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Huh! I thought that the older birds were preferred for dishes that are stewed (mainly French - Coq au Vin and the like type of stuff).
Well the French are miracle workers with food. If they can make an old laying hen taste good just think what they could do with a young fryer. On the Farm/Ranch that I grew up on chickens had a very short life span. After all: Everybody/everything loves chicken.
Older birds aren't preferred. They're slow roasted as a way to make them as palatable as possible, but it's primarily a way to not let older birds go to waste. The slow cooking is out of necessity.
Even coq au vin, which was originally a way to get rid of not-young-anymore-and-behaviorally-problematic roosters without wasting anything. Now, if you order it, ithe is generally going to be a young bird, and as likely to be female as it is a coq
Well the French are miracle workers with food. If they can make an old laying hen taste good just think what they could do with a young fryer. On the Farm/Ranch that I grew up on chickens had a very short life span. After all: Everybody/everything loves chicken.
I've never done any French cooking, but older birds make the most delicious stock, and the meat can be used in soups, stews, or in chicken and dumplings. The connective tissue is tougher, so it's a bit harder to get off the bone, but it's worth it.
When I cook chicken, I look to see what I have in the freezer before I decide on the dish. (I tend to watch for sales and stock up, so I don't always have the same things.) On the grill, I prefer leg quarters, and I never skin them. Stir-fry? Either breast or thigh meat, depending on the sauce. A more delicately flavored sauce gets thinly sliced, velveted breast meat, darker, spicier sauces, like kung pao, get cubes of thigh meat. I don't generally use chicken with alfredo at all, my protein of choice with that is pan-seared scallops or shrimp.
When I roast a chicken, the legs and thighs always get eaten first. The rest usually gets cut up or shredded and put in quesadillas, chicken salad, or a great favorite, chicken spaghetti with Ro-Tel tomatoes.
I'm not sure, when one can have baby backs or smoked brisket, why anyone would BBQ a chicken.
Hopefully no one is doing that. Barbecuing is cooking slowly on low, indirect heat. That would ruin a chicken breast same as it would ruin a steak. Grilling is cooking on high, direct heat.
wait you don't barbeque steaks? I love steak off the grill.
I prefer dark meat chicken but the thing is certain recipes don't taste as good when you use boneless thighs instead of breasts. Like chicken alfredo tastes really different to me when you make it with dark meat chicken instead of breasts. I think I am going to mostly use breasts when recipes call for it even though I like dark meat more..breasts are more healthy obviously and I would like some variety, but I just need to figure out how to prepare them to where they are not dry.
They are a lot better in soups, chicken breast has almost zero flavor. Tortilla soup for example. As far as being healthy, either one is a much better choice than ground beef.
As we all know, the flavor and texture of breasts and thighs are simply different. I like them both, but my wife does not in general like breast meat, so I use thighs almost exclusively. For flavor's sake, these would be the bone-in and skin-on variety. In some recipes, I remove the skin after boiling the thighs and nuke those into cracklings and shmaltz. Cracklings are just sinfully delicious!
I use bone in thighs often too. Sometimes I skin them.
There is not that much difference between the fat in breasts and skinned thighs.
Use which ever you like the most. We grill our thighs with a light dry brine. And sometimes I bake them over rice.
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