By Stephanie Schupska
University of
Georgia
Poultry and food scientist Daniel Fletcher can make “a silk
purse” if he wants to. In his research, he’s turning dark meat,
the underused “sow’s ear” of chicken, into something more
valuable: white meat.
“Americans prefer the breast meat,” said Fletcher, who was
recently named a Fellow of the Poultry Science Association, the
highest honor the PSA bestows. “Dark meat evolved into being a
by-product of the chicken industry.”
This is due in large part to dark meat’s fat content and its
distinct taste, making it far less plastic, or able to be
molded into shapes, than white meat.
Dark meat gets its color from myoglobin, which plays a key role
in transporting oxygen and shows up in the muscles an animal
uses most often. Chickens walk, but rarely fly. That’s why leg
meat is dark and wing and breast meat is white.
Through centrifuge and other extraction methods, Fletcher
is “creating” white meat. Dark meat’s disadvantages are its fat
content and color. And that’s what he removes.
“We grind the meat up, add excess water and make essentially
meat slurry,” he said. “We then centrifuge it at a high speed,
which breaks up the meat. What settles out are the raw,
extracted layers.”
The result is three distinct layers: fat, water and extracted
meat.
“The dark-meat project is partly a training project for
students,” Fletcher said. “We use it to teach students how to
take apart and create new foods.”
When the modified dark meat — in this case, thigh — is
cooked, it looks incredibly similar to breast meat. Out of the
skillet, unmodified thigh meat is much darker.
“Who’s going to buy bleached-out dark meat?” Fletcher
asked. “It won’t be anything the consumer ever saw, as far as
the grocery store.” The chicken, whitened by removing much of
the fat that colors it, is intended for restaurants and fast
food businesses.
Fletcher compares using the modified dark meat to a restaurant-
style grilled chicken sandwich popular today. The
chicken “breast” starts out as a “frozen shingle” of processed
chicken with grill marks burned into it.
“This is good chicken, but you’ll never see it in Kroger,” he
said. “It’s a high-tech product. But in the hands of a 19-year-
old professional, it’s incredible.”
The prepackaged grilled chicken, which also tops salads, is
made specifically for restaurants. If the average consumer took
it home and let it thaw before cooking, he’d be left with a
puddle of water and meat. But it sure does taste good at a
restaurant.
“This type of product fits into that scheme of food,” Fletcher
said.
“Food is an extremely dynamic portion of life,” he said. “A lot
of foods we now consider good foods were yesterday’s by-
products.”
Yesterday’s scraps that demand high prices now are ribs,
Buffalo wings and hamburger meat. Today’s leftovers are the
dark-meat portions of a chicken, at least in the United
States.
The market opportunity for the dark-meat project “is probably
not now,” he said. “But it could be a hot product tomorrow.
Food shortages will occur again. It’s a political issue, not an
agricultural issue. It’s always nice to have potential ways to
keep the food market healthy and nutritious.”
Fletcher points to the Great Depression of the 1930s as an
example. He remembers some touchy food times during his
lifetime, too.
When President Jimmy Carter put a ban on chicken exports, he
said, “it almost killed the poultry industry in Georgia.
Likewise, Sept. 11, 2001, hurt the cattle industry, especially
because there was such a decline in eating out.” More than half
of the meals Americans eat are prepared outside the home.
“This project gives us a better way to utilize dark meat,
instead of just sending it to other countries,” he said.
(Stephanie Schupska is a news editor with the University of
Georgia College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.)
