Few issues in life are each cheaper and higher, however for a very long time, this was true of the rooster thigh. Its superiority was handed like a shibboleth amongst meals connoisseurs: Thighs are juicier, tastier, are virtually half the value—preferable in nearly each technique to the boneless, skinless, flavorless breasts that reign supreme in America.
Nicely, the key’s out. On a current journey to the grocery retailer, I picked up a pack of boneless thighs that price, pound for pound, some 50 cents greater than boneless breasts. In actual fact, the price of thighs has crept steadily upward for years now, and surpassed that of breasts for a lot of final yr. In current months, breasts have gained in value once more, however chicken’s continued dominance not appears assured. Dwelling cooks have embraced the flavour and flexibility of darkish meat; fast-casual eating places similar to Chipotle and Sweetgreen have it throughout their menus. After a decades-long run, America’s white-meat period might lastly be ending.
That period started in the1980s, when the primary plant devoted to deboned breast meat opened in the US. “Earlier than that, deboned breast meat was very costly and uncommon,” Paul Aho, a poultry-industry marketing consultant, instructed me. Consuming rooster used to imply getting complete chickens, pores and skin and bones and all. However when processing crops began atomizing rooster into their components, the recognition of boneless, skinless breasts exploded. People discovered to like not solely slabs of chicken but additionally nuggets, patties, and tenders—processed merchandise made doable by the ubiquity of deboned breasts. In an period obsessive about low-fat, low-cholesterol diets, chicken was deemed the more healthy possibility too. Demand for breasts drove the enlargement of your complete American poultry {industry}, Aho mentioned.
The billions of chickens being raised for breast meat after all even have billions of thighs, legs, wings, and organs, arguably by-products of breast manufacturing. U.S. producers discovered to export minimally processed leg quarters—a complete thigh and leg with pores and skin and bones—abroad, the place customers didn’t thoughts, and even most popular, darkish meat. Russia was a significant buyer, then China, after which Mexico.
The boneless and skinless rooster thigh, nonetheless, didn’t exist as a widespread meat product in the US till the 2000s. That is additionally partially a narrative of business innovation: Over time, the thigh-deboning course of has grow to be extra automated, making boneless darkish meat much less labor-intensive to supply. The Baader 632 Thigh Filleting System, for instance, boasts of processing 230 thighs a minute, by yanking the meat straight off the bone. Aho factors out that automation tends to work higher with thighs, which have solely a single straight bone, than with breasts, which cling to a number of curved bones. Machines that debone breasts often can’t get the muscle off as cleanly, leaving extra meat behind.
With the rise of the boneless thigh, American rooster producers noticed a chance to promote darkish meat at residence, at costs increased than intact thighs can get abroad. They began producing extra deboned thighs. In 2019, the rooster producer Sanderson Farms instructed the Los Angeles Occasions that it might quickly have thigh-deboning capability in any respect seven of its crops for giant birds, in contrast with only one or two a few years earlier.
If a completely intact thigh is unmistakably a thigh, the boneless, skinless model is extra approachable for People raised on equally processed breasts. Deboned thighs are simply as simple to throw on a grill, put in a sandwich, shred, or chop into bite-size items for burritos. In actual fact, they’re simpler to cook dinner than breasts, as a result of they’re much less liable to drying out from being left within the pan for 5 minutes too lengthy. Recipe builders optimizing for straightforward and fast can tout their “mass enchantment.” “I definitely see much more reward of darkish meat than there was,” J. Kenji López-Alt, the meals author and cookbook writer, instructed me. (He personally prefers a superbly cooked rooster breast, however mentioned it’s laborious to get proper.)
Matt Busardo, who heads up North American poultry for the market-intelligence agency Expana, factors to 2 different causes for the recognition of thighs: the diversification of the American palate, because of the recognition of Asian and Latin American cuisines that prize darkish meat, and the rise of fast-casual eating places, which thought-about thighs a tastier, extra forgiving, and till lately cheaper lower. Rooster breasts are nonetheless in style; their gross sales have been rising this complete time, too. However “thigh meat has form of overshot that by leaps and bounds,” Busardo instructed me. Gross sales of rooster breast by quantity are up 3.9 % previously three years, however gross sales of thighs are up 15.9 %, in response to the marketing-research agency Circana.
The traditionally single-minded give attention to breeding chickens for chicken has, sarcastically, made it much less interesting in some methods. Anecdotally, I’ve heard of consumers postpone by woody breast or spaghetti meat—muscle issues that outcome from the breast rising too massive too quick. Rooster breasts have almost doubled in measurement because the Fifties, and these muscle irregularities grew to become widespread sufficient to fret the {industry} about 20 years in the past. Woody breast causes an unappetizing, virtually crunchy texture; spaghetti meat comes out mushy and stringy. Tinkering with diets to sluggish development or slaughtering birds at decrease weights can mitigate woody breast, Casey Owens, a poultry scientist on the College of Arkansas, instructed me. However a small, slower-growing rooster is a much less worthwhile rooster. Owens has additionally studied the best way to make woody breasts extra palatable by means of further processing. When floor up into patties, she mentioned, the additional connective tissue present in woody breasts makes for a much less dense, perhaps even preferable, texture.
If the demand for darkish meat continues to rise, chickens chosen for his or her massive breasts might not be economically optimum. May the {industry} begin breeding birds with larger thighs? “I’ve truly introduced that as much as breeding corporations, and 10 or 15 years in the past, they might simply scoff on the concept,” Aho mentioned. “Now they are saying, ‘We’d want a extra balanced fowl.’”
