After a monthlong hiatus, he’s baack! Hope you’re hungry because we’ve got another searing scribble from DLT‘s proudly-persnickety contributor, Eric Eats Out. Check back the first Wednesday of every month as Mr. Eats OUt never fails to shock us. What’s in store for this month? Why, chicken with ballet dancer breasts and thighs like Beyonce . Read on…

If you haven’t figured it out already, I’m easily agitated.  Little things, like cloudy ice cubes, really piss me off.  Overcooked poached eggs make me nearly homicidal.  But few things lower the collective bar in the world of food more than chicken.  It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about nuggets, breasts, strips, fingers or thighs; most of the time, chicken just plain sucks.

Chicken, in all is various forms, has been marginalized to nothing more than a vehicle for flavor delivery.  The meat itself is tasteless and bland and, like tofu, exists purely to serve the higher cause of delivering flavor from a sauce.  If you really think about it, chicken is like cigarettes.  Chicken is to sauce as cigarettes are to nicotine.  It really doesn’t have to be this way.

Our society’s aversion to fat (and, thus, flavor) is largely to blame.  Why is it that white meat has somehow become more desirable?  With few exceptions, chicken breasts are the least interesting part of the bird.  Because of our desire for white-meat-everything, factory farms are breeding chickens with breasts that look like they came from North Scottsdale Central Casting.  While these chickens may have nice racks (if you’re a male chicken), they have no taste.  Michael Ruhlman, my food writing hero, even wrote an article entitled “The Shame of the Chicken Caesar” in which he equates adding chicken to a Caesar salad with the mediocrity of American cuisine.

Fortunately, it’s not all bad.  The Roasted Chicken at Bandera is divine.  Watching those bird carcasses spin on the rotisserie in the front of the restaurant is my idea of food porn and the aroma is intoxicating.  Rancho Pinot also does chicken well with its “Nonni’s Sunday Chicken,” a hearty and comforting braise involving chicken thighs, white wine, mushrooms and herbs.  FnB, which does almost everything well, features Jidori™ Chicken.  Akin to “Angus Beef,” Jidori™ is a brand of chicken that is bred for better flavor and texture.  Lo Lo’s Chicken and Waffles has its devoted followers, although I’ve found it to be inconsistent and its success largely dependent on how long it sat around after it came out of the fryer.  I also think Lo Lo’s is expensive, for what it is.

My solution to this conundrum is simple.  I’m creating an all-dark-meat chicken.  If our best scientific minds can’t cure the medical pandemics that afflict us, then at least they could do us the favor of genetically engineering a chicken that actually tastes like chicken.  My ideal bird would have the chest of a ballet dancer and thighs like Beyonce. Birds with Back.

Sheriff Joe might not be happy with the dark-meatifcation of America, but you’ll all thank me for it.

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