Supermarket roast chicken taste test: ‘Ham-flavoured chook is extremely divisive’

In a bid to establish a pecking order of eight roast chooks, Nicholas Jordan samples a ‘truly neutral’ chicken and another that triggers feelings of dismay If you value our independent journalism, we hope you’ll consider supporting us today I would guess that over the course of my childhood, 50% of all large family events featured a roast chicken.

I have no idea where the chickens came from, but I know it wasn’t from our oven. Sometimes these chickens tasted as if they were baked under the care of Stephanie Alexander. Other times they had the moisture content of an Ugg boot and tasted as though they’d been seasoned by fourth-century ascetic monks. I may be exaggerating the facts here, but not my feelings. I have since developed a deep and multifaceted interest in poultry, and was…