A mini-rant with pictures


 
T

Tim Murphy

TVWBB Fan
Dear Board,

I know I don't come around and post much, but I do read and I often use recipes and tips that I read here over the years.

My rant is about chicken! When I have a craving for fried chicken and go to Popeye's, or Church's, or KFC and order a 16 piece with 2 sides it comes in bag that doesn't need an NFL caliber offensive line to carry it.

When I was a kid our Dad used to cook 20 plus pieces of chicken breasts and thighs on a regular 22" Weber Kettle. I have 2 equally large brothers, and our Father is no small fry, but that would feed all of us plus Mom and still leave more than a couple of pieces left over.

Contrast all that with today's cook. Four chicken breasts scaling out at 5.79 pounds! The good thing is that we will make chicken salad with one, make gumbo with another, freeze one for soup, and do something with the last one.

But seriously, if the chicken fast food places used the same sized chicken to make a 16 piece family meals and offered 4 quarts of sides to match the size of the chicken pieces you'd need a 3/4 ton truck and a forklift to get the order home.

Regards,

Tim Murphy

Harrisburg, PA :-)

P.S. Please don't hate me because they are on a pellet grill. It's the message that matters! We need normal sized chicken pieces again!


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I think this ground has been covered but, I am in complete agreement, one breast half should not weigh over a freakish pound! It’s just weird. Breasts need to be “Just right” for optimum dining pleasure. If you start pounding them out, they can be as big as a plate!
The massive fast food chicken sandwich is one thing but, at home cutting them down to a manageable size takes practice to get them to cook evenly I’ve taken to just doing one and then carve it for my wife and myself.
I’m pretty good at breaking down a chicken, and anymore what used to be eight pieces has become ten cutting the breasts in half, and you end up with one big end and one smaller but, that’s fairly easy to work around, practice.
 
I hear you Tim.
Barb called me from work and said that Safeway had a sale for employees on chicken breasts for $.99 Lb. I told her to pick up eight or ten of them and I would put them in food saver bags for future use.
She brought home ten or in other words a little over $22 worth. The lightest one was 4oz. short of 2 pounds, all the others were over 2 pounds. Looked more like turkey breasts.
 
Brown's chicken in Chicago always had larger pieces compared to KFC, Church's or Harold's.
Good thing I don't like chicken breasts, now if the legs and thighs where bigger...
I think the whole chicken experiment is pumping up the white meat lately.
 
timothy said:
I think the whole chicken experiment is pumping up the white meat lately.
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Just like the turkey industry's been doing forever.

Tim, did you buy unlabeled store chicken or was it branded? I've had pretty good luck with Amish-sourced chicken like Gerber, but I stick to dark meat.
 
This is pretty much why my g/f & I stopped buying the vacuum sealed packs of chicken breasts at Costco. Incredibly convenient, tear the packs apart, throw all but one if the freezer..... and each one with 2 breast [halves,] would feed us for a couple of meals. Just too much.
 
Brad Olson said:
Just like the turkey industry's been doing forever.

Tim, did you buy unlabeled store chicken or was it branded? I've had pretty good luck with Amish-sourced chicken like Gerber, but I stick to dark meat.
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It’s rather like the Kardashian’s! The greater the breasts, the higher the Ratings?
 
I wonder if the surge in popularity of fast food chicken sandwiches has funneled all of the reasonably sized breasts to them, leaving the bigguns to us. The other day, we opened one of the Costco packs mentioned by JKalchik and out popped two regular sized pieces and a third that was probably three pieces worth of meat. Makes meal planning difficult.
 
Chris Allingham said:
I wonder if the surge in popularity of fast food chicken sandwiches has funneled all of the reasonably sized breasts to them, leaving the bigguns to us. The other day, we opened one of the Costco packs mentioned by JKalchik and out popped two regular sized pieces and a third that was probably three pieces worth of meat. Makes meal planning difficult.
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Dear Chris,

That is a possibility, but I think more than that is making the monster chickens we find at out local grocery stores.

On Thursday, my wife stopped at Popeye's and brought two 4 piece chicken dinners home. They had a breast, a thigh, a leg, and a full wing. They also held containers of red beans and rice for me, and mashed potatoes for her, and similar sized containers of cole slaw, and a biscuit. Each box contained a full meal, plus leftovers for lunch on Friday. The boxes were 9" x 5" x 3". and I'm being generous with my estimate.

Had I dropped the largest breast of the ones I pictured on top of both meals stacked on top of each other the boxes would have collapsed.

I want to buy Popeye's sized chicken parts! I guess that is too much to ask?

Regards,

Tim Murphy

Harrisburg, PA :-)
 
Tim Murphy said:
I want to buy Popeye's sized chicken parts! I guess that is too much to ask?
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Yeah, you have to contract for millions of pieces to get those small chicken parts! :)

Places like Costco have their own chicken supply chain for rotisserie chicken to make sure they get around a 3 pound bird. It used to be easy to find 3.5 - 4 pound whole chickens at the supermarket, now it seems like they're 5+ pounds. I'm with you, I wish I could buy a smaller bird at the store.
 
Chris Allingham said:
Yeah, you have to contract for millions of pieces to get those small chicken parts! :)

Places like Costco have their own chicken supply chain for rotisserie chicken to make sure they get around a 3 pound bird. It used to be easy to find 3.5 - 4 pound whole chickens at the supermarket, now it seems like they're 5+ pounds. I'm with you, I wish I could buy a smaller bird at the store.
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Exactly! Finding a four pound chicken is much more difficult than it used to be to say the least.for the six of us, I still seem to need two, body builder, two growing teenagers then the other three of us kind of destroy almost two of them there is maybe one leg or a breast left when I do two of these monster birds.
 
Yep, Barb and I did a new recipe of Garlic Butter Chicken and Broccoli. I took one boneless skinless breast and sliced it horizontally. With the monster breast 2lbs 3 oz. we got two full meals out of the one breast. That's just nuts.
 
I didn't know Costco rotisserie were chickens. I was told they were baby dinos.

I do get a few meals and a lot of chicken soup out of them.
 
We used to be able to buy the 3# fryers at Aldi, but lately all I see is the 5# roasters.
 
Tim Murphy in response to your post about chicken check out Bell and Evans in Fredericksburg Pa. They have fresh normal size pieces of chicken. Do a google search, you will be able to get store address and hours. Oh by the way their chicken is delicious.
 
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