Why YSK: consuming too much sodium can lead to high blood pressure, increasing the risk of heart disease and stroke. In my country (USA), the average daily sodium intake is over 3,300mg, exceeding the recommended maximum of 2,300mg. The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends an even lower maximum of 2,000mg.
Also: with the rising cost of food, being mindful of additives that increase sell weight is important.
Here is a short that tells of what’s going here. This short is also a reaction, from an independent farmer who farms chickens. I think the creator here, FarmingWhileBeige, offers a lot of good insight into what is bad and not bad in our current farming practices as a level headed not batshit crazy maga person.
Chris also explains the chlorinated chicken myth and daily unpacks MAHA bullshit about food.
And here’s the short in a normal video format
That man is such a gem. It’s great to see him out in the wild!
FarmingWhileBeige is highly recommended. He does a lot of good educational (and sassy) videos about different aspects of the farming industry, and has a good catalogue of funny shorts of reacting to stupid TikTokkers in-between. He has the experience and knowledge, and he’d be the first to tell you to stay the fuck away from the industry unless you’re ready to deal with a lot of bullshit.
interesting thank you
This makes the chicken taste better too.
True, but you can salt or brine the chicken yourself instead of paying more for it.
Also true, but salting it leaves a much dryer, crappier chicken. Brining one works great, but I’d much rather get one already brined vs having to brine one myself like 6 hours before I want to start cooking it. That’s a lot of time and a lot of salt I’ll only use once before dumping.
Salting only draws moisture out of the outermost layer of skin and meat, which improves browning and crisping. It won’t affect the interior. The best way to reduce moisture loss in the meat is to spatchcock it so it cooks faster and more evenly.
I only spoke of salting in comparison to using a brine. There is no cooking method that doesn’t leave you with a more moist cooked piece of meat if the meat was brined beforehand. Spatchcocking is great. It’s better in combination with brined bird. Same with rotisserie, which I generally prefer over spatchcocking.
There’s a lot of great cooking methods, but starting with more moisture trapped in the protein always means there’s more moisture left after cooking.
Well agree to disagree then, I don’t see the point of cooking a whole chicken at home if I’m not getting crispy skin.
You can buy whole chicken thighs and debone them, or you can buy deboned chicken thighs. Not everyone wants to do the extra work.
Eh, in my experience this chicken has a weird texture so not really
Are you talking about the “woody” chicken problem? Because that’s not from this. This is effectively shipping chicken pre-brined.
The texture thing is either from being frozen/thawed too many times or a genetic issue with chickens bred to grow too fast, leading to striated meat.
Possibly. The really water-injected stuff is often frozen so that probably doesn’t help for sure.
Covers up the taste of chlorine
Chicken is not chlorinated, that’s more MAHA bullshit.
Yeah i forgot the /s that’s on me. It was supposed to be an NaCl joke but i forgot about the whole chlorinated chicken bullshit.
LOL, sarcasm … right ? right … ?
I’m sorry you had to learn it so late in life but, salt makes food tasty. You should try some next time.
I wouldn’t be surprised if that person never actually ate UNbrind chicken plain in their life, and would be shocked at how bland some chicken can taste
Okay so, since we are being serious : my taste preferences are :
1- adding salt, but also,
2- reducing the amount of water.You want dry chicken?
The technical term for that is turkey.
I guess i can cut back to four chickens a day
Are you gonna die for some chickens?
Someone is.
Also, at least in my area, I believe there is a mislabeling scam going on. At least twice now I have bought boneless skinless chicken thighs from 2 different grocery stores (different chains) and the weight has been like ~15% lower than advertized.
Like a package of chicken thighs labeled at 3.11lbs (1.4kg) actually weighed roughly 2.67lbs (1.2kg), 14% less. One labeled at 2.49lbs (1.13kg) actually weighed roughly 2.1lbs (0.95kg), 16% less.
Some of that may be accounted for by the absorbant pad sucking out some of that excess liquid they pump in, but it shouldn’t be so radically different
Apparently that’s a current scandal.
Do you have a link to an actual source that’s not just a person talking in their car?
If you watch the vid, she shows clips from Jimmy Wrig who went into Walmart and demonstrated.
You should be able to easily report this to a state agency. Governments take standards and measures very seriously and have for thousands of years.
Governments take standards and measures very seriously and have for thousands of years.
Yeah, that was before Trump.
States (and often larger cities) have their own weights and measures bureaus. That’s where you’d start even in a period of an Administration friendly to regulatory environments.
We’ve had ongoing issues here with places including the weight of the packaging. Not as bad as what you’ve encountered as a % difference, but also not allowed.
You can weigh it with the pad to check
You’d have to know the dry weight of the pad to do that.
You can assume the pad is close to negligible. If you want more accuracy you can dry out the pad, weigh it, then subtract that from the total of the [meat + wet pad]
15g. not enough to matter
Meat has a water content, and water is lost by evaporation between the packagers and the person who brings it home.
If you care about this, buy from a butcher who weighs at the time of sale.Or, wash your chicken and watch the weight magically increase.
This is another Tiktok “scandal”.
It’s not just meat though. And sometimes they are way off to the point it is definitely not within reason. A good one seen was the prepackaged mini hams that are airtight. They were weighed and basically 30% off or more from the label the store slapped on them.
Again, if you believe every “scandal” on tiktok and YouTube…people fake this shit.
I have only seen 1 person do it and I am not on tik tok or ever used it before. I guess theres a chance they are lying, but they have gotten several suppliers to admit to issues they reported and were corrected. I would like to think I am good at weeding out fake videos and they just dont seem like it, but there is always a chance.
Please do not equate YouTube to TikTok. TikTok is literally incapable of long-form videos and the platform is a cesspool of misinformation.
It’s really not. The weight determines the price and added water raises the cost, you are essentially paying meat prices for water content. In the EU there are strict rules against that. A meat producer has to declare the amount of added water if it’s above 2%. Of course there are companies which fraudulenty go above that without declaring it. My point is, that’s illegal for a reason
Yeah, like I said I’m not certain. And I have since seen random people circulating this on various social media, but I noticed it myself first. At 15%, it could just be water loss, but also it could be something more than that. Mainly it’s just an annoyance.
I’ve seen people getting upset about this. I’m only upset because I have kidney issues and have to watch my sodium and meat really fucks me when it comes to sodium content.
It’s basically just pre-brining them. And the label discloses the added salt water.
Here in the UK it’s just plain water that’s added.
Common with red meat also.
So just the same as adding water to milk
Why is this even legal?
Because the people who write the laws own milk companies, and chicken slaughterhouses?
Here in the EU, I just looked at some packed chicken. It’s marinated, but still: the ingredients say it contains only 87% actual chicken meat, then water, then salt. 13% marinade seems a bit much. It’s not swimming in sauce. Not sure if it’s been plumped too.
It’s a truism that all sorts of industrially produced & packaged meat shrink when you cook/fry it.
It would be interesting to know what the leagl situation is around here. I checked wikipedia and it refers only to the USA.
The salt helps prevent bacterial growth.
And humans also tend to like salty things
The water and salt is absorbed and held inside the chicken meat. That’s why it is 13% and not swimming in sauce.
Brining meat causes the meat itself to swell and take in extra moisture\salt. It’s why brined meats are more tender and less dry after cooking.
Is this legal in the EU?
I’ve always assumed the “mildly salted” chicken is just that.
Yes but it has to say so on the packaging.
Yes
This is why you want to look for “air-chilled” when it comes to chickens. Aside from paying more for a higher sodium product, you’ll get better browning on your meat with air-chilled.
That and I recently purchased frozen chicken breasts from Costco. They were huge and once thawed and cooked they were still larger and had more weight than a usual store brand chicken breast.
As someone with POTS, I for one am okay with sodiummaxxing 😎
chicken breast
ingredients: 86,7 % chicken
This is a good example of using technically true facts to imply something that isn’t actually representative.
Yes, some chicken is sold with an added salt-water solution. That’s not a secret it’s disclosed right on the label. But presenting the maximum legal numbers as if they apply to all supermarket chicken is misleading.
“Up to 30%” is the ceiling, not the average. Likewise, “up to 500 mg of sodium” describes heavily enhanced products, not ordinary chicken. Plenty of chicken is sold with no added solution at all, and consumers can choose whichever they prefer simply by reading the packaging.
This post also frames the added solution as though it’s some kind of deceptive adulteration. In reality, it’s added to improve moisture retention and consistency during cooking, and it’s regulated and clearly labeled.
So the takeaway isn’t “supermarkets are secretly selling watered-down chicken.” The takeaway is much less dramatic: read the label. If you want unenhanced chicken, buy unenhanced chicken. If you don’t mind the added solution, buy the enhanced product. Manufacturing practices are not evidence of a conspiracy just because someone cherry-picked the largest numbers they could find.
Here in Denmark how much water is in the chicken is written on the label of the packaging. It is also required to list what ingredients are used to treat the chicken if anything besides water is used.
Must be nice living in a functioning society.
Happy 2nd cake day James 🎂🍻 !
