Ye-HaI'm Gonna do a Little Chicken Pickin'
Actually, I'm going to do a lot but it's going to take a number of posts.
This should be a seemingly easy decision in the market, right? It's reasonably inexpensive, a good source of protein, and doesn't have those pesky fats in meat.
Well, there are actually a lot of factors, depending on how you feel about being Green, cruelty to animals, eating chickens that had antibiotics, etc.
I'll get to all of those, today's topic is pretty easy: enhancement.
How carefully do you read the label on your chicken, other than the price and the sell by date, like never?
I didn't. Then one night I cooked some plain boneless, skinless chicken thighs. Didn't salt or pepper them or anything; just grilled them becuase I like the taste of them plain. Only, they tasted funny; certainly too salty, but there was more.
I dug the package label out of the trash and there it was, " enhanced with up to 15% solution."
So, now to the solution ingredients: Water (oh great I'm paying by the pound for water, I paid $2.29 lb for the chicken so I paid $.34 lb for water), sea salt, evaporated cane juice, sodium carbonate, lemon juice powder, (corn syrup solids and lemon flavors, lemon juice solids, natural flavors, natural flavoring).
I'll address many of those ingredients in another post. What I want to get to right now is this:
Serving size: 4 oz (how many of you did any homework and figured out how much 4 oz of chicken is?)
Calories 150
Cholesterol 85mg
Sodium 490 mg 21%
Sugar 0g That's weird since there is sugar in the ingredients
Here's what an un-enhanced chicken thigh is (from nutritiondata.com, assumes roasted):
Calories 236
Cholesterol 118 mg 36%
Sodium 100 mg 4%
Sugar 0g
The calories & cholesterol are a big discrepancy that I will have to figure out and explain one day. Could it be that they force so much water into it that it makes it weigh that much differently? The data is all supposed to come from one common government source, and sure enough, caloriecounter.com agrees with nutritiondata.com. That would mean the packaged, enhanced chicken would actually be only 64% chicken, or 2.54 oz of chicken. Seems a bit unbelievable that almost 1.5 oz could be water weight. The implication that the maximum water is 15% or .6 oz. How can the nutritional data be off by a factor of 2?
OK, two shocking things, look at how much salt that they snuck in. Salting food should be your option.
And second, and this shocked me when I started looking up cholesterol in thigh meat, OMG 4 oz of chicken thighs could account for 1/3 of your daily limit?
Let's check breast meat on nutritiondata.com; Chicken, broilers or fryers, breast, meat only, cooked, roasted:
Calories 184
Cholesterol 96 mg 32%
Sodium 84 mg 4%
Sugar 0g
I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to look up the nutrition information for chicken with skin.
BTW, I purchased the packaged, enhanced, boneless, skinless chicken thighs at Raley's in Los Gatos, CA. I could not tell from either the packaging or their web site what their chicken source is.
The chicken plot thickens. Stay tuned.
This should be a seemingly easy decision in the market, right? It's reasonably inexpensive, a good source of protein, and doesn't have those pesky fats in meat.
Well, there are actually a lot of factors, depending on how you feel about being Green, cruelty to animals, eating chickens that had antibiotics, etc.
I'll get to all of those, today's topic is pretty easy: enhancement.
How carefully do you read the label on your chicken, other than the price and the sell by date, like never?
I didn't. Then one night I cooked some plain boneless, skinless chicken thighs. Didn't salt or pepper them or anything; just grilled them becuase I like the taste of them plain. Only, they tasted funny; certainly too salty, but there was more.
I dug the package label out of the trash and there it was, " enhanced with up to 15% solution."
So, now to the solution ingredients: Water (oh great I'm paying by the pound for water, I paid $2.29 lb for the chicken so I paid $.34 lb for water), sea salt, evaporated cane juice, sodium carbonate, lemon juice powder, (corn syrup solids and lemon flavors, lemon juice solids, natural flavors, natural flavoring).
I'll address many of those ingredients in another post. What I want to get to right now is this:
Serving size: 4 oz (how many of you did any homework and figured out how much 4 oz of chicken is?)
Calories 150
Cholesterol 85mg
Sodium 490 mg 21%
Sugar 0g That's weird since there is sugar in the ingredients
Here's what an un-enhanced chicken thigh is (from nutritiondata.com, assumes roasted):
Calories 236
Sodium 100 mg 4%
Sugar 0g
The calories & cholesterol are a big discrepancy that I will have to figure out and explain one day. Could it be that they force so much water into it that it makes it weigh that much differently? The data is all supposed to come from one common government source, and sure enough, caloriecounter.com agrees with nutritiondata.com. That would mean the packaged, enhanced chicken would actually be only 64% chicken, or 2.54 oz of chicken. Seems a bit unbelievable that almost 1.5 oz could be water weight. The implication that the maximum water is 15% or .6 oz. How can the nutritional data be off by a factor of 2?
OK, two shocking things, look at how much salt that they snuck in. Salting food should be your option.
And second, and this shocked me when I started looking up cholesterol in thigh meat, OMG 4 oz of chicken thighs could account for 1/3 of your daily limit?
Let's check breast meat on nutritiondata.com; Chicken, broilers or fryers, breast, meat only, cooked, roasted:
Calories 184
Cholesterol 96 mg 32%
Sodium 84 mg 4%
Sugar 0g
I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to look up the nutrition information for chicken with skin.
BTW, I purchased the packaged, enhanced, boneless, skinless chicken thighs at Raley's in Los Gatos, CA. I could not tell from either the packaging or their web site what their chicken source is.
The chicken plot thickens. Stay tuned.
Science News
Deep Pencil
Business News
Movie Train
Artist Quirk
i agree, when you buy raw meat you dont expect it to be marinated unless it explicitly says so in the product description
Culinary Hatchet
Did You Know This?
You really have to be very attentive to all of the labeling.