Lots of premium options available for tastier chicken. What do all the various labels means and which are actually worth the extra cost? What is Jidori chicken and why is it so special? What is the meaning when associated with fresh chicken of words like “All-Natural,” “Free-Range,” “Pasture-Raised” and “Cage-Free” ? Chef Andrew explains…
SoCal Restaurant Show
Ask the Chef with Co-Host Chef Andrew Gruel of Calico Fish House
This is Tristan Beeman of the Wine Exchange in Santa Ana. You're listening to a spectacular vintage year in food news. So Cal restaurant show. Cheers. And welcome back. Sadly, it is the concluding segment of the So Cal restaurant show. But the better news is, is we're going to be right back here with you next Saturday from 10 a.m. to 12 noon. And it is going to be our 12th anniversary special, broadcasting live from the West Drift Manhattan Beach, celebrating the inaugural Manhattan Beach Food and Wine Festival. And you can also catch us on the AM830KLA app. I'm Andy Harris, the executive producer and co-host of the show. And at this time in the show, it is always fun to welcome back my co-host, Chef Andrew Grool of the Calico Fish House in Huntington Beach. And boy, it is a crazy weekend in Huntington Beach, Chef Andrew. Yeah, it's a good weekend. We got the air show and a few other events going on. So it's always nice when you get you kind of slow down after the summer and then you get a few of these little pops on the weekends. Well, from what I understand, Chef Andrew, that Pacific air show is a monster. So whatever spillover you might get north in in Sunset Beach. I'm sure they're there. Yeah, we've been very blessed because we're right on that thoroughfare. When anyone comes down from LA, Long Beach, Seal Beach, they've got to go past our restaurant. And we throw the lobster on the corner, you know, wake everyone. Hey, sounds like a good deal to me, Chef Andrew. Chef Andrew, everybody is looking to kind of cut that food bill at home these days. And in terms of proteins, you know, always looking for value for the dollar. And chicken has become increasingly more popular. Gosh, you see every fast food chain, even the burger chains now, you know, are adding different variations of chickens, whether it's tenders or wings or this type of sandwich. And for the home cook, they're also looking at the premium varieties of chicken, because there are a lot of them out there with a lot of promises. Also, there are a lot of terms that are associated with premium chicken, some of which I think you're going to explain to us mean something and others not so much, but they sound great. So let's start out with a premium brand of chicken. You had a very successful fast casual chicken restaurant for a number of years in Irvine called Two Birds. And if I remember this correctly, your signature source for chicken was Gidori Chicken. And if I'm remembering correctly, you were during the time of Two Birds, actually the largest customer of West Coast Prime Meats for Gidori Chicken for Two Birds. What is Gidori Chicken? Well, Gidori Chicken is a brand itself, right? So Gidori is the specific brand and it's a farm. It's here locally in California. The Gidori Chicken is a specific breed. It's between like a Japanese bird and a road. It's called a Rhode Island Red, right? So it's this breed of like a Japanese chicken and this kind of more classic heirloom chicken out of the states. They raise them in small farms here in California. It's fed a specific diet of like tomatoes and apples and grains and some spices. It's part of the really the allure of the Gidori Chicken is the processing, right? So they clean it by hand. They chill it in ice and water, which prevents a lot of that water retention because when you kind of commercially mass manufacture and process chicken, a lot of times they soak it in salt water. So you'll see like water added, there allowed a certain amount of retention in these commercial chickens that soak up some of that water. So when you're paying for the chicken, right? You're also paying for the water. The beautiful thing about the Gidori is there's no water soaked or injected into the chicken and that's great for flavor. It's also great for the dollar, right? Because you're not paying for water, but from a flavor perspective, you get this really creamy, clean taste. It's a healthy, rich flavor. That's because you don't have the dilution of the water in there. And it's interesting because a similar principle applies across all meats, right? So like the reason dry-age beef is so good is because when you dry-age it, you're releasing the water that's naturally in the beef and you're left with that really, really rich, creamy beefy flavor. So that's the science behind the bird there. It's delivered within like 24 hours after they slaughter it. So you can find Gidori chicken as well in various stores throughout Southern California. I've seen it at pavilions, mothers. I don't know if Whole Foods has it. They might have a similar product because now there's some rip-off products and you can buy directly from Gidori. So it's a great bird. It's a little bit more expensive, but once again, you're getting a richer flavor. You're paying for less water. So in a way, I think it kind of balances out. Now that's a brand of chicken itself, Gidori chicken. They don't market themselves as being like organic or natural or free range or pasture rates because I think that really for them, this story encapsulates a lot of those marketing terms that you see on chicken packages. Now it's funny, it's like I say, you go to the store and it's like watching NASCAR. Every package has like 100 different labels or callouts and you don't even know what's what. That, Chef Andrew, that's a good segue. Let's talk about what some of these terms mean if they're more than just a marketing slogan that possibly has nothing to back it up. So I know one that does have some meaning that we see quite often, but wonder what it means. What does all natural really mean? Well, I got to be honest with you. I think the all natural one is the most deceiving one because it's kind of a catch-all. It doesn't have like, I don't necessarily know if it has a specific FDA definition. I think it just can't have like a certain amount of chemicals in it and it can't be manipulated or fabricated, which makes it natural. I think the more, so all natural, once again, I look past that. If I'm buying chicken, I'm looking for cage-free range pasture-raised organic, right? Like those are the four main ones. And the organic is, I think everybody understands, what they eat and the way it was to raise. There's no chemicals, no antibiotics. They slowly eat an organic feed. So if you're very concerned about chemicals and pesticides on the products that they eat, transferring through the bird, you go with the organic, right? That's the cleanest. Now, the interesting thing is that free range and pasture-raised, while some of them might not be, or I should say, cage-free, well, let me define it first, right? So this is the thing that people don't know. Cage-free really only means that the poultry don't live in cages. They're not caged, but they could still be crammed into a barn which has like 50,000 birds flying and living on top of one another, almost like a huge cage, unable to move. And they've never been outdoors in their entire life. So cage-free can be a little bit of a misnomer. It's definitely better than living in a single cage because the birds get sick when they're living in such a small environment, which is where there can be disease. They have to kill a lot of them. And I'm not saying it's going to make you sick if you ate a bird that was around other sick birds, but it doesn't taste good, right? The meat's going to be mealy. It's not going to taste good. And in many cases, that's where they use the antibiotics that keep the birds healthier. That's where you go for that organic. And the free-range birds, as well, it's just they're living in an outdoor area. And I think the requirement is like two or three square feet of outdoor area per bird. So once again, they're more spread out. And then you go into pasture rays. Pasture rages like these birds are walking around. They're living naturally like chickens did hundreds of years ago. They're eating off the earth and they're eating a much cleaner feed. They rarely get sick. So if I'm looking at like cage-free range or pasture rays, I'm going to go with pasture rays. And in many cases, it's also organic, but they don't pay for the organic label because that's very expensive, but they can still use the organic feed. So I'd say pasture rays is the way to go. And if I've got 30 seconds here, Andy, I'll also throw out there. I read a study on eggs, right? And you know when I found fascinating on the eggs, somebody did a case test against like the free range, the cage-free, on all of these different eggs. And in a blind case test, there was no case difference between any of the eggs. Oh, Chef Andrew, that's where we need to leave that. But that is an amazing little factoid. And we definitely appreciate you mentioning it. But I think you've given us some good tips in terms of what to look for and also in terms of branding what is behind judori that is not something that is particularly fanciful. So we appreciate that. Chef Andrew, thanks. We're going to see you next week for our 12th anniversary show. You've been part of this for the last seven years, so you definitely join in all of that. Food fans, that's our show. A tip of the talk to my co-host, Chef Andrew Grulle. My thanks to Tony here at Angel Stadium and Technical Excellence. Kudos also to the behind-the-scenes Adam Bell on social media. And as a matter of fact, right now he is out at UCLA starting to cover the opening of LA Loves Alex's Lemonade, which again is another one of the wonderful Fall Food Festival events. We're proudly presented each and every week by Melissa's World Variety Produce and West Coast Prime Meats. Remember, our 12th anniversary show is next week. We're live from the West Drift Manhattan Beach, which is the official hotel of Manhattan Beach Food and Wine. Dr. In the Dugut with Alan Byer MD takes the field next. Be safe and good eating.