What makes a good chicken?

There are a lot of ways to describe chicken these days. Free-range, pasture-raised, organic, air-chilled, antibiotic-free, no added hormones. You can find plenty of labels on a package of chicken. But strip all of that away for a minute and ask a simpler question:

What actually makes a good chicken?

The answer starts long before the chicken reaches your kitchen. It starts with the bird.

Like any animal, a chicken is shaped by the way it grows. How quickly, what it eats, how much room does it have. Does it spend its days packed into a building, or does it have the opportunity to scratch, peck, forage, dust bathe, chase bugs and move around?

Those things don't exist in separate boxes. They're all part of the life of the animal, and that life eventually becomes the food on your plate.

Basically, chickens are meant to do more than eat from a feeder.

Walk out to a healthy pasture and watch chickens for a while. They don't just stand around eating. They scratch through the soil, peck at plants, hunt for insects, and generally wander from one thing to the next. They're curious.

That's what a chicken does when given the opportunity to behave like a chicken.

Pasture isn't simply a pretty backdrop behind the barn. It gives chickens another environment to interact with, and that matters to us because raising animals well means paying attention to the animal, not just the end product.

Then there's the food.

Chickens are natural foragers, but that doesn't mean they can live on grass alone. They need a balanced diet to grow well. So while our chickens have access to pasture and the things they can find there, they also receive the nutrition they need to develop properly.

But the one thing that matters the most is time.

One of the strange things about modern food is how much we've come to expect everything to happen quickly and on some pre-conceived timeline. Dinner should cook quickly and food should be cheap and everything should taste exactly the same every time.

But animals don't always fit neatly into that system. A chicken is a living organism. The way it grows affects the food it becomes. That's one reason we don't think raising good chicken is simply about checking a box that says “pasture-raised.”

The bigger question is what happens during all those days between the chick arriving on the farm and the chicken arriving in your freezer.

Of course, raising a good chicken is only half the story too. You can start with a wonderful bird and still turn it into a dry, flavorless dinner. 

Chicken has a reputation for being boring, but we've always thought that was more of a cooking problem than a chicken problem. There are many ways to cook chicken, from thighs browned in a skillet to chicken simmered into soup on a cold afternoon. Some of the best ways to cook chicken aren't particularly complicated. They simply respect the food.

So we're back to the original question: What makes a good chicken?

It's not just one thing. It's the bird and its genetics, its diet, its movement and foraging, the environment around it, and the farmer paying attention. It's giving the animal the time and care it needs to grow. And, eventually, it's what you do with it in the kitchen.