Whatever about the bird, just taste the gravy. When I first cooked one of the Ballybrado organic chickens, now available through Tesco supermarkets, I cooked it in the simplest way imaginable, simply placing it in a heavy casserole dish with a splash of water, a white onion sliced in half and an unpeeled head of garlic. I cooked it at a high heat for about 20 minutes, then turned the heat down slightly until the bird was ready, which took about an hour all told. I turned off the heat, opened the oven door and let the chicken rest.
The skin around the breast had browned beautifully, and the skin was still firm and nicely chewy. The onions had softened and caramelised nicely, the garlic was spreadably sweet and delicious. The chicken was firm and still weighty, and it carved beautifully. The breast meat was firm and tender and pale white, the brown meat on the legs and thighs was even better. But, oh my goodness, the gravy.
With no more than a splash of water used, the bird had exuded the most heavenly, dark brown gravy. I simply spooned off the fat from on top, and there, without a trace of work, was a rich, viscous, perfectly-textured gravy. It was perfect with the bird for that dinner, and next day, when I made a chicken and mushroom pie, it formed the perfect basis for cooking the meat under a lid of pastry.
From a relatively smallish chicken, we had one dinner, one large and two small chicken pastry pies, two good chicken sandwiches the next day, and there was still enough for two chicken tortillas the following day. When the carcass was cleared, I made a chicken stock for a risotto, which was splendidly flavourful.
It is important to mention the myriad uses to which the Ballybrado bird was put, for these chickens are not cheap. The bird cost just under £13 - a lot compared to a standard chicken. But aside from its versatility, the bottom line with the Ballybrado bird was that it produced the most gorgeous, dense, flavourful meat. I am fortunate to be able to buy fine chickens from a local producer, but this was in another class altogether. The sheer weightiness and firm bone structure of the chicken was the most significant difference between good conventional chickens and the organic chicken.
The Ballybrado chickens are imported from France. There, their feed meal is both vegetarian and organic, using no meat and bone meal, and it includes specialities such as linseed, sesame seed, maize and calcified seaweed. No antibiotics or conventional medicines are used, and salmonella are absent.
This is a far cry from the standard picture, as outlined by Maureen Tatlow in her book, Good Enough to Eat? (Gill and Macmillan), which lists the horrifying statistics of modern poultry production: in 1996 36 per cent of poultry samples contained salmonella; 56 per cent contained camplyobacter; where it once took 84 days to rear a chicken, that figure has been cut in half by production methods which also routinely dose the animals with antibiotics. Tatlow also points out that so-called "free-range" chickens are in fact reared in flocks of up to 20,000 birds, and will be slaughtered at between 50 and 60 days - before the flavour has had time to fully develop.
All of this is bad, but Josef Finke, of Ballybrado, points out something potentially much worse. "Research carried out in Holland and Germany has shown that 40 per cent of turkey farmers carried antibiotic-resistant bacteria in their own body system. The same applied to workers at the abattoir. However, the stunning fact was that 14 per cent of the neighbours of those turkey farmers carried those antibiotic resistant bacteria in their system. Imagine you need antibiotics and they do not work anymore . . ."
Ballybrado Organic Chickens are available through Tesco supermarkets