Do you ever have leftover BBQ chook?

the size of bbq chooks has definitely decreased over the past couple of years (that i've noticed!). i know our local shop decreased the size of the chickens when new owners took over (to increase profit without increasing price) - they're now similar in size to red rooster chickens (which i consider to be on the small size) when they used to be at least a couple of sizes bigger.

i find the only way to get value from a bbq chicken now is to be lucky enough to be at woolworths when they're clearing them out for a few dollars, take them straight home, strip them and freeze the meat for cooking later. otherwise we stick to buying the breast fillets on special and stock up!

For those talking about the decrease in size, yep you are exactly right. Bigger sized chickens are much harder to come by, from a purchasing perspective. At work, we struggle to get anything over a size 16 (1.65kg) these days & we buy them in bulk as we're a distributor, so I can understand that the retail seller would have even bigger problems getting them.

Thank goodness it is not just us! Roast chook is pretty much all everyone will eat here and we rarely have leftovers....mind you I am trying to serve up and hide the rest as DH manages to eat it all 'cos it 'tastes good' regardless!!!!

I wonder if there is a struggle to keep up with demand, so they are not letting them grow as big, or maybe there is a cost reason. A certain weight where they get the most profit per bird.

I don't feel so bad now about us eating a whole bird. Thanks Ladies :D

Well that explains it Sarah... We used to get size 18 or 20 chickens growing up. And they were always frozen steggles chooks. I buy fresh chicken so I very rarely look at the weight - bad me! The weird thing is I find Marylands are way too big these days. How bizarre.

So I wonder what constitutes a "large" chicken these days.

It the joys of the frankenchickens. I notice that the ones we have raised ourselves are a different shape to the store bought ones, the last one fit better into the pot sideways.

As there is just the 3 of us eating, we usually have enough left over for DH to take a roast chicken sandwich the next day. Not a lot of leftovers. I rarely buy the BBQ chooks as they seem so small for the $$$.

I remember the chooks use to bigger as mum could feed our family of six and still have leftovers. These days she goes the lamb roasts instead to feed us all for Sunday lunch.

Rouge, the fresh ones will tend to be bigger because the companies get a bigger profit from fresh over frozen.

Astrid, chicken prices are calculated at a per kilo rate, so the size doesn't make a difference to the profit, but because they get a bigger profit for fresh chickens it makes more sense to keep the bigger ones fresh & freeze the smaller ones IYKWIM.

I understand that the sale price per kilo would be the same, but the cost may not be. (Sorry this is the Economics/Business training in me). The cost to raise the chook would not be the same for each 100grams in weight it puts on. Costs are not linear. There would be a point where it would be not profitable to raise a chook beyond a certain age.

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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.

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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

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There would be a point where it would be not profitable to raise a chook beyond a certain age.

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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.

Thanks for a bit of an inside look a the food production industry Trillian.

Being single, yes I do, but I use it for lunches, or quiche or something.
I am a bit tight when it comes to the BBQ chook purchase - I tend to only buy when they've got a broken one they are selling off cheap! They are always properly cooked because they've broken in half when getting them out of the oven!