Black chicken, tinged with melanin & nutritional claims

The now-vegan Virat Kohli and his team needn’t fear the cholesterol and fat content in chicken if they consume the black-coloured meat of the Kadaknath fowl. This advice to the Board of Control for Cricket in India came recently from veterinary scientists in Madhya Pradesh’s Jhabua district, where the Kadaknath bird is largely reared by tribals.
For the uninitiated, Kadaknath is one of 25 black chicken breeds in the world and among the four most popular ones, the others being Silkie (China), Ayam Cemini (Indonesia) and Oke (Vietnam).Thanks to the high melanin content in its body, the bird’s plumage, beak, comb, wattles, flesh and blood are dark in colour.
The meat may not make for a very pretty sight on the dining table, but its nutritional value and taste is unbeatable, says Chandan Kumar, scientist in-charge of the Kadaknath Farm and Hatcheries at the Krishi Vigyan Kendra in Jhabua. He claims that the chicken has less than 2% fat, low cholesterol and a high percentage of protein, iron, amino acids, vitamins and calcium.
In Pune, Kadaknath chicken is mostly reared in farms in the outskirts and savoured mainly in the dhabas along the highways.
Within the city, Siddharth Mehta serves Kadaknath chicken at his hotel on Senapati Bapat Road. “People who know about the bird consume its meat regularly. Cooking the chicken is a challenge as it is game meat. We offer a Kolhapuri rassa style dish which involves marinating the chicken for two days and baking it in a coal oven for 16 hours. We also make chicken sandwiches,” he says.
The 28-year-old Mehta’s engagement with the black bird began around 6 years ago when he and his partner, Nitin Patil, picked up 75 chickens from a village in MP and began the breeding process here. Today, they have around 3,500 Kadaknath birds at their farm at Donje near the Sinhagad fort and another 4,000 birds at another farm in Satara. Mehta isn’t sure, but thinks they are the biggest breeders of Kadaknath chicken in Maharashtra.
Mehta claims to sell around 70 kg of Kadaknath chicken in a month. A single bird, which weighs around 1,250 gm after dressing, goes for around Rs 1,600. Justifying the high cost, he says the feed alone costs Rs 120 a month for one chicken. Besides, the bird is non-productive for long — it does not lay eggs for nine months after hatching. “The Kadaknaths are also aggressive, constantly fighting with each other. They refuse to sit on the eggs for hatching, for which we have to either quarantine them or use incubators for the eggs,” he says.
Unlike Mehta, however, business for Mahesh Tipole (32), another Kadaknath chicken breeder at Donje, has taken a sudden dip in the last three months. He blames contract farming for the drop in business and says the cross-breeding of the bird with country (gavran) chickens is not uncommon these days.
Tipole, who has 600 Kadaknath birds at his farm, says he used to sell five to 10 chickens every Sunday but now barely sells one. The price of eggs too has dropped from Rs 22 earlier to Rs 10 now.
Seeking regulation of the business by the state government, Tipole says that while the bird was heading towards extinction in MP’s tribal areas a few years ago, the sustained efforts by the Jhabua veterinary scientists to educate people about its properties have seen a turnaround in its breeding and consumption.
But while some exalt the qualities of the chicken, other experts feel the claims about it may just be a trifle tall. Dr Mukund Kadam, head of the department of poultry science at the Nagpur veterinary college, says the Kadaknath chicken is just like any other free-range chicken, which obviously would mean it would have lower fat and cholesterol. “Some documents claim the Kadaknath meat has medicinal value, even helping infertility, but nothing has been scientifically proven yet,” he says.