Glutton Forum

Chicken Kitchen is an extremely popular fast-casual restaurant located in South Florida, with a lot of locations in Miami.  They have been the recipients of numerous awards, including one for healthiest fast food for kids.  Since so many awards can’t be unmerited, let’s take a look at that menu (which I might add is made to look incredibly tempting on the website!).

Chicken Kitchen offers, as you can likely imagine, a huge range of chicken dishes.  They have a lot of what you might expect, like wraps, grilled chicken, and salads.  They also have a special claim to fame, called the “chop-chop.”  At its most basic, it is freshly grilled, chopped chicken served over rice.  But what makes it so distinctive (and delicious) is the variety of signature sauces and ingredients that you can add.  You can tour the world with this dish - flavors offered include Mexican, Oriental, and Mediterranean.  Other unique choices are pita pockets and rotisserie-grilled chicken (all parts of the chicken available!).  Chicken Kitchen sauces are simply wonderful - they even trademarked their mustard‘n curry!

Beef cuts have a real pretentious quality about them.  Beautifully marbled filet mignon and Delmonico steaks leave people feeling like they have to drop $30 on a decent cut of beef.  That's just not true.  If you read the article I typed up a little earlier on different cuts of beef, you'll know that the price that you pay for a piece of the steer is dependent primarily on its tenderness and flavor.  Cuts taken from the rib and the short loin primal sections are almost always the most expensive.  This is largely because, if they're prepared properly, they tend to be juicy and delicious on their own.  You don't have to add much to a porterhouse steak to make it taste amazing.  With shoulder steak, however, we may have to work with it a little.

The average freshly murdered steer weighs just under 1200 lbs, but not all of his meat is ripe for the picking.  After dressing the animal, you're left with nearly 600 lbs of delicious cuts of beef, and another 150 or so of fat and bones.  Even though, when it's all said and done, you can only use about 60% of the animal for eating, that's still several hundred pounds of steerlicious goodness.  There are dozens of different cuts of beef on a cow carcass, most of which I'll do my best to thoroughly address in this post.

A layman looking at a dressed cow carcass might just see a dead cow, or a punching bag.  A butcher, however, sees potential, 9 specific areas of potential.  The beef cuts on a cow are split up into 9 individual sections called primal cuts of beef.  Starting at the rump and working counter clockwise, we have the round, sirloin, flank, plate, brisket, foreshank, chuck, rib, and short loin.  These nine primal cuts are primarily divided based on tenderness, and the tenderness of the beef cut ties directly to how much exercise each section got while the animal was alive.  A cow works harder in the front around the shoulders than in the rump, or on the back.  This is why the front shoulder portion of the animal, the chuck, is a lot tougher, and more muscular that the round, or the coveted short loin, taken from the middle of the back. How the cuts are priced and cooked are also directly correlated with the tenderness.  This is why you cook a pricey rack of baby back ribs in dry heat, and let that cheap cut of chuck soak in beef stew.  Either way you cut it, they both sound pretty freakin' good to me.

Mmmmmmm.  Yep, in my house the dead bird you'll find most often on the menu is the majestic baked chicken breast.  Though I'm a connoisseur of darn near anything consumable, chicken recipes are meals that I hold near and dear to my heart...literally.  See, chicken breast meat is one of the finest sources of protein available in the animal kingdom, second to its kin, the egg.  The meat you'll find on this bird is exceptionally lean, and high in muscle building protein. 

It's no coincidence that professional athletes, and health nuts alike all fill up on chicken, and baking it preserves its healthy state.  A three ounce baked skinless chicken breast contains 25 grams of protein at only 1.5 grams of fat.  Leave the skin on, and you're only looking at 7 grams of fat - small price to pay for a whole lot of flavor.  Sure, there are quite a few ways to cook a chicken, and I love the taste of every one of them, but for my money, baking chicken breast is the most effective way of combining both healthy and delicious cooking.