Formerly upstate NY, Now residing in Southern NH, Live Free or Die!
My current cookers include a Shirley Fabrication 24x36 patio model; Weber Performer with the Slow-n-Sear 2.0 & Drip & Griddle; Pit Boss Series 2 propane smoker & SnS Travel Kettle.
Straight Whiskey: I'm a bourbon guy. All time favorite Pappy Van Winkle 12 year. Standard go to Blantons
Blended Whiskey: James Oliver American Whiskey
I also enjoy an occasional cigar
Large Big Green Egg, Weber Performer Deluxe, Weber Smokey Joe Silver, Fireboard Drive, 3 DigiQs, lots of Thermapens, and too much other stuff to mention.
Formerly upstate NY, Now residing in Southern NH, Live Free or Die!
My current cookers include a Shirley Fabrication 24x36 patio model; Weber Performer with the Slow-n-Sear 2.0 & Drip & Griddle; Pit Boss Series 2 propane smoker & SnS Travel Kettle.
Straight Whiskey: I'm a bourbon guy. All time favorite Pappy Van Winkle 12 year. Standard go to Blantons
Blended Whiskey: James Oliver American Whiskey
I also enjoy an occasional cigar
The fried chicken sandwich at Pecking House in New York is not your average sandwich. Featuring a chicken thigh brined in buttermilk, MSG and five-spice powder before being fried twice and dunked in chili oil laced with duck fat, the dish has been anointed as one of the city’s best by the likes of Bon Appétit and Eater.
It’s also a testament to bygone stigmas and ascendant trends in American dining.
It wasn’t all that long ago that dark meat was unpopular across certain swaths of American culinary culture, owing to popular misconceptions about its healthiness, cleanliness and quality.
Now, “people are eating more chicken thighs—for protein, for flavor, and for economical reasons,” said Chef Eric Huang, Pecking House’s founder and a former Eleven Madison Park sous-chef. “It’s juicy, it’s delicious, it has a really great texture, it’s just logistically a little more forgiving.”
Back in 2007, even as the average American ate chicken about nine times a month, only two of those instances involved dark meat at all, according to an annual industry study conducted by the National Chicken Council.
For decades, chicken thighs rated so low in the national pecking order that U.S. poultry producers unloaded much of their dark-meat yield to hungry markets abroad in Russia, Mexico, and across Asia. All the while, chefs, culinary historians and industry observers were pleading for Americans to embrace poultry’s dark side.
“Enough is enough,” the late Josh Ozersky wrote in one cri de cuisse in 2011. “The time has come to get with the dark-meat program. The boneless thigh may be the most perfect piece of meat or poultry imaginable.”
In recent years, American diners have finally taken full stock of the dark-meat cut. Thanks to a four-piece combo involving immigration from regions that embrace dark meat, along with evolving culinary culture, economic forces and technological advances, chicken thighs are ubiquitous. In salads, bowls and burritos from high-price fast-casual outfits like Sweetgreen, Cava and Chipotle. In the styrofoam boxes of New York’s halal carts and the cast-iron dishware of its trendiest restaurants. In a surreal moment in recent dark-meat history, the popular chicken-wing chain Wingstopintroduced a virtual concept dubbed, well, Thighstop.
Even ground chicken, which is primarily made of dark meat, has seen a sales surge, with Circana reporting a 23.1% yearly increase in November.
Chicken thighs are roosting in recipes from high-end wellness resorts for top spenders and in the grocery carts of average consumers who are increasingly steering toward poultry because of record-high beef prices in recent months. In an earnings call last month, the chief executive of Pilgrim’s Pride, the second-largest poultry producer in the U.S., said that “boneless dark meat volumes are growing at double-digit rates” across the entire food-service industry.
Among restaurateurs and poultry producers, this development represents an enormous cultural shift. “For years, the stigma largely centered around health perceptions,” Robert O’Brien, the head chef of Popeyes, wrote in an email. “White meat was marketed as leaner and therefore ‘better for you,’ and that messaging stuck.”
The wisdom around white meat’s superiority emerged not just from henhouse superstition and a misperception of cleanliness owing to darker meat’s color, but also from a medical establishment that associated dark meat with higher fat and calories more than flavor. In 1994, guidelines set by the Food and Drug Administration limited which foods could be labeled “healthy” based partially on their fat content.
In both grocery aisles and the public consciousness, items such as avocados and almonds were deemed too fatty to be “healthy,” while Cocoa Puffs and Pop-Tarts technically qualified.
Ironically, heavily processed and oddly shaped chicken patties, tenders and nuggets were popular so long as they claimed to contain 100% white meat. McDonald’s, for example, rolled out their white-meat McNuggets with considerable fanfare in late 2003 and saw a significant sales bump.
As the American consensus on nutrition evolved, production techniques advanced in ways that primed chicken thighs for the American masses.
Machines built to debone chicken breasts were eventually modified to debone dark-meat pieces, which gave less of a visual shock to finicky consumers, who tend to prefer that meat not resemble an actual animal even on food labels, according to a study by the U.K. Government Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs. Or, as the writer John Updike once confessed, “I don’t like meat to look like animals. I prefer it in the form of sausages, hamburgers and meat loaf, far removed from the living thing.”
It certainly also helps that chicken thighs, by wide acclaim, are more difficult to cluck up in the kitchen. Both Chefs Huang and O’Brien described the cut as “more forgiving” than white meat, which has made it popular among professional chefs and featherweight home cooks alike. “You really can cook well past like 190°, maybe 200°, and it’s still really great,” Huang argued. “Personally, as a chef, I love seeing thighs get their moment,”
“They’ve always been a workhorse in professional kitchens,” O’Brien added, “because of their depth of flavor and versatility.”
Of course, chicken thighs and dark meat in general have been a celebrated ingredient of American cooking and foodways for centuries, including in Southern and Black American traditions.
But, according to both trend reports and poultry-industry executives, the recent rise of chicken thighs can also be attributed to the increase in Asian and Hispanic populations, who have been the fastest-growing demographic groups in the U.S. for decades, and for whom chicken thighs are a more central culinary fixture. As a result, even bone-in dark meat prices have gained “a whopping 93% increase from the average just five years prior,” as one industry publication noted in January.
“The example I always use is when I was growing up, my Korean friends were teased ruthlessly about kimchi and their kimchi fridges, and how the houses smelled,” Huang said. “And now kimchi is at Whole Foods.”
Places where dark meat had been overlooked are finally seeing the light. O’Brien, a 17-year veteran of Popeyes, explained that the company has “seen strong demand in regions where dark meat historically wasn’t as dominant,” specifically noting the Midwest and Northeast as areas where “white meat used to be the default preference.”
For the chicken-thigh devotees, it’s poultry in motion.
I now cook most all of my Chinese dishes with boneless skinless thigh meat I purchase. Much more flavorful and tender. I was thinking that my chinese restaurants were just getting cheap when they were using that and maybe so but it tastes much better than the chicken breast.
Pit Barrel Cooker
Weber Master-Touch
Blackstone Omnivore 4 Burner Griddle
Thermoworks: Signals, Billows, Thermopens, Thermopops, Nodes, bunch of silicone stuff, and more!
OnlyFire Rotisserie w/ Basket attachment for the Weber
Vortex for the Weber
Both of Meathead's books!
Way too many BBQ related accessories, tools, and doo-dads!
I'm seeing more Korean style chicken joints here in town, and every one I've been to has thighs on the menu.
Personally, I'm happy about it. First off the recipes I see at those places were unique, definitely not your run of the mill midwest chicken eats (like the hot chicken takeover places that sprung up a few years ago and seemed to be everywhere for awhile).
Secondly, I prefer thighs over breasts (ok, ok... haha, yeah, yeah, that's funny! I get it...). for the flavor. Typically, if I get fried chicken takeout, I'll go for the dark first. Usually cheaper anyways, and not overcooked or dry as the white meat. Even in sit down restaurants, I feel like the white meat is usually overcooked.
When I cook at home, it's almost always thighs or drumsticks. They're on sale A LOT. Also gives me a chance to make a bunch of different recipes, try them out, and see if I like em.
By the way, every recipe I've tried from AR? All good. I'd serve any of those (what I've gotten to so far) to anyone.
Now if only I could get my kids to come over to the dark side....
I always liked dark meat more than white meat. White meat is good right out of the oven if cooked right but for leftovers white meat dries out and I would rather have dark meat.
I always used the white meat the next day, slathered in yellow mustard on a sandwich! Overcooked or dry, whatever! Like I told someone else recently, I'd eat cardboard with mustard on it.
I actually have had, and liked their chicken. Unfortunately, the store closest to us, is not in the best area, and last time me and some friends walked in, we walked right back out. The place was filthy. Never been back to see if they ever found their mop and bucket.
All the Popeyes around here, save 1, have closed probably due to quality. And the last one will probably close soon. It is terrible. And I love Popeyes.
22” Blue Weber Kettle with SnS insert
Kamado Joe Jr with Kick Ash Basket
Char-Broil Smartchef Tru Infrared Gasser
Anovo Hot Tub Time Machine with Custom Hot Tub
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