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 Domestic
consumption fact
Health
tips for chicken consumers
What
makes chicken tender or tough?
Some people uselessly try to make chickens as tender as possible,
but there's also a lot you can do.
• Don't let chicken dry
out in the refrigerator. Dried chicken is tough chicken. Keep
it wrapped in the package it comes in until you use it.
• Avoid freezing it.
When the juices inside the cells freeze, they act like little
spears and they'll rupture some of the cell walls. When you
defrost the chicken, you'll lose some of the juice and the
chicken becomes less tender.
• Cook chicken to the
proper temperature, using a meat thermometer or pop-up guide.
Cook bone-in chicken to 180F and boneless chicken to 170F.
Undercooked chicken will be tough and rubbery because it takes
a fairly high internal temperature to soften the proteins
in the muscles and make them tender. But don't overcook chicken
either because moisture will start to steam off and the more
chicken dries out, the tougher it gets.
• Keep the skin on chicken
during cooking. The skin helps keep juices in, and tenderness
and juiciness go hand in hand.
• When microwaving any
chicken product, cover it with a loose tent of waxed paper
to prevent drying.
• Some authorities feel
strongly that you should not salt the chicken before cooking
because salt draws the juices out during cooking and toughens
the meat. It is found after several experiments that there
is a detectable difference in tenderness between salting before
or after cooking. Still, most people wouldn't notice a big
difference unless they were specifically paying attention
to it. The difference doesn't jump out at you as it does with
overcooking or freezer burn.
• Fry or roast breast
pieces rather than microwaving them if tenderness is a top
priority for you. Microwaving is significantly faster, but
there's a greater risk of toughness when you microwave breast
meat, it is fairly dry to begin with, and you don't have a
whole lot of latitude between overcooking and undercooking.
Why
are some chickens yellow-skinned and some white?
A chicken's skin color comes from the diet it is fed. The
diet that produces a yellow skin is more expensive than the
usual diet, but the people feel it's worth it because a yellow
skin color is one of the fastest ways to find and disqualify
an inferior chicken. If a chicken is sick or off its feed,
it doesn't absorb nutrients well and won't develop the rich
golden color. Also, if part of a chicken's outer skin is "barked,"
that is, rubbed off due to rough handling during processing,
you can detect it more easily than with a white skinned counterpart.
Detecting and removing chicken with barked skin is important
because damaged skin shortens the shelf life and both dries
and toughens the meat.
Sometimes
when I open a package of chicken, there's a pungent odor that
doesn't smell spoiled, but it's definitely unpleasant. Should
I throw the chicken out?
If the odor lasts only a matter of seconds, your chicken is
probably fine. Meat is chemically active, and as it ages,
it releases sulfur. When you open a bag that doesn't have
air holes, you may notice the accumulated sulfur, but it will
quickly disperse into the air. In fact, there are cases where
a wife will call her husband over and say, "Smell this, I
think it's gone bad." He'll take a deep whiff and find nothing
wrong with it. She'll take another sniff and then wonder if
it was her imagination. It wasn't. It's just that once the
package was opened, the sulfur smell faded into the air like
smoke rings. If the chicken still smells bad after a couple
of minutes, it's an entirely different story. The problem
is bacterial spoilage or rancidity or both. Return the chicken
to the store where you bought it. Rancidity can also occur
in frozen chicken if the freezer where the meat was stored
wasn't cold enough or if the product was kept there for a
very long time (more than six months for uncooked chicken,
or more than three months for cooked chicken). I don't like
to focus on this unpleasant stuff, but I do want you to get
your money's worth when you're buying chicken.
Are
chickens given hormones?
Never. It's against the law to give chickens hormones.
Can
I cook frozen chicken, or do I have to let it defrost first?
In a pinch, go ahead, but allow extra cooking time. For the
best texture and tenderness, however, you're better off starting
from refrigerator temperatures; you can be surer of getting
an evenly cooked product.
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