Not to be deterred I decided to contact local breeders to find out how I could get my hands on some rare-breed chicken to cook with. It wasn't easy! There are a significant number of farmers and hobbyists who keep interesting breeds of hens for laying eggs but none I could find that keep them for their meat. It takes a lot of time and effort to get weight on these birds and as there is no demand for them, not in Northern Ireland anyway, farmers aren't going to waste their time. 

That being said my experience of farmers who keep rare and native breeds are they're generally up for a challenge and finally I did find a guy who agreed to keep some table birds for me (thanks Andrew). Andrew keeps all his female hens for laying eggs but the male roosters, as I'm sure you can guess, don't lay eggs so a lot of them are discarded (if y'know what I mean) at a young age. Andrew set aside a number of birds for me and agreed to feed them up for me until they were ready to fly the nest and large enough to make a good roast.

That's the story of how I ended up with seven Sussex roosters in my freezer. It took them over 8 months to get up to size (compared to the 2 months our Hubbard hens take) but in my mind the slower the growth the greater the flavour, so I'm pretty excited to taste them!

There'll be more blog posts over the next few months detailing what I do with the chickens so come back to find out how I get on.

Until then…

Joel