Got to get around to attempting Heston Blumenthal's method for slow roasting (or, I suppose, sous vide) a chicken (60*, four hours after a day of being brined and another day of sitting uncovered in the fridge). I want to use a good quality chicken as, really, there's no point going to all that effort for a $6 mass produced bird. You can only improve a dodgy chicken so much. Rubbish in. Rubbish out.
Enter the chook of the Barossa Valley, bred and marketed by one Saskia Beer. I bought mine at Thomas Dux in Armadale but I've seen them elsewhere, too--David Jones Food Hall, from memory. It's a weeknight and I worked today so I wasn't up for four hours of roasting at a low temperature or fucking around. Flash bird but my standard roasting method: herb (in this case, parsley) butter, salt, pepper, a 180*C oven.
The price I was, I'd say, comparable to any free range bird. For roughly $20 you get a bird that'll feed four people if you serve it with veg and other stuff or two people if you're too lazy to prepare much in the way of sides and hungry. I was lucky and got mine for $15. The best before was today and they'd marked it down.
Plain and simple: this is good chicken. It's better than any chicken I've bought (and I've sampled most of the free range and organic varieties I've come across). The chickens are expensive because they live to roughly twice the age of regular chickens. They're fed all good stuff. The end result is a bit that's little tougher than what you're used of, probably, but juicier and more flavoursome. I wouldn't go to that expense if I was making a chicken curry or some elaborate sauce--a Lilydale free ranger from Coles would do the job there--but for simple roasts and braises (like that excellent saffron and egg yolk one in the original MoVida cookbook) it's worth the extra money.
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