I use to enjoy getting chicken strips in the frozen food aisle and making easy and nice tasting dishes for dinner or lunch, but there is like a weird consistency now in many of the chicken strips that is just really bad tasting. Anyone know what that consistency is? It's really horrible and basically inedible. Some of the chicken strips seem to be "normal" but some seem to have this weird bad taste quite often now.
It’s due to “woody breast” syndrome in chicken. We have bread them so large, chickens are developing scar tissue in muscle due to growing too fast.
I'm noticing it more the last few years.
Before it was just a texture issue. Now the meat has weird smell and slight weird taste if the chicken is eaten by itself without a sauce
I have not seen it in whole chickens sold at the grocery store, they are supposedly a different breed. When you break them down you’ll see how much smaller the breasts are.
Smaller is good. Smaller usually has less of a chance to be woody.
Oh I c your point. I suck at breaking down a whole chicken unfortunately. I can never do the thigh and drum sticks correctlu
Really not that difficult. Pull the leg over until you pop the joint out, cut it off from just ahead of the bone. Do the same to pop off the drum.
If you want to debone that does get trickier, but with both of those its generally wiser to keep them on the bone. Drum at least anyway, as it doesn't often have enough on it to justify deboning it. Thigh is just a matter of cutting as close to the bone as you can without shredding the meat.
Sharp knife definitely helps with that.
Trying to find small breasts is the only real thing you can do to try and avoid it.
I noticed this too in my latest pack! So off putting
Cause all the chickens got culled from bird flu. Probably more shitty chicken survived than the tastey ones.
My local grocery store used to have like 6-7 breasts in a family pack. Now it's 5 breasts per pack and they suck. It's around 4 lbs. I feel they are now 1.5 times larger than before. I always butterfly my chicken breasts and these breasts I have to create a tri fold butterfly....
Also Costco branded chicken nuggets were good. Now they are weird and have gristle or a weird texture to them.
I love it when we bread chicken!
Taste or texture? With the advent of "woody chicken" any preparation using chicken breasts potentially is subject to that effect, and I imagine the chicken producers would rather unload that on the frozen chicken strip market as opposed to the butcher counter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woody_breast
Never heard of this. I occasionally had some frozen fried chicken for making like Buffalo blue salads 😋 without having to deep fry my own chicken bc it’s so messy.
But the last times I got them I had a couple bites that had a terrible taste. Very funky and unpleasant and haven’t bought any in a couple years now.
And they all leave that one long tendon in them now
Gotta get bell and Evan’s
Yes, the only chicken we buy now.
High rollers. But for real if Whole Foods has them on sale I’ll stock em
Oh, Definitely not cheap. It's the only splurge we have. Also lucky to live near their retail outlet store in Pennsylvania so I buy it by the case.
Did OP mean like breaded tenders? I was confused on the wording but the only answers here are bell and evans or just bare brand if we are talking breaded.
Best chicken tenders!
I've definitely tasted consistent chewiness/funkiness/woodiness in some brands, but no more so than in the past.
I can’t eat them anymore. They weren’t ever something I kept at home a lot, but nice as a treat every once in awhile. I just don’t bother anymore. The quality of everything has just become ass over the last decade or so.
Prepared chicken strips have been horrible for at least 15 years now. My guess is companies trying to save money at the cost of quality ingredients. I.e. capitalism.
Yes! The last 3 years I’ve seen it get worse. I used to count on the Tyson chicken strips but it’s a gamble if I get more than 5 edible strips per bag
Perdue has been good to me. I haven't bought Tyson in like 10 years.
I feel bougie saying this but Tyson hasn’t been palatable to me in a long time. I remember giving up on them around the same time as you.
Wooden chicken pandemic
Try Hampton House from Costco. They are made with real breast meat.
Yes it’s worse than the meat inside chicken nuggets now.
Go to your local farmer's market and get some organic, free range chicken that is air-chilled. You'll be amazed how much better it is than the mass market stuff.
Agree but we occasionally get a woody Smart Chicken breast and it’s expensive!
and you'll be amazed at how empty your wallet is after you buy it.
That is true. That said, even grocery chicken can be good if you get the organic, air chilled stuff. It's still more than Costco chicken (which I find woody) but Whole Foods is normally OK.
Reminds me of an anecdote from a book about food quality. Some lady tried for like 50 years of her marriage to make some chicken dish like her husband remembered from his childhood. (I would’ve given up, but whatever.) Nothing she tried worked, until she drove 4 hours round trip to the country and bought a chicken. He said “just like my mom used to make.” Sad
many use mechanically separated chicken. or they are way too salty. I get breaded fried chicken tenders from the deli counter. I like Safeway or Winco. Freeze and air fry to reheat. chicken strip salad, chicken strip wrap, chicken strip sandwich.
The ones we get are Mary Free Range Heirloom pasture raised from HEB. https://maryschickens.com/ most of the other stuff is like you mentioned water pumped franken chickens
Yeah I made some at home and I was like, wow, this is what chicken tenders used to be like.
I think it’s just really poor quality meat, and probably old or worse rancid oil. Some places I can taste the rancidity? Rancidness? of the oil. Also poor frying techniques which is a shame because I tend to go out for fried food because I expect them to know better than I do. I’m not that great at it.
Same experience making burgers with the Costco grass fed grass finished beef haha. Whole house smelling like fast food burger joints used to smell.
American chicken is garbage
Once chic fil a turned its back on god (quality ingredients), I knew it was over for the chicken game.
Make and batch freeze your own!
No cause I make my own
It could be increased amounts of "textured vegetable protein" (soy)
Buy fresh, lay ‘em out on a tray that can fit in yer freezer and shove them tenders on up in that there freezin machine until they done got hard. Then you can toss ‘em in a big ol’ baggie and git em out when you git a hankerin fer chicken
...what?
They're saying to flash freeze tender-sized pieces of chicken breasts individually so they won't freeze into 1 large mass. And presumably because you can buy higher quality fresh chicken breasts so as to avoid woody breasts.
They didn't mention anything about breading though which I think is what the OP is talking about. You could dredge and bread them before flash freezing.
Basically, DIY.
No, because I cut my own
They’ve always had bad ones you just suck at choosing
I don't really eat nuggets, tenders, boneless skinless breasts. So I really haven't noticed.
But in the US chickens are bred to grow fast and have giant tits. They are not bred for flavor. Weight and cost is the driver. I'm older and raised the little mofos when I was younger. (raising chickens is not really fun, they are cannibals.) But the flavor and texture was so much different in the 70s it's hard to describe.
Honestly these days I would kill for one of our home raised chickens. Even though I had to off them pluck and clean. The flavor was night and day.