Can You Eat Roosters?

The short answer is yes!

However, there are some caveats.

Depending on breed, age, how you're feeding them, ect... you may or may not want to.

If you search the internet you'll find conflicting opinions on this.

Some people raise broilers and only raise males so they fill out faster. These are usually killed and packaged at a pretty young age so the taste and texture of the meat isn't much different than their female counterparts might be.

But what about older roosters?

I'm going to chalk this one up to personal preference. Older roosters tend to have meat that is tougher. So I'll share what I've been doing with them so that we get the most out of what we have and aren't wasting life unnecessarily.

Recently I culled 4 roosters. They were mostly leghorn with some other genes in them I'm unsure of. They grew and acted like leghorn.

You can see they have some buff coloring. Maybe from some colored leghorn genes or from a different breed. Unsure.

I'm not that fond of this breed. They aren't that nice in my experience, sort of act like tweakers. They also grow a bit lanky for my preference and lay white eggs. I like color in my birds also so having an only white bird would be cool to me only if there was something really special about them. To me though, leghorn isn't a very special breed.

That said, we had 4 extra that we weren't going to breed to get stock up so we decided to eat them.

Here's what I learned from that experience.

First of all, since we have 0 money, and have had to attempt to feed our chickens with food stamps, I've been very limited on what I can feed them.

After a ton of research I found that oats are about the best grain to feed if you can only feed one thing. But they lack the protein level that the birds really need.

So I feel like my birds grew up small. They were never sick, injured or seeming malnourished, they were just small.

After culling them, the average dressed weight was only 2.5 lb each.

That's a pretty small bird. It was hard to even fit my hand inside the cavity for evisceration.

We're so insanely poor that we decided to eat them and see how it goes though.

So we dressed them and put them in the freezer until the other day when we finally decided to start eating them.

Look guys, unless you're as poor as we are, your not going to like eating roosters.

That said, there could be breeds, ages, types of feed, that can change my thoughts on this.

Leghorn though, fed with only 11-13% protein for a year, you won't like.

After boiling for an hour plus, it was almost impossible to chew through the leg and wing meat. The breast meat was tolerable at beat.

After the second meal I made with the rooster meat I decided to not eat even the breast meat. Even as poor as we are I just figured out ways to use it so we weren't wasting it at least.

My big thing with chickens is broth.

I wrote a series of posts a while back called The 50 Cent Meal. Where I show how to create meals for 30 cents each, actually.

In the case of these roosters these were not 50 cent meals. After feeding them for a year and losing our entire stock to a dog, if I were to figure the amount we spent in feed, divided by the amount of total dressed weight we got after the year... this would be 100 dollar a pound meat!

Anyway, in The 50 Cent Meal series, I share how much food/nutrients you can really get from a single chicken. Mostly by getting the most you can out of broth.

So, we decided to go with broth as the main way to use what we've got here.

You can get an immense amount of broth from a couple of chickens. Even small ones like this.

The truth is that you can keep pulling broth from chicken, bones, cartilage, skin for quite some time and each time still pull plenty of nutrients. The nutrient level does go down some as you continue to pull broth but it's a great way to really get the most out of chicken. Especially chicken that's otherwise to tough or something.

How to make broth.

This couldn't be easier. It's essentially chicken tea. (You can do anything you see me doing with chicken, with nearly any other animal)

Throw chicken in pot and fill pot with water.

Boil that pot of chicken in water for like an hour. I would do half hour at least. Half hour is pretty good for first boil. Boil longer on each successive boil. (Remember, mom says "Boil it till it don't taste like chicken anymore!" Lmao.)

Strain that broth.

Before using, add salt to taste. (It takes a lot of salt to get homemade broth to taste good. Don't be shy here)

That's it, that's broth making.

If you're now thinking about things like how much chicken per water and all that...

Chill...

Slow down...

Stop over thinking.

Boil the chicken in water. Use the water.

Seriously though, don't just boil it once.

Boil that chicken, or carcass, again and again in new water. It's a total waste to only boil once.

Anyway, that's it, broth is so super easy to make (and so stupid cheap) that there's literally no reason to ever buy it.

Now, if you're the type of person that never prepares meals, or ingredients for meals, in advance this is of no use to your at all. Because you're not storing your extra food production.

Ok, back to using the roosters.

We made a ton of broth. 6 gallons from 3, 2.5 lb dressed birds. I easily could've made more. We couldn't really afford to store more though.

I'll tell you this, you will never know the difference in broth from roosters vs hens. It's literally the same. This makes broth potentially the best way to use a tough bird. This is also the reason you'll hear the term "soup chicken", or "soup hen". People are saying with this, that the meat is likely tough, yet will make good broth.

We canned the broth we made, minus a gallon or two for chicken noodle soup.

We decided not to eat any of the meat after the second batch of chicken noodle, having this time not used any of the leg or wing meat.

But we didn't waste it.

After boiling the first time we took all 3 boiled chickens (Pic only shows 2)...

Pulled the meat and separated into 3 sections. Breast meat, leg and wing (with anything not bone), bone.

I boiled the bone pile again. This time I went 3 hours to try to pull marrow and more of the collagen. (Since we weren't collecting more broth this time)

Then I pulled all the other stuff I could from the bones and having no more places to put broth I tossed the bones.