The Perdue Chicken Cookbook | Page 7

should be used within three months. (Personally I try to
avoid freezing chicken since I know that freezing makes the chicken
less tender and less juicy. Still, in spite of good intentions, I sometimes
end up doing it. I've learned to make it a point to have a wax marking
pencil and freezer tape handy, so I can label the package with the date
and contents. I wonder if you've found, as I have, that it's unbelievably
easy to lose track of how long things have been in there.) Do not stuff
poultry before freezing, and freeze cooked birds and stuffing separately.

Can frozen chicken be thawed and frozen again? Each time you freeze
chicken, you sacrifice quality. If carefully handled, however, it is safe
to defrost uncooked chicken and to freeze it again after cooking. If
frozen after cooking, do not thaw and freeze again. Why is chicken
sometimes implicated in illness? In a warm, moist environment,
illness-causing bacteria can grow in high-protein, low-acid foods such
as meat, fish, poultry, eggs and milk. But there is no reason to become
ill from eating or serving these foods, if they are cooked thoroughly
and served or refrigerated immediately. To prevent transferring bacteria
from one food to another, use warm water and soap to wash hands,
utensils and work surfaces before and after use. What makes chicken
tender -- or tough? Frank does his best to make Perdue chickens as
tender as possible, but there's also a lot you can do. _Don't let chicken
dry out in the refrigerator; dry chicken is tough chicken. Keep it
wrapped in the package it comes in until you use it. _Avoid freezing it.
When the juices inside the cells freeze, they act like little spears and
they'll rupture some of the cell walls. When you defrost the chicken,
you'll lose some of the juice and the chicken will be less tender. _Cook
chicken to the proper temperature, using a meat thermometer or pop-up
guide. Cook bone-in chicken to 180 degrees and boneless chicken to
170 degrees. Undercooked chicken will be tough and rubbery because
it takes a fairly high internal temperature to soften the proteins in the
muscles and make them tender. But don't overcook chicken either,
because moisture will start to steam off, and the more chicken dries out,
the tougher it gets. _Keep the skin on chicken during cooking. The skin
helps keep juices in, and tenderness and juiciness go hand in hand. I've
tried this both ways, and the difference is significant. (When you cook
chicken with the skin on, approximately half the fat from the skin is
absorbed into the meat; if calories and cholesterol are very important to
you, you might want to remove the skin before cooking even if it
means a less tender result.) _When microwaving any chicken product,
cover with a loose tent of waxed paper to prevent drying. _Some
authorities feel strongly that you should not salt the chicken before
cooking because salt draws the juices out during cooking and toughens
the meat. In my experience, there is a detectable difference in
tenderness between salting before cooking and salting afterwards; the
chicken that I salted afterwards was slightly more tender. Still, I would

guess that most people, myself included, wouldn't notice a big
difference unless they were specifically paying attention to it. The
difference doesn't jump out at you as it does with overcooking or
freezer burn. _Fry or roast breast pieces rather than microwaving them
if tenderness is a top priority for you. Microwaving is significantly
faster, but there's a greater risk of toughness when you microwave
breast meat. Breast meat is fairly dry to begin with, and you don't have
a whole lot of latitude between overcooking and undercooking. With
breast meat, there's a trade-off between the speed of microwaving and
the reliability of frying or roasting.
Why are some chickens yellow skinned and some white? A chicken's
skin color comes from the diet it was fed and the same bird could have
a white skin or a yellow skin, depending on what it ate. The diet that
produces a yellow skin is more expensive than the usual diet, but the
people at Perdue Farms feel it's worth it because a yellow skin color is
one of the fastest ways Frank's inspectors have of finding and
disqualifying an inferior bird. If a bird is sick or off its feed, it doesn't
absorb nutrients well and won't develop the rich golden color that is
characteristic of Perdue birds. Also, if part of a bird's outer skin is
"barked", that is, rubbed off due to rough handling during processing,
the Perdue inspectors can detect it more easily than with a
white-skinned bird. Detecting and removing and chicken with a barked
skin is important because damaged skin shortens