I have a couple of budget recipe books and have noticed a number of the recipes call for 1 cup or 1 1/2 cups of shredded BBQ chicken. Now obviously part of budget cooking is making good use of leftovers, but this one leftover we rarely have. For us it tends to be a dinner after shopping, so we make up chicken and salad rolls or grab a bag of oven fries. The sometimes is enough leftover to make sandwich for DH's lunch, which takes priority.

So I was wondering, those of you with 4 or more in your family, do you ever have left over BBQ chook, or if you do, is there even enough to make up a cup or more? I am wondering whether we just eat too much.
Astrid, if I was going to make something that specifically asked for that much BBQ chook I would have to buy one. We need 2-3 BBQ chooks to feed all of us for a meal so there are no leftovers. I just buy them now specifically for cold meat/lunches, not buy one and use it with the expectation that there will be enough left over.

They are more bantam sized these days though LOL. But there are no 'frankenchickens' Larger chickens are a result of selective breeding to only breed from hens which are large themselves. Plus there is the whole 'harvesting' of smaller chickens to meet a particular market. When we sell our sheep at market, we have to 'grow' our lambs to meet what the buyers are after, otherwise they either wont buy them, or they wont pay a premium for them. So we would produce what we called 'supermarket lambs', that is, lambs of the right size that the big supermarket buyers were after, which were a lot smaller than something a butcher would buy. But lately the trend seems to have changed and the supermarkets are after heavier lambs with more fat on them. It would probably be a bit different when dealing with chickens because the companies that produce the chickens are also growing them, but they would still be dictating the size that they are turning them off at.

And Astrid, you are exactly right when you say

There would be a point where it would be not profitable to raise a chook beyond a certain age.
That makes a huge difference. Again we see this with sheep. Some farmers sell lambs for record prices, but they may have spent an extra $50 per head to get them to that size and get the top dollar, thus reducing their over-all profit margin. The trick is to turn them off at the best possible size to keep your overheads to a minimum and therefore get the best profit margin. This would definitely be applied to chicken production considering that the bulk of what they eat has to be brought at a cost to the producer.

Sorry to take the thread OT, but it may help some people understand how these things work.