mouth. They have lost their ability to chicken.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, they don't chicken so well anymore.
Speaker 1:
Not at all.
Speaker 2:
It's another thing I thought it was worth mentioning too, because I see a lot of chatter about folks wanting to use them to hybridize into the normal heritage birds and try to find a balance and because of that, jorgen, you might waste maybe not waste it.
Speaker 2:
I mean, it'll be educational to experiment with the breeding to see how traits get expressed, but the moment that Jorgen kicks in, it's not going to have the same effect and all you're going to do is lose size. That'll happen like what? Three generations into this little project You'll start seeing yeah, it won't take long yeah.
Speaker 1:
Well, I talked to a hatchery about that one time, and I was talking about using the Red Rangers in a hypothetical cross with New Hampshire's and they said well, you can do that, but 25% of the chicks you're going to hatch are going to be dwarf. Yeah, because they have that same generation.
Speaker 3:
OK, so then we don't select the dwarf gene, or do we?
Speaker 2:
It can pop back in as a recessive later on, though, oh yeah, those grandparents recessive are always fun and great grandparents great grandparents and grand parents.
Speaker 1:
They all. All those crosses were made to incorporate the specific recessive genes into the terminal crosswords, and especially so that they spread at a specific time.
Speaker 3:
That's why there's these. You know, 16 different crosses at different stages. So that way, when this, when this recessive gene pairs with this, we're getting into polygenetics now. So you got two recessive genes on far ends that come together down here at the, the final hybrid level. That just works. But it only works at that level. You can't take it any further, otherwise it falls apart and you can't use it any earlier because it's not there in place yet.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, I just thought that was an important little tidbit. Before people go, well, I'll just make my own. It's a little bit complicated and sometimes the way it's designed you can't replicate it. That stuff's trademarked and protected but also preventing that fall apart of it later. I mean there's protocols.
Speaker 1:
Let me throw this one out there we have multiple, if you want to call it brand names of Cornish crossbirds. Out there, you've got Cobb, you've got Ventress, just on and on and on. But how many actual companies are involved in producing all these millions of broader chicks each year?
Speaker 3:
Following them all the way back to their mega corporation owners? Probably two, Exactly right.
Speaker 1:
Two companies control the genetics for the birds that are eaten worldwide.
Speaker 3:
And that's scary from a nutritional anthropological perspective, because every time we've based a food system around a single thing, it's fallen apart eventually. Yeah well, in history at least we're not going to repeat history though, because we're smarter than that, right, Right.
Speaker 1:
That cute John. Just think what disastrous results would be if they had a genetic issue tinkering with all these little recessive genes. But they had something popped up.
Speaker 2:
If they lose one piece of their pie, the whole thing collapses.
Speaker 3:
It all collapses. But it's feeding billions of people. It's working so far. How do we define working, though? It's working for the producers and people are getting a clean protein source, but there's really no freedom to the market, and you go to the market and you buy what's there. You don't have a choice.
Speaker 1:
Exactly right. We talked about age to maturity. We talked about flavor profiles. They started about nine weeks and they peak at about 20 weeks.
Speaker 2:
You know, actually, and I don't know, mandy, you may have run across this and John, you may have run across this, but it seems like some people actually have been on this industrial Cornish cross hybrid so long they don't like the taste of a heritage bird or the texture, because the other thing that changes with age is the texture of the meat and any bird that had time to go run and didn't park itself in front of a feeder, it's going to have denser muslin going on in the leg where it's leaner, just from being used, just from them being out there doing chicken things.
Speaker 1:
Texture is different too. That's where the flavor comes from too.
Speaker 2:
Right yes, increased blood flow Pui and you're emphasizing, the protein is building muscle.
Speaker 3:
That's that's what happens physiologic. Yeah, yeah so isn't the muscle gonna be built out of the protein source and carry that flavor with it?
Speaker 1:
But think so, and I know this is something you work with and you talk about a lot with breast and on your breast group, but you talked about the texture of the meat I I'd like for you and John, because I know he's a chef and he's hands-on experience with all this stuff, as Do you man, but what do you see as a major textural differences?
Speaker 2:
It's almost like.
Speaker 2:
It's the fiber of the muscle and I think I recall doing some reading when there's two different types of how they could be muscled up. You can be short fiber or long fiber. So if you take the thigh section off of a Cornish cross and you start shredding that meat, it shreds pretty finely, it's not like a really long strand. But when you shred down the meat from the thigh of a heritage bird, that strand of meat will run from one end to the other. You almost have to cross cut it if you're going to chop it small for like a chicken salad or something like that. But you can see that difference of how the fibers are put together when you're getting into the thighs. Especially the breast meat is pretty similar one from another. You can see some variation between breeds, like once you start going through all the different heritage breeds even You'll see different ways of how that Muscling is, where it's located and then what the strands are like when you start breaking those birds down after cooking.
Speaker 3:
The diversity there is kind of incredible really and then you can get really geeky and bust out your little magnifying glass and start checking for the intermuscular fat deposition.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, self-buttering birds.
Speaker 1:
Hey, do I sense a rabbit hole coming up here? Thank you for joining us this week and, before you go, make sure you subscribe to our podcast so you can receive new episodes Right when they're released and they're released every Tuesday. And if you're enjoying this podcast, we'd like to ask you to drop us an email at poultry keepers podcast at gmailcom and share your thoughts about the show. So thank you again for joining us for this episode of the poultry keepers podcast. We'll see you next week.