The Ultimate Chicken Breast Buying Guide

[playful music]

Let's talk about chicken.

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No artificial colors or flavors,

no hormones, no antibiotics, minimally processed,

free-range, gluten-free, cage-free,

USDA organic, probably raised on farms in the US,

ultra premium with rib meat,

air-chilled versus chilled in water.

This one has no claims on it.

What do these words actually mean?

Today we're gonna look at as many chicken breasts

that we could find at the store

and look at all the different claims

and see if it corresponds to better quality product.

By the end of this video,

you'll never shop for chicken the same way again.

I promise.

My name is Jake Dickson.

I'm the owner and operator of Dickson's Farmstand Meats.

I'm a family run butcher shop in New York City.

When shopping for chicken in the store,

there are a lot of considerations to take into account.

For me, the top ones are humane treatment, no antibiotics,

pasture-raised, or free-range.

For me, the biggest red flag is no claims at all.

I would probably dismiss it out of hand.

We're gonna look at all these products raw.

Then we're gonna cook a few and see how on the other side

the texture and quality compare.

Let's get started.

This is Perdue, 99% fat-free,

boneless, skinless chicken breasts.

My first impressions of this package,

these are enormous chicken breasts.

Off a roughly three and a half pound bird,

a chicken breast should weigh maybe a half pound,

and this thing is significantly heftier than that.

That means this was a huge chicken.

Sometimes they can grow so fast

and become so heavy that their legs can't support them.

In all production methods in all animal agriculture,

animals will get injured.

It's just the nature of raising animals for meat.

We want hearty birds or raised well and cared for.

You know, we want them to have a good life with one bad day

is kind of how we like to think about it.

But these giant birds are more likely

to not be able to support their weight.

They grow just too fast.

You can see that this is a modified atmosphere packaging

or MAP gas because it's kind of puffing out.

So there's either argon or nitrogen gas in this package.

It will prevent oxidation, so it'll extend the shelf life.

Overall, it's pretty typical packaging

for supermarket poultry.

There's a little like we call a diaper in the bottom

to absorb any juices, which is a positive thing.

This one has a little bit of what we call white striping,

these fat striations.

That's usually a result of the bird growing really quickly.

You see it in large chickens.

It can lead to like a woody texture,

like really overly firm and chewy.

That's a real fear.

And then I'm looking at the label claims.

So no hormones or steroids added.

They put those things on there

to give you a perception of more natural product,

but it means absolutely nothing.

They have the little asterisk.

So you see federal regulations prohibit the use of hormones

or steroids and poultry, so it's just chicken.

And then you have some other claims here

like no animal byproducts in the feed.

You can't feed chicken to chicken in our country.

But in a commercial environment

where I don't know what that animal's eating,

I'd probably agree

that I want no animal byproducts in the feed.

And then the big claim on here they have

is that no antibiotics ever.

The use of antibiotics

in poultry raising serves two purposes.

One, it allows you to put more chickens in denser housing

without them getting sick.

More birds means more profit.

The second they realized

when they started giving antibiotics to both beef

and chicken was that they grow faster.

So that's the reason you see it in a lot of poultry

is that they can raise them in denser conditions

and they grow a lot faster.

I would say don't buy these giant chicken breasts.

My experience with giant chicken breasts is always negative.

Always go for those eight or nine ounce chicken breasts.

They seem to cook up much better every time.

I'm gonna open up this Perdue package and see how it looks.

My first impression, it looks pretty fresh.

It's not like slimy or weird.

The other major thing is this is a huge chicken breast.

So there's not a lot of purge,

liquid that came out of the chicken in there.

This breast seems pretty dry.

Chicken can retain up to like 15 or 16% of water

that was used to chill it or purposefully added to it.

You think you're paying for meat,

but really you're just paying for water at that point.

So when a chicken is processed,

first the animal is killed and then it's scalded,

so dipped in boiling water quickly.

That releases the feather so it can be plucked.

And then after that you have this hot bird.

And if it retains the heat too long,

it will almost cook itself.

So you have to chill the bird quite rapidly.

Some people are against the water chilling,

which is where most poultry is processed

'cause they think it's a kind of cesspool for bacteria.

When done correctly, it doesn't need to be.

The downside I would see

is that it adds that additional water to the process.

The white striping I was a little bit concerned with

doesn't look too bad, and you'd almost think like,

Oh, white striping, a little bit of fat is good,

it's like marbling, but it leads to firm, chewy texture.

But overall, actually like these breasts

don't feel too firm.

They don't seem too bad, considering they are gigantic.

I'm gonna weigh these up

so we can get a yield for them later after we cook them

so we can compare what the raw weight

to the cooked weight is.

We've got the Farmer Focus organic and free-range,

boneless, skinless chicken breasts.

They're trying to make it look fancy,

higher end with the label and the farmer.

They're going with a pretty generic packaging

that you'll see in a lot of supermarkets now,

which are these trays combined with vacuum sealing.

That's because vacuum sealed chicken

in a loose package doesn't look very appealing.

They've tried to give the packages

a little bit of structure.

It doesn't do anything else for it.

It makes it look bigger than it is.

And actually this chicken breasts are enormous

so I don't think they need to look bigger

than they already are.

This is an organic product,

has to adhere to the USDA's organic program,

which would mean organic feed throughout entire life.

It also means no antibiotics ever during its lifecycle.

Could mean that it grows slower

so it's gonna have more flavor.

It says probably raise on farms in the US.

That doesn't mean that much.

I think all chicken we pretty much eat here

is from US farms.

There's also one other claim here

that I guess I should call out too, which is free-range.

Free-range is a term that is certified by the USDA.

That means that they have access to outdoors

and it can't just be like a tiny little hole.

They have to have real access.

There's also a gluten-free certification,

which I don't think means anything for a chicken breast

but maybe for some people.

And they also have this non-GMO verified.

The USDA organic and the non-GMO should mean the same thing.

It could be that they had to do that

to get the USDA certification anyway.

Getting the organic certification

can be a bit cumbersome for a small farm.

That's why a lot of people don't do it.

I think organic matters a lot when you go to the supermarket

and you have no other information.

That's when all these labeling claims mean something.

Says there's an easy open tab. Let's see how it goes.

I might need a second glove for this.

It's not as easy open as I'd hoped.

There's a few things that I am surprised

given that this is the most expensive one we're doing.

It's the only organic one.

The first is their huge, just like the Perdue bird.

This is the enormous chicken breast.

It also has quite a bit of white striping here.

That makes me pause a little bit,

like I'm not super excited about this chicken,

and that's something important to remember.

The claims don't always mean it's gonna be delicious.

So there's a little bit of bruising that's not great.

You can see the little blood spot.

This is not super extensive, but if I went to the shelf

and I saw two packages, one with, one without,

I would choose the one without.

I want non-damaged meat when I can get it.

When I first open the package,

you're gonna get an offgassing.

You might have this like negative smell at first.

Don't judge it right when you first open the package.

Give it like 30 seconds, a minute, and then kind of smell,

and actually all that smell is dissipated.

So I'm not really worried about freshness on this.

But there is a bit of like a syrupiness around it,

water with protein solids in it.

That for me is not great.

It's not like terrible,

but it's also not that appealing to me either.

It also says up to 5% retained water.

So that means it was a water-chilled bird.

There's also some like weird butchery things.

They've left on some of the rib meat.

Not a big deal, but, like, this is probably

a really expensive chicken breast.

So you're paying for this fatty bit

that isn't gonna be great.

Compared to the Perdue, this one looks pretty similar.

All right, this is the one I think we're going 16 ounces.

18.1 ounces, that is an enormous chicken breast.

That chicken was probably pushing eight to 10 pounds.

The average chicken that you probably pull off the shelf

is like three and a half to four and a half pounds.

This was a bird that if you saw in the yard

would intimidate you.

All right, we got the boneless chicken breast family pack

from Food Bazaar.

Super old school packaging, plastic tray,

no modified atmosphere packaging or vacuum seal.

This was chicken breast that came out of a big case.

They individually packaged,

wrapped them in Saran wrap, and put 'em out.

So in some ways I like

that there's no modified atmosphere packaging

that's extending the shelf life.

That being said, you have a shorter window to use it.

There's one thing I don't like about this package.

It has a sell by date but not a pack by date,

especially in this context.

I kind of just like wanna know

how long it's been sitting there.

There are no other claims on this chicken breast.

The worst case scenario,

these are just really big, fast growing birds,

raised with a lot of antibiotics

and not very good condition.

Another monster chicken breast.

White striping on it, some bruising.

As we talked about before, you see these ragged edges.

It was either torn off or mechanically separated.

There wasn't clean knife work here.

But there's some also like weird things

where somebody with a knife

actually went the wrong way across it.

You would never know that from buying it

'cause it's the bottom but it's not great.

This is a 20.1 ounce chicken breast. A monster chicken.

We've got the Trader Joe's chicken breast

boneless, skinless with rib meat.

I don't know if they're required to say

with rib meat or not.

It seems like a weird one to add if they weren't required.

It's vacuum sealed, so zero oxygen packaging.

They look a little bit smaller.

I think there's three chicken breasts in there.

And it's a little bit saucy but not too saucy.

The minimally processed claim doesn't mean anything to me.

Pretty much every chicken breast

should be minimally processed.

That means there's no weird ingredients in it.

It's not ground and reconstituted.

No artificial colors or flavors.

They're kind of like signaling quality

but with words that don't mean anything in this context.

Up to 5% retained water. That's not bad or good.

It's not like a really high number

that I would be concerned about, like 12 or 15%.

That's just the nature of it, retaining water likely

because it was a water-chilled chicken.

Whereas air-chilled, you're not adding water,

so you're going on a very cold refrigerator

with a lot of airflow rapidly bringing the temperature

of the bird down so it doesn't do that cooking itself.

The advantage also there is in addition to not adding water,

you could kind of crisp up the skin nicer theoretically.

That being said, then these birds

are being packaged usually.

Moisture from the inside of the bird

is gonna travel the skin.

So unless you're going directly from refrigerator

to the butcher shop shelf with no packaging,

likely it's not really gonna improve it,

but you will have less water.

You won't have this 5% or 2% or 10% retained water.

I'm trying to not to stab myself or the chicken.

It has no odor even when I first open it.

That's a good sign overall,

so I would assume it's pretty fresh.

So in the same package there's three breasts.

None of them are as big as some of the other ones we've seen

and actually pretty nicely butchered.

It had rib meat, and only one of the three

has any rib meat on it.

They're pretty nice looking breasts.

They're pretty clean, well-butchered, a nice size.

There's no claims about how this bird was raised,

but it's still a high quality looking product.

If I were to pick out without labels,

I'd probably have taken these ones home

out of the four that we've seen so far.

All right, we've got the Kirkland,

which is the Costco brand,

fresh boneless, skinless chicken breasts.

It's a bit of an intimidating package.

There's a lot going on here.

There are individual sections.

They want you to buy in bulk,

but they have individually packaged it,

which I guess is pretty user-friendly.

This is the first one that we've seen

that has a halal certification.

Halal is a religious designation or process.

I am certainly not an expert on that.

I think some people believe that halal or kosher

denotes a level of quality.

I would argue, especially for kosher, that is not the case.

You can't stack value propositions

from a financial perspective.

Kosher meat is already really expensive

and they're getting a premium for kosher meat.

They can't get a double premium

for being kosher and organic.

And when there's no financial incentive,

at least for the mass market,

people just aren't gonna do it.

In addition to the halal certification,

there's not a lot here.

It has a unique packaging we haven't seen.

I see up to 2% retained water, which is not a lot.

They're making it some American Heart Association claims.

I would assume that those are true

for every chicken breast in the world.

Hatched, raised, and harvested in the USA.

I would argue that the chicken industry in our country

is as bad or worse than most other countries.

They do look a bit saucy.

Anytime you vacuum seal something,

it starts kind of giving up liquid.

Definitely when you buy vacuum sealed any meat,

make sure you're padding it really dry before you cook it.

Is it gonna be one or two breasts? It's two.

They're pretty syrupy. There's quite a bit of liquid.

They're very wet and a bit floppy.

They're a little smelly, a little smelly.

That smelliness could also be in the liquid

and I'm gonna pat it dry.

And see how this one's kind of pale and white

and has a little bit of striations.

It might have a little bit of that woody chicken syndrome.

It doesn't mean that it's terrible.

I'm going purely based on superficial characteristics

in analyzing these breasts.

That's what I'd be going for

when I'm buying in the supermarket.

My guess is if you were to cook these

that this was a healthier, happier chicken

than this one here.

You can see this one has like some weird things.

There was something going on

that they trimmed off from here.

This is not the natural line of the chicken breasts.

They've kind of have like a flatness

that some of the other bigger ones didn't have

that probably cooked more evenly.

I think these are kind of middle of the road

compared to other ones we've seen.

We've got the Just Bare

boneless, skinless chicken breast filets.

There's some things I like about this label

and some things I really don't like about this label.

No antibiotics ever. I like that.

Broilers in our country are not raised in cages.

Saying that this is a cage-free, that would only apply

if you were talking about laying hen

after it stopped laying eggs

if you were turning that into a meat bird.

Meat birds generally in our country are not raised in cages,

but making a cage-free claim means nothing really.

And then it actually makes me question

other things about here.

So it's American Humane Certified, but what does that mean?

Different humane certifications are different.

I start to question it

when they're making a cage-free claim along with that.

There's something weird here.

It actually says a weight printed on the package,

which always freaks me out.

This is a lasered on, but this is actually looks

like it was in the like label generation.

Does that mean they're like having these giant breasts

and they're cutting little bits off

to get to this exact weight they're aiming for?

I don't know. That kind of makes me think weird of it.

Let's get into this chicken breast.

It's actually like a pretty nice chicken breast.

I like the size of it. Butchered well, no ragged edges.

The breasts are really consistent.

Feasibly could be from the exact same chicken.

Curious how much liquid's in here. An average amount.

The color's nice, like 'em a little bit darker,

but overall, I think it's a nice looking chicken breast.

All right, we've got the Bell & Evans

ultra premium chicken breasts.

They're in the plastic tray.

I am personally not a huge fan,

but a lot of the higher end products

have been going this way lately.

It gives it some structure.

I think it displays better in the supermarket on the shelf.

Seems like a lot of plastic for like a small product.

Their big thing is that they're air-chilled.

That being said, there's still quite a bit of purge in here.

They say raise without antibiotics.

Usually when you see that in the package,

that's their big claim.

Bell & Evans has gone air-chilled as their bigger claims.

And they say humanely raised on family farms.

That can mean a lot of things in our countries.

It could be a network of small family farms

or it could be giant grow houses

that happen to be owned by a family.

That's why for me local is important.

Somebody theoretically could show up and verify it.

I had no idea how to open this package

without getting chicken everywhere.

Oh wait, wait, no, there we go.

A bunch of liquid in there,

even though it has no retained water.

Not like air-chilled means

that there will be no water coming out of the product.

I like the size of them, pretty nicely trimmed.

They've kind of like pulled the chicken breast off,

but then they've trimmed them.

I like the color of them.

This one has like a little bit of the white striping.

It's not so bad.

Is it gonna be a perfect dreamy chicken breast?

Probably not. Is it gonna be a nice quality chicken breast?

It probably will be.

I brought some chicken, whole chickens

and chicken breasts from our store

from two different suppliers

to kinda demonstrate quality in a different way.

These are from two small family farms in New York state.

I've got my heritage birds from Snowdance

up in the Catskills

and then they've got a pasture-raised birds

from up in Romulus, New York.

Both are chicken,

but they're completely different styles of birds.

This is kind our American Cornish Cross style.

It's gonna have really big breasts, small legs,

really compact, faster growing.

This is our Rhode Island Red.

And you can see they look totally different.

It's got a really, really long breast

but it's very narrow and really big legs.

So this is more in style wise

what you would find in an American supermarket.

None of them are really big,

so you're not gonna see that like, you know, white striping.

Those chicken breasts that you're seeing in the supermarket

are not from what you would see as a normal-sized chicken.

That chicken would be like double

or even two and a half times the size of this.

Let's start the browning test.

We are gonna brown three of these chicken breasts,

giving them each the same treatment

with the same amount of oil,

same amount of time on each side in the pan,

and compare how they eat.

We'll also take a look at how well each of them browns.

Here are three brown chicken breasts.

No real surprises here.

The Farmer Focus definitely got the best sear on it,

nice caramelization.

The Perdue chicken, it looks like

it's kind of maybe had some surface liquid on it

so it's steamed a little bit.

It doesn't have quite as much color.

And then the generic one in the styrofoam tray,

it has nice color on it, but I'm slightly worried

it's gonna come off like a skin when we go to cut it.

It's gonna be like too dry on the outside

and moist underneath it.

The Perdue seems to have shrunk a lot more

because these two were not that dissimilar in size

when they were raw.

Overall, they look pretty good.

So we weighed these when they were fresh.

We weighed them when they were cooked.

They were all 72 to 73% shrinkage.

Somewhat surprising to me only

in that they were a bit variable in size,

but it shows that the yield, regardless of size,

seems to be the same across these breasts.

Big, small, they all give up

about the same amount of water during cooking.

Here we've got our generic supermarket bird

from the styrofoam tray, this is our Perdue bird,

and this is the Farmer Focus over here.

So this guy, it's like kind of mushy.

I was actually expecting it to be more like hard

and maybe it will eat firm, but it's kind of watery

and mushy in the middle in a not very appealing way.

And then the Perdue bird is the opposite.

It's like hard and dry in the middle,

even cutting from the thickest part of the breast.

And then the Farmer Focus

actually has like a nice kind of middle of the road texture.

It looks chickeny, tighter grain to the meat here.

I think it's a smaller breast compared to this one

that has these like big muscle fibers

and then the Perdue is kind of somewhere in the middle.

This is more appealing looking.

The Perdue visually for me is the worst

and it looks really dry.

And this has this weird mushiness

that does not excite me either.

From a price point perspective,

we're kind of following bottom price point

up to the organic Farmer Focus.

I find a lot of commercial chicken has both like a tough

but wet texture to it, which is kind of what you see here.

Juiciness, as we experience it, is not so much water.

It's about kind of the ratios of fats and proteins

to the overall product.

Dry age beef and prime beef seems juicier

'cause it has more fat-to-water ratio.

Wetter does not mean that you'll experience it as juicier.

And then this seems more like an average chicken breast

what I would be looking for in the Farmer Focus.

It's not wet, it's not dry.

It looks like a normal chicken breast

that I would wanna eat.

I guess my normal is what I sell in my store.

I find this looks pretty appealing.

Maybe a little dry. Overall I think the texture is positive.

Nothing a little bit of ketchup couldn't solve.

This one here is the Perdue.

The flavor is actually decent.

It has that kind of like stringiness to it,

more like a little bit overcooked turkey breasts.

It just kind of eats dry

and leaves like a cardboardy texture in your mouth.

What I don't like a lot about low-end chicken,

it has a firmness.

That might be dry but it's not firm.

This is what I'm a little bit worried about with this one.

It's not hard or tough.

It's very wet and has no flavor at all.

This actually doesn't taste like anything

because it grew so fast it didn't develop any flavor.

They all colored decently in cooking.

You know, I don't expect a ton

from a boneless, skinless chicken breast.

Based on the labeling claims,

I would always go with the organic one.

But of these three,

it's nice to see that the organic one was better.

Let's start the sous vide test.

We're gonna cook three of these in sous vide

at the exact same way, at the exact same temperature.

Then I'm gonna do a blind taste test of each one.

These are our three sous vide chicken breasts.

So the one on the left came out kind of like dry seeming,

just looking visually.

This middle guy is very, very wet

and kind of like mushy in a highly unappealing way.

And this one on the right is somewhere in between.

The grain of the muscle is very established there.

If I had to guess right now before eating them,

this one will be pretty good,

this one will be not great but okay,

and this one is gonna be very unappealing.

A little dry but fine, pretty tender,

doesn't have a ton of flavor.

If I had to guess, that would be Farmer Focus,

the organic one.

This big wet one, my guess is gonna be,

it's the generic like styrofoam tray one.

Eats like it looks, wet and dry at the same time.

Big open grain, not a great texture.

This you could dice and put in a salad

and it'd be pretty good.

This would be like ruin your salad.

And then our third one.

Texturally it's probably

maybe even a little bit better than that.

It's not wet, but it's not as dry as that one. It's fine.

I'd probably still prefer that one

'cause it has like a nicer bite and chew to it.

Whereas this one is still like a little bit wet and floppy

and the grain is a little bit bigger.

It's not tough, but it's not very good either.

Okay, the big reveal.

We've got the Perdue, the Farmer Focus organic,

and then our generic supermarket over here on the right.

It's a little bit strange to me

that the organic one was both the best and the worst,

and I would say that this sous vide the worst by far,

but it was a giant chicken breast

in that package that we did sous vide.

But it all a little bit makes sense based on the variability

in every single package that we had.

If I had to choose one thing from a quality perspective,

forgetting about the rest,

I would say don't buy these giant chicken breasts.

Always go for those eight or nine ounce chicken breasts.

They seem to cook up much better every time.

We're here at the end of our chicken breast investigation.

One of the big surprises I had was that within each package

there was wild variation in chicken breasts,

both in size and quality.

As a consumer, that's very problematic.

It means you can't buy a package of chicken breasts

for you and your partner, cook them next to each other,

and expect to have the same eating experience.

That leads to a pretty poor customer experience.

So when in doubt from a quality perspective,

I would always buy smaller versus larger.

The quality of the supermarket claims

and the eating of the end product

or even the visual of the raw product don't really line up.

Those claims may be true

and they may mean it lived a better life,

but it doesn't necessarily mean

that it is a better quality chicken breast.

Given that, it means it's really important as consumers

you learn how to actually look at meat and read quality.

You have to look further than the label.

My view is that if most Americans saw

how animals in our country were raised,

they wouldn't want those commodity farm products.

I think people should educate themselves,

see what that's all about, and then make the decision

based on what they care about, what they can afford.

You need to know what you're buying before you buy it.

Good luck in your quest to find the perfect chicken breast.