The end of the chicken breast domain

Few things in life are cheaper and better, but for a long time, this was true in the chicken thigh. Its superiority was passed as a shibboleth among food connoisseurs: thighs are more juicy, tastier, almost half the price, preferable in almost every sense to boneless breasts, without skin and without taste that reign supreme in America.

Well the secret is out. In a recent trip to the grocery store, I picked up a package of boneless thighs that cost, pounds per pound, about 50 cents more than boneless breasts. In fact, the cost of the thighs has increased constantly for years and has exceeded the breasts for much of last year. In recent months, the breasts have won the price of nine, but the continuous dominance of white meat does not seem assured. Domestic chefs have adopted the taste and versatility of dark meat; Fast casual restaurants like Chipotle and Sweetgreen have it in all menus. After decades for a duration, the era of the white meat of America can end.

That time began in the 1980’s, when the first floor dedicated to wicked breast meat was opened in the United States. “Before that, the wicked breast meat was very expensive and rare,” said Paul Aha, a poultry industry consultant. Eating chicken used to say to get whole chickens, skin and bones and all. But when processing plants began to atomize chicken in their parts, the popularity of boneless and skinless breasts exploded. The North -Americans learned to love not only the slabs of white flesh, but also the pepites, the cakes and the offers, the processed products possible for the ubiquity of the discussed breasts. In an age obsessed with low fat and low cholesterol diets, white meat was also considered the healthiest option. Aho said that the demand for breasts promoted the expansion of the entire North -American Poultry industry.

The billions of chickens that are raised for breast meat, of course, also have billions of thighs, legs, wings and organs, possibly by -products of breast production. North -American producers learned to export minimally processed leg barracks, a whole thigh and leg with skin and bones, in the ueses, where consumers did not care, not even preferred dark meat. Russia was an important customer, then China, and then Mexico.

The boneless and skinless chicken thigh, however, did not exist as a widespread meat product in the United States until the 2000’s. This is also partially a story of industrial innovation: over time, the thigh’s deposit process has automated, which causes the boneless dark meat to be less intense in the labor. The Baader 632 thigh stretch system, for example, has the processing of 230 thighs in the minute, making a head of meat directly from the bone. Aho notes that automation tends to work better with thighs, which have only one straight bone than with breasts, which cling to multiple curved bones. The machines that discussing breasts usually do not remove the muscle so clean, leaving more flesh.

With the rise of boned thigh, chicken -north -American producers saw the opportunity to sell dark meat at home, at higher prices than the intact thighs can be abroad. They began to produce more thighs. In 2019, chicken producer Sanderson Farms told the Los Angeles Times that he would soon have capacity to thigh at seven of his plants for large birds, compared to only one or two years earlier.

If a totally intact thigh is indisputably a thigh, the boneless and skinless version is more accessible to the North -Americans alive in breasts similarly. Suboned thighs are so easy to throw on the grill, put on a sandwich, crush or chop in pieces of chopped burritos. In fact, they are easier to cook than the breasts, because they are less likely to dry -to leave in the pan for five minutes. Recipe developers that optimize for easy and fast can prevent their “massive attraction”. “I certainly see much more praise from the dark meat than before,” J. Kenji López-Alt, a food writer and a kitchen author, told me. (Personally prefers a perfectly cooked chicken breast but said it is difficult to do it well.)

Matt Busardo, who goes to the American poultry for the intelligence firm of the expane market, points to two other reasons for the popularity of the thighs: the diversification of the American palate, thanks to the popularity of the Asian and Latin American tuises who reward dark meat and the rise of fast and casual restaurants, which they considered to be more tasty, and even more so, and even more so. makes a cut of cheeper. Chicken breasts are still popular; Their sales have increased all this time. But “thigh meat has a kind of misfortune that, through limits,” Busardo told me. Chicken breast sales have increased by 3.9 percent in the last three years, but thigh sales have increased by 15.9 percent, according to the circuana marketing-investigation firm.

The historically a single idea approach to the breeding of chickens for white meat has made it less attractive. Anecdotally, I have heard of buyers put by forest meat or spaghetti: muscle disorders resulting from the breast growing too fast. Chicken breasts have almost doubled the size since the 1950’s, and these muscle irregularities became common enough to worry about the industry about 20 years ago. The woody chest causes a little appetizing and almost crunchy texture; The meat of the spaghetti comes out annoying and wide. Tinkering with diets to stop growth or killing birds to lower weights can mitigate the woody chest, Casey Owens, a poultry scientist at the University of Arkansas, told me. But a slower and slower chicken is a less profitable chicken. Owens has also studied how to make woody breasts more pleasant through additional processing. He said that when it is based on breasts, the additional connective tissue found on woody breasts makes it a less dense texture, perhaps even preferable.

If the demand for dark meat continues to increase, the chickens selected for their large breasts can no longer be economically optimal. Could the industry start breeding birds with larger thighs? “In fact I have contributed it to breeding companies and 10 or 15 years ago, they would only make fun of the idea,” said Aho. “Now they say,” maybe we need a more balanced bird. “”