From Chef Amie Bailey,
"So, I had a LOT of fun with the birds, and have some thoughts! I did a couple of different things:
Mole Poblano (Braising)
Classic Fried Chicken (Deep Frying)
Zuni Cafe Chicken (Roasting)
Gribnes (Cameron, you may know these fried chicken skin bits, kind of like popcorn chicken. Very Eastern European.)
Stock
The best of the three was definitely the Zuni Cafe Roast Chicken. The second runner up was the Mole Poblano and the Fried Chicken was pretty much a huge fail.
A couple of thoughts as to why they fell in this order:
The birds are actually pretty hard to break down (at least for me), and trying to get the breast plate separated was really hard (I pretty much mangled it). As two of the recipes required a broken down chicken, it was good to do it twice, and each time I got similar results.
The thighs and legs are offing gorgeous, so roasting and braising turn out really delicious. The searing on the braise really helps to render out what you can of the skin before going into the liquid. Don't skip that step, or you'll have rubbery chicken skin in your dish (gross).
The skin is super thick in comparison to most commercially available chickens, making the fried chicken a little unpleasant. And as the birds have next to no fat (the fat layer in my stock pot was minuscule), they don't render out from the inside (critical to really great fried chicken) as much as is needed. The skin does make amazing gribnes.
I think what you have there are birds that are pretty much ideal for roasting. The Zuni chicken is salt cured for three days before roasting, which was a great way to treat that thicker skin and still get a perfectly roasted and slightly blistered chicken at the end.
The flavor of the meat itself is delicious. I seriously have not enjoyed eating that much bird in ages. "