Word: chickening
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Frank Perdue and Dinah Shore cross drumsticks in the Great Chicken War. -- An elegant new book on Southern cuisine...
With their ready-to-eat chicken products, the fowl combatants hope to pluck some feathers from such fast-food chains as McDonald's, Burger King and Wendy's. "They have siphoned off about 20% of supermarket poultry sales in the past five years," estimates Kent Hill, a marketing executive for Holly Farms. That is an increasingly important market share, as chicken begins to surpass beef in the American diet. Dinah Shore, the Tennessee-born singer and cookbook author, is the spokeswoman for Holly Farms Foods, which last week launched its oven-roasted chickens with a celebrity bash at Manhattan...
Perdue, who speaks for his own company, in Salisbury, Md., has been selling a full "Perdue Done It" line along the Eastern seaboard for the past three months, and it will be introduced next in Ohio. Restricting flavors to plain, with a piquant hot-and-spicy variation for chicken wings, the Perdue line, like Holly Farms, offers parts and whole roasted chickens. Perdue also has breaded tenders (fillets of breast) and nuggets, as well as cutlets that are formed of boned, cut-up white meat. So far nuggets are the biggest sellers, popular especially with college students and singles...
...general, these cooked products cost twice as much as comparable cuts of raw chicken, but they are about one-third less expensive than fast-food counterparts. And though there are minor differences in preserving, cooking and packaging techniques, both companies follow roughly the same procedures. Chickens are injected with water (Holly Farms) or broth (Perdue), along with seasonings and such preservatives as dextrose, sodium phosphate, malic or citric acid; many of the Farms products also contain vegetable or coconut oil. Though several samples from both processors were bloody, the meat is generally cooked until well done to kill bacteria...
Overall, the Perdue products, particularly the Cornish hens, seemed somewhat fresher and brighter than the often gray-tinged, overly salty and watery Holly Farms cuts. But neither is a match for the home-cooked product, or even for a chicken fresh off the rotisserie of a neighborhood deli. Asked if the Holly Farms product is as good as her home-roasted chicken, Shore did her best. "Well, I sprinkle mine with herbs, salt, pepper and lemon juice and pop it in the oven, and it's not any better than this," she said with an almost straight face. Almost...