Free-Range Chicken : Once-Lowly Fowl Getting Fancy Price

The “free-range chickens,” the chickens that sell for up to three times as much as less active fowl, the chickens that supposedly taste better because of their natural diet and regular jaunts around the barnyard, were not ranging.

They were locked inside their houses, dozing, side by side, or hovering together by the feeders. From a distance, no chickens were discernable, only a sea of white feathers, with the red beaks and combs bobbing like buoys.

Bart Ehman, who has a contract with a commercial chicken farm to raise his free-range birds, apologized profusely for the sedentary chickens. A few weeks ago, during a period of heavy rain, Ehman explained, he told the ranch manager to keep the chickens inside. The ranch manager told the ranch foreman. Ehman paused and shrugged sheepishly. When the storm passed, the order to lock up the chickens, he said, was never rescinded.

‘Never Happened Before’

“I can assure you this has never happened before,” said Ehman, whose brand, Rocky the Range Chicken, is the only commercial free-range chicken operation in California. He crouched beside the yard in back of the chicken houses and pointed. “See all those feathers. You can tell they’re out here quite a bit.”

Free-range chicken is a food fad that has given cachet to chicken. They are superior, Ehman insists, because, unlike most mass-produced chickens, his range birds are not given antibiotics and are fed a natural diet with no animal fat additives. And--except for the occasional mishap, he said--they are not confined to crowded chicken houses 24-hours a day. Ranging, he said, makes the birds leaner so the meat is firmer and has more flavor.

But there is controversy among chefs over whether the range birds actually taste better. And the results of several recent blind taste tests comparing free-range and commercially grown chickens have been mixed.

Filet Mignon Prices

Once considered a pedestrian dish, a dish associated with the unwholesome fumes of deep frying, the lowly chicken traditionally was shunned by discriminating diners. But now, with the availability of a chicken ne plus ultra , an increasing number of Los Angeles’ most fashionable restaurants are featuring free-range chicken dishes--and charging filet mignon prices. Since the Bel-Air Hotel began serving free-range chicken--served with a sun dried tomato cream sauce for $23.50--twice as many people are ordering chicken, said executive chef George Morrone.

The increased interest in health and natural foods, many chefs say, also has contributed to the popularity of the range chickens. If diners batter their bodies with aerobics and jogging, suffering to stay fit, why shouldn’t the chickens they eat? They don’t want a chicken that spends its days dozing by the feed trough; they want a fit chicken, one that does a few laps around the barnyard every day.

In the early 1980s there were only two major free-range chicken producers, said Bill Roenigk, an economist with the National Broiler Council, the trade association for chicken producers. But the demand from restaurants--primarily in New York and Los Angeles--has increased tremendously and now there are 12, along with a number of other small local operations.

And Ehman, who began raising 200 chickens a week in 1984 for a few select chefs, now sells 7,000 a week to about 50 Los Angeles restaurants and a handful of gourmet shops.

After Ehman cleared up the ranging misunderstanding with his foreman, he instructed him to open the doors to a chicken house. Ehman lit his pipe, took a few puffs and waited for the ranging to commence.

One chicken waddled to the doorway, tentatively leaned its head out the door, looked around and decided it prefered the comforts of the chicken house to the great outdoors.

No Great Incentive

About a minute later, the more intrepid birds ventured outside. Others followed. They pecked around the yard--a 160-by-200-foot area bordered by wire to keep out predators--dug in the grass and returned to the house. The chickens did not have a great incentive to peck and prance around--most of their food and water is kept inside.

Of the 7,000 birds in each house, only about 80 were outside during the recent morning. The rest dozed or waddled around the chicken house.

“They don’t use the outside as much as I’d like,” Ehman said apologetically. “What can you do? I don’t want to force them out.”

But even if their peregrinations are limited, they still taste better because of their diet and “stress-free” environment, said Ehman, a food marketer who in the early 1980s began raising Sonoma baby lamb for many California restaurants.

Ehman provides more space in his chicken houses than most commercial operations--2 square feet per bird in contrast to an average of less than 1. And his chicken ranch, set in a bucolic valley near Sebastopol, about 65 miles north of San Francisco, is not part of a noisy agribusiness operation, he said. There even is a sign at the entrance: “QUIET PLEASE.”

sh Try to Eliminate Stress

“People who are under a lot of pressure every day don’t do very well . . . and neither do chickens,” Ehman said. “So we try to eliminate the stress in their lives. We give them good food, ideal weather, a lot of space and say: ‘Enjoy yourselves.’ ”

Free-range chicken is a “traditional” not an “innovative” idea, said Clark Wolf, an editor at Cooks magazine. People are simply trying to raise chickens like they were raised 50 years ago.

“The term ‘free range’ is a little misleading,” Wolf said. “People imagine the chickens running through Montana, leaping over creeks. It just means they are not kept in cages most of their life and then hacked up.”

There is a great divergence of opinion among food experts about free-range chicken. Some do not like the taste.

“Slightly gamy and not very tender--I wouldn’t go out of my way to buy it,” said Marion Cunningham, who recently revised the Fanny Farmer Cookbook.

‘Wishful Tasting’

Others cannot tell the difference.

“Wishful tasting . . . to think it’s much better than a commercial chicken,” said Loni Kuhn owner of Cooks Tour cooking school in San Francisco.

Others say free-range chicken is vastly superior.

“There is a tremendous difference--it has a much richer taste,” said Fabrice Bals, general manager of Pastels restaurant in Beverly Hills.

At a blind taste test at Campton Place restaurant in San Francisco, the judges overwhelmingly picked the Rocky brand over other commercial chickens. But Wolfgang Puck, the renowned chef who owns Spago in West Hollywood, picked a supermarket chicken over Rocky in two blind taste tests. Still, he serves the chicken at his restaurant because of the natural feed and absence of antibiotics.

Despite the lack of consensus about the taste, people are willing to pay much more for free-range chicken. At the Irvine Ranch Market in Los Angeles, Rocky sells for $2.19 a pound--about $10 a chicken. (The average price of chicken in the United States is 75 cents a pound, according to the National Broiler Council.)

Firmer, Stringier Meat

Range birds get more exercise than supermarket chickens, so the texture of their meat is different--firmer, stringier--”but there is no evidence that they are better for you,” said Francine Bradley, a poultry scientist at the UC Davis cooperative extension department. And although most commercial growers use antibiotics, Bradley said, the federal government conducts random tests to ensure that no chemicals can be detected by the time the chickens are slaughtered.

Duane Herrick, manager of the Zacky Farms chicken operation in Fresno called free-range chickens “marketing scams . . . like selling refrigerators to Eskimos.” There is no advantage to letting chickens wander around, he said. They simply are more susceptible to worms, parasites “and whatever else is on the ground.”

“I’ve heard of $25 chicken dinners because they are range birds,” Herrick said. “I work too hard to throw around money like that. I can get a good chicken dinner in Fresno for $7.

“I don’t believe you can raise a better chicken by going backwards and using the methods of the past. Because of modern technology, we have a better genetic line of chicken--a healthier and stronger bird--we have better automated equipment to monitor them and we feed them a more balanced and nutritious diet.”

Fad Began in East

The free-range chicken fad began in 1980 when Lawrence Forgione, owner of An American Place restaurant in New York, decided that he wanted chickens that tasted like the ones he ate as a boy on his grandparents’ farm. He contacted Paul Keyser, who had a small egg business in Upstate New York, and together they devised a plan to raise chickens with more flavor than ones that were commercially produced. Forgione coined the term “free range,” and now many fashionable restaurants in New York feature the dish.

Because free-range chickens sell for so much more than ordinary chickens, there have been many reports of fraud in the business, said Roenigk of the National Broiler Council. But there are no government inspections to ensure that the chickens do range, he said, so those who raise the birds are on the “honor system.”

“There’s no way to really monitor the situation,” Roenigk said. “No one’s going to stand out there for 60 days to watch these chickens . . . except the farmer.”