In Bangladesh, we had scrawny little chickens that you'd buy live at the market. When we moved to the U.S. I couldn't eat chicken for 6-9 months because it just tasted so bland and flavorless.
Curiously, in the U.S., chickens are bread for breast meat. Growing up here, I never really got a taste for dark meat until I was in my 20s. My grandmother always preferred it.
My wife, from South Korea, also grew up with non-U.S. chickens and also likes dark meat. She'll pretty much refuse to eat white meat unless there's no other option.
Now that my tastes have grown and become more sophisticated, I have a strong preference for dark meat now and I love to cook with it. I had a chicken breast sandwich recently, for the first time in years, and almost didn't finish it it was so dry and bland.
We get dark meat free range chicken thighs from a food delivery service in Baltimore. A bit expensive at $5 per pound, but unbeatably flavorful marinated in curry powder + brown sugar or garlic + red chili paste and grilled (with thai peanut sauce obviously). I don't even get the point of white meat chicken unless it's fried.
Costco sells huge packages of deboned chicken thighs cheap. I use them these days instead of breasts, pan fried in salted butter and rosemary. About $2.50-3.50/lb.
Probably not as good as your free range, but cheaper for a dinner party.
Back home in South Carolina, we had apple trees in our front yard. Never used any pesticides or anything, just let them grow. Anyway, they were about half the size of grocery apples, almost completely covered in insect bites, and tasted like ass. Incredibly sour, strangely dry, and very little sweetness. So thank god for pesticides and Fuji apples.
South Carolina is kind of outside the range of apple cultivation unless you plant a specialized heat-tolerant variety. We have apple trees in the back yard, which we grow without pesticides or fertilizer, and the results are "okay". Small, but tasty, not a whole lot of production. You're better off growing peaches here. We stock up on apples whenever we drive through the mountains of North Carolina, which are just right for apples.
I live in BC, Canada, and here you can find apples, a large variety of berries, pears, plumbs... All growing in random open areas and all delicious and relatively pest free without any pesticides. Even though a lot of those aren't native they seem to do pretty well. Perhaps the fact they're not grown commercially in this area helps... I grew up in Israel where pests were definitely more of a problem but you could still grow many different fruits without using pesticides and I used to pick many fruit off trees for eating... (Mangoes, oranges, and many more). Some of those "large" grocery apples have no taste and a floury texture though we do get some local apples in season here that are good...
Monocultures is a big problem. If you have a good mix you're less likely to have serious issues. It can still happen but less likely. You also need to take care of your trees, prune them, water them etc. if you want to get good fruit... Just let them grow doesn't always work...
probably a "real" apple tree. Most apple varieties are created by grafting a branch of an existing variety onto a new tree. Thats why despite genetic variation, they taste pretty much the same.
It's not my experience that apple varieties in the grocery taste "pretty much the same." Maybe you meant something else?
Apple trees are grafted because the best-tasting varietals don't form the most hardy root system. You put the good-tasting apple tree on top and the hardy strain on the bottom (to become the roots)
Each variety tastes the same (a golden delicious apple tastes like other golden delicious apples).
The grafting does that among other things "Maintain consistency". A hardy root system that you mention is one.
I started looking into it because my dad has a giant apple tree thats much bigger than the ones I've seen in an orchard, but the apples taste surprisingly bitter.
I guess another reason they like grafting is the trees stay smaller and its easier to pick the fruit.
You can find yellow-hair chicken and other breed at some Asian markets. I like the Asian markets, especially because it's trivial to get a variety of breeds and cuts, but it's much harder to get any sort of provenance info about their meat products, which is a little concerning.
Also, if you are willing to try other animals, you can get quite a bit more flavor out of quail and most duck I've gotten is fine. The problem with that is you will rarely, if ever, see these products fresh. I still haven't gotten into rabbit, some day.
For me personally, I've got about 5 different places I get meat from depending, including a CSA meat club.
We moved out to a small acreage two years ago and raised our first batch of pastured chickens. Totally different tasting bird, I agree it's hard to go back to mass-produced after that.
I would argue though, that the breed of bird isn't as important as the method of production. I've had standard cornish rock cross that were pastured and they tasted amazing. I've also had heritage dual purpose breeds and more modern "forager" breeds like the freedom ranger.
All tasted excellent, even the cornish X which are what you would get at a grocery store. The feed and pasture make the difference.
You just brought back memories of getting home from school and slamming a plate of "deshi murgi bhuna" and rice.
I always found it interesting that the scrawny and flavorful chickens co-existed with the bland and plump ones. Haven't been back in a few years, so I wonder if this is still the case or if the "farm murgi" has taken over domestic consumption.
