Sourced: Where good chicken comes from

At this time of year, I develop a hankering for fried chicken that must be satisfied. Yet I can’t find a bird in my nearby grocery store that measures up to how I prepare the Southern mainstay.

Americans have gotten so used to overfed, factory-raised specimens that we have come to identify chicken by its seasonings rather than its inherent flavor. What do we really mean when we proclaim that something “tastes like chicken”?

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• Where to find Evensong Farm chickens

Usually it’s not a compliment.

Thanks to producers such as Julie Stinar at Evensong Farm in Sharpsburg, Md., it doesn’t have to be that way. She pasture-raises Cornish Cross and Poulet Rouge birds that look, feel and taste superior to what you generally find in a supermarket or at many farmers markets.

When those two packaged broilers are placed side by side, you can see that the Cornish Cross is plumper and whiter, with a large, rounded breast and thick legs. The Poulet Rouge has a gamier appearance; the skin has a lilac hue, with dark dots where the feathers were. The flesh is darker, the thighs and drumsticks longer and the breast meat narrower.

More-developed muscle and less fat so enhances the flavor of pasture-raised chickens that they are worth their premium cost: close to $20 for a 3 1/2-pound bird. Bear in mind, however, that the meat is naturally firmer than what you might be used to. They therefore especially benefit from brining, marinating or poaching.

On the sunny, not-so-humid August morning I visited Evensong Farm, Stinar’s red-combed, auburn-feathered Poulet Rouge birds seemed content to bawk, walk and lounge under a patch of shade trees rising from sloping pastureland. They snacked freely on the occasional insect and from the buffet bins stocked with a 16 percent protein feed that is specially blended for them.

Stinar’s goal with all of her animals is to provide an environment that’s as stress-free as possible. For a broiler, that life begins as one of 200 day-old, mail-order chicks from a hatchery. They spend 2 1/2 to three weeks in an indoor brooder. From there, they go into portable pens on pastureland; the small Quonset-hut-like, wire-and-wooden structures have gravity-based water systems, a feeder and a plastic covering to provide shelter.

“We move them around from field to field,” say Stinar. “The amount of fertility they are able to put on the pasture is phenomenal.”

Two dogs guard against predators.

After two or three weeks, when the birds are too large to dash through a fence, they are free to roam the pasture.

It takes Stinar’s Cornish Cross broilers eight to 10 weeks to reach a carcass weight of 3½ to 4½ pounds; for Poulet Rouge, 12 to 14 weeks. Cornish Cross are therefore cheaper to produce. In the summer, though, she doesn’t raise Cornish Cross, having learned the hard way that they don’t do well in the heat.

As a self-described suburban girl from Kensington and a former visual merchandiser for Nordstrom, Stinar had no agricultural expertise to draw upon. Yet her natural love of animals and gardening led her to farming.