"Cluck! Cluck! Cluck!"

These chickens sound as happy as fowl can be, pecking in the grass and strolling around the pasture on this foggy morning near Woodland.

Compare their lives to the claustrophobia of a factory farm, where chickens spend their days in a square foot of space, sometimes less. Life seems charmed here on Cache Creek Meat Co.'s farm.

Little do these relaxed birds know they're headed toward dinner plates near you.

Just a year since Cache Creek Meat Co.'s founding, its chickens have become the commodity du jour for local chefs and foodies alike. You'll find these prized chickens served at such high-profile restaurants as The Kitchen and Mulvaney's Building & Loan, along with area farmers markets and select grocery stores.

"It's a great product," says Randall Selland, executive chef of The Kitchen on Hurley Way. "This chicken is so much more healthy, and it's good to support farmers who go back to the basis of how food sourcing started: small farms raising animals to feed the populace."

Cache Creek Meat Co. serves a niche clientele – farmers-market aficionados and local gourmets. Charging up to $6 a pound for a whole chicken in today's economy can be a tough sell. But its advocates champion the idea that a chicken should taste like … well, a proper chicken.

"Mankind in 2009 thinks of chicken as a soft, flavorless meat," says Darrell Corti, who carries Cache Creek's chickens at his Corti Brothers market. "When people have alligator and say, 'It tastes like chicken,' that means it has no discernible taste.

"Chicken's always been a meat that has some consistency and taste. Most chickens grown today don't have flavor. Chickens should have a chicken-y taste."

Partners in poultry

They are business partners and lovebirds who raise chickens.

Cache Creek Meat Co. is run by Kristy Levings, 29, and her 31-year-old boyfriend, Brian Douglass. Both come from farm families in the Cache Creek area. Levings grew up raising livestock, and Douglass is no stranger to farm chores, either. The chicken farm's property is owned by Marge Hildebrand, Douglass' grandmother, and was once a dairy farm and horse ranch.

Levings and Douglass once left for bigger pastures – the Bay Area. Levings graduated from San Francisco State University and landed a job in that city as a social worker. Douglass received a political science degree from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and later graduated from the California Culinary Academy in San Francisco.

"I was actually a vegetarian in college," Levings says after looking over a flock of week-old chicks. "I started tasting all this commercial meat, and it didn't taste right. I thought I could do better."

They left big-city life and returned to the Sacramento area, where Douglass worked as a line cook at the now-closed Masque Restaurant in El Dorado Hills.

But they yearned to start their own farm, and launched Cache Creek Meat Co. in 2008. They've built their chicken business from scratch, selling at farmers markets, inviting chefs to their farm and thriving on old-fashioned word of mouth.

You might hear folks refer to Levings as "the chicken lady from Cache Creek." The couple still run a fairly small operation, processing 200 to 300 chickens a week through a USDA facility in Petaluma. That's barely a peep in the world of corporate chicken producers like Foster Farms.

Cache Creek Meat Co. remains a two-person operation, and the chickens keep them busy for up to 14 hours a day. "Demand's blowing up," Douglass says while tending to chickens in rubber boots and soiled jeans. "There's a real opportunity to expand. The plan for this thing is to sustain us."

Living life outdoors

The term "free range" for chicken isn't all it's cracked up to be. It sounds humane, but "free range" can just mean that a small door has been added to a barn packed with chickens. Not all "free range" chickens will actually take advantage of their freedom to go outdoors.

Cache Creek Meat Co. specializes in "pastured poultry" – raising grown chickens outdoors and rotating them through a series of pens. The birds spend their first month indoors, turning from cute, peeping chicks to maturing chickens, before they're sent to pasture. The chickens spend another couple of months or more in Cache Creek's outdoors, getting plump from organic feed and building muscle roaming around their 100-square-foot pens.

Call Bee food and wine writer Chris Macias, (916) 321-1253.