The Perdue Chicken Cookbook | Page 7

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 the shelf life and dries out and toughens the meat. No white colored chickens get by the inspectors. Sometimes when I open a package of chicken, there's a pungent odor that doesn't smell spoiled, but it's definitely unpleasant. Should I throw the chicken out? If the odor lasts only a matter of seconds, your chicken is probably fine. Meat is chemically active, and as it ages, it releases sulfur. When you open a bag that doesn't have air holes, you may notice the accumulated sulfur, but it will quickly disperse into the air. In fact, I've heard of cases where a wife will lean over to her husband and say, "Smell this, I think it's gone bad." He'll take a deep whiff and find nothing wrong