Roasting a Pastured Heritage Chicken in a Dutch Oven

3/6/2020

This photo is courtesy of our customer Jeff Cooper of Vancouver, BC. He sent us this picture with the note "The bird was a success! I ended up cooking it at 350 over veggies and with a little water, like your mother in law recommended."

To cook in the oven using a Dutch oven, set the temperature at 350 deg F with a little bit of water to prevent the bird from drying out. Cook a 4 lb bird for around 2 hours or play it by ear with the cooking time, there is no definite math to it. If you plan to cook on stove top, we suggest you put more water than if you plan to cook it in the oven.

Dutch oven tip & recipe variation from our regular customer R.L. of Chilliwack, BC:

Use a relatively low temperature, eg 300 deg F, and it would take somewhere in the neighbourhood of 2 hours. For best results, brown it first on top of the stove, and then toss in a bunch of shallots and whatever else you want.

He added: “I should add, browning the chicken on the stove you’ll naturally need tongs to hold the bird. I actually hold it with my bare hands sometimes, but your other customers are probably smarter than that.”

Another Dutch oven tip from Modern Farmer website:

A Dutch oven is an excellent tool for roasting a heritage-breed chicken. The large, heavy, lidded pot is designed to retain moisture over long periods of oven cooking. Place the chicken, breast-side down to keep it moist, in the Dutch oven with quartered onions, garlic cloves, a cup of water and some butter. Roast it for 30 minutes per pound at 325 degrees F.

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Welcome to our Recipe Page!

Thank you for your interest in pasture raised birds. It's so hard to find recipes for heritage pasture raised birds without having to look for pre-1950's cook books, so we've decided to create this recipe page to compile recipes tailored just for pastured chickens. Recipes come from family, friends and our customers. This is a good guide for new cooking ideas for homesteaders/farmers raising chickens or for foodies/cooks who are curious to try pasture raised poultry.

If you have a good recipe you would like to share, please send it our way and we will post it on this recipe page.

Pastured poultry is an integral part of our rare breed and heritage chicken preservation efforts. Thank you for doing your part in helping us preserve for the future.

“For more information and recipes well suited to all the traditional meats that can be produced from the historic breeds of chickens, look to old cookbooks from before the 1950s. Here are some favorites mentioned in Gina Bisco's Rediscovering Traditional Meats from Historic Chicken Breeds:

Fowl and Game Cookery, by James Beard,1944.

Better Homes and Gardens Cook Book, 1941.

The Modern Family Cookbook, by Meta Given, 1942

Let's Cook It Right, by Adelle Davis, 1947, 1962, 1970."Write something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview.

Recipes for Pasture Raised Heritage Chicken

"In cooking pastured birds, there's something you should know: throw all that you think you know about cooking chicken out the window. We're talking about cooking chickens that lived like chickens; rather than a shorter life in a barn, you're about to prepare a bird that has been running around on a field and has the legs of a sprinter. Dark meat is where a lot of the flavour is. That's where a good chicken recipe transforms into a great one!"

-from our long time cusotmer D.S. of Vancouver, BC