OK, so I've done some educational posts in the past. I won't redo this one, but I'll post it here. If you want to learn about the different breeds of chickens and what makes a meat breed and what makes a laying breed... read this old post here.
But as usual, let me give you a little story first.
It's been almost 10 years since we moved to the farm. Both of us have farming in our roots, but it's mostly farming, not ranching. (Those are two more foggy definitions... farmers grow crops, ranchers raise livestock, not sure if chickens count...) My grandpa ran a potato farm in Mid-Michigan. Larry's grandpa grew wheat on the Eastern Plains of Colorado. I am sure our grandmas and great-grandmas raised a few chickens here and there.
Prior to living on the farm, we bought chicken at the store like all good suburbanites. I knew chickens by their cuts - boneless breasts, wings and legs, and I usually only bought boneless breasts! So when we did move to the farm, and started raising meat birds, people were asking us if we had any fryers or roasters.
What the heck? What was the difference? We had meat birds, often called broilers, and we have egg layers that we butcher for meat as well. We usually call those stew hens. So what were we missing?
Here's the short answer from the article linked above.
Broilers: Chickens 6 to 8 weeks old and weighing about 2 1/2 pounds
Fryers: Chickens 6 to 8 weeks old and weighing 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 pounds
Roasters: Chickens less than 8 months old and weighing 3 1/2 to 5 pounds
Stewing Chickens: Chickens (usually hens) over 10 months old and weighing 5 to 7 pounds
Capons: Castrated males that weigh 6 to 8 pounds
OK, so let me put my spin on it, and don't forget, you'll get more details from the linked article above. Here's what I know now about chicken meat - the older the bird, the more FLAVOR the meat has, but the tougher the meat becomes. Too young and you'll have no flavor. Too old and you're chewing leather.
This is a weird list. Basically young birds are considered Broilers or Fryers. Size makes the difference between the two. Most of our birds don't butcher out much lower than 3.5 lbs. Roasters can be a bit older and a bit bigger. OK, that seems to fit ALL of our birds. We generally butcher our Cornish Crosses at 8.5 to 9 weeks. We butcher out the Rangers at 12-14 weeks and most of our birds are 3.5 to 5 lbs in size. So there you have it, ours are apparently roasters. Birds less than 16 weeks when butchered can be cooked any way you want to! Roast, broil, fry, grill, stir fry, curry, you name it.
Now stewing chickens, yup, they have that right. But honestly, our egg laying hens don't get to 5 lbs, they are usually about 3 years old, and they weigh out around 3-4 lbs. That would be very breed dependent. Rhode Island Reds are a medium sized breed. You could have MUCH larger stew birds from Jersey Giants, and so much smaller stew hens from Polish or Phoenix, or definitely any bantam breed is going to be very very teeny. I do butcher my Rhode Island Roosters. It's a by product of hatching my own replacements, I get a bunch of roos! I don't wait until they are 10 months, I grab them around 6 months. 6 Months is still long enough that the meat is tough, but flavorful. Stewing birds should not be cooked in any fashion. Grill, fry, roast - you'll be eating leather. Tasty leather, but still leather. These birds are best cooked in the crock pot - make soup or broth out of them, or a long slow coq al vin. I put mine in the crock pot all day with veggies. I strain the liquid for broth. I pull the meat off the chicken and mix it into casseroles or the like - macaroni and cheese, chicken pot pie, things like that.
Capons - nope we don't do that. Supposedly when you Capon a cockerel, they grow bigger and they shouldn't be aggressive. A eunuch chicken, if you will. Caponing is removing their testicles when they are about 3 days old. I've watched videos on this and read how to do it, and I won't. Basically, you take a rooster chick, make a teeny very precise cut on its side, go in with tweezers and pull out two tiny testicles that you can barely see. And you let them grow up with no testes, and supposedly they grow bigger.
There are a few problems here. One is that at 3 days old you might not know your roosters from your hens, unless you have a sexlink breed. The other issue is this is a very small baby animal, you have to know exactly where to cut and exactly where to pull those testes from. This is not like banding a ram lamb - bird testicles are NOT on the outside of their bodies.
And while I am at it, here are a few other poultry terms:
Cute fluffy little baby chickens are CHICKS. Turkey babies are POULTS and baby ducks are DUCKLINGS. Just to clear that up. Baby chicks are chicks until they start growing in their feathers. As an aside, I will only be selling chicks (poults and ducklings) this year. Once they reach 3 weeks and are fully feathered, they get introduced to my flock and are no longer available for sale.
A female chicken, before it reaches maturity, is called a pullet. This is usually between 3 weeks and 6 months of age, or until they start laying. At the point of lay, the bird is now called a hen.
A male chicken, before it reaches maturity is called a cockerel. This can be from 3 weeks to a 6-8 months. Usually once they start crowing you can start calling them a rooster.
OK folks, what did I miss, when it comes to bird words? The Bird IS THE WORD, this I know... but let me know if there are other chicken related terms I didn't discuss here...