America's Chicken Obsession Is Shifting to Dark Meat
After decades of believing that breast meat was better, restaurants and home cooks are learning to love the thigh. But obstacles remain.
The dark truth: thighs are the tastiest parts of chicken to eat.
Source: Bloomberg
I sat down at an outdoor table at New York City’s Hudson Yards one bright May afternoon with a bag containing two of star chef David Chang’s entries in the fast-food fried-chicken-sandwich wars. They were both Fuku Spicy Fried Chicken Sandos, but with a crucial difference: one was made of thigh meat, the other of breast meat.
When Chang opened his first Fuku in 2015 at the site of his original, reputation-making Momofuku Noodle Bar in Manhattan’s East Village, it offered only thigh-meat sandwiches. Chefs and others who think a lot about food are nearly unanimous in their belief that dark chicken meat is juicier and tastier than white meat, and while Chang doesn’t always truckle to elite culinary opinion — witness his highly amusing pro-iceberg-lettuce Twitter rant that I had the honor of inspiring last fall — he is a self-proclaimed “dark-meat loyalist.”