Free range chicken

Sorry if this is the wrong part, please move if it is.

Most chicken we get is in noodles or curries and in small strips. I love whole chickens and in recent years have been into free range chickens as they do taste different, maybe not better, just different.

Are Thai chickens free range? I do not imagine they have battery farms but they use lots of chicken, so is it or not and can you buy free range or not?
Thanks

Thailand is a good country for free range chicken. Most all of what you buy in the supermarkets (Tesco, Big C etc) is CP-farmed. But in the markets you can usually find what's referred to as gai-bahn (ไก่บ้าน). It generally costs the same as regular chicken. It can vary in degrees of tough......you'll know if you have range chicken, because it's tougher than the farmed stuff.

For what it's worth, we stopped buying Big C chicken many years ago because it always fell off the bone when it was cooked. Something didn't seem right about it. Lotus chicken is much better.....it's certainly not tough, but at least it has some chew to it. For a pot of soup or deep fried cut-up chicken with herbs and kaffir leaves, a range chicken is our favorite.

For curry, suki, khao-pat, etc. where you do not taste the chicken as much, we buy from Lotus. When we want to taste the chicken as in barbque, roasting etc., we buy whole free-rrange chicken. If you live near Nong Som Rong, PM me and I can tell you where to buy the free-range.

Hello and thanks. I cannot use the PM function, but in any case I am not living there yet and I am not sure where I will. It is good to know that they are available though and by the time I get there I am sure I will be able to find out from you where to get them
Thanks again.
R

You can buy gai-bahn in just about any small village market....and many of the city's markets. If the chicken has a lot of meat on the bone, it's not gai-bahn.

"chickens with 4 legs"
Are the ones with less meat tougher than the ones with more?

parrot wrote:You can buy gai-bahn in just about any small village market....and many of the city's markets. If the chicken has a lot of meat on the bone, it's not gai-bahn.

Doesn't sound very promising, scrawny chickens, thanks anyway.