How to turn a dark thigh into a white breast

University of Georgia poultry scientist Daniel Fletcher said he can make "a silk purse" out of the underused dark meat of the chicken, by transforming it into the more desirable whitemeat. "Americans prefer the breast meat," Fletcher said. "Dark meat evolved into being a by-product of the chicken industry." Dark meat gets its colour from myoglobin, which plays a key role in transporting oxygen and shows up in the muscles an animal uses most often. Since chickens rarely fly but walk instead, the leg meat is dark and wing and breast meat is white. Using a centrifuge and other extraction methods, Fletcher is able to transform it into white meatby removing its fat content and colour. "We grind the meat up, add excess water and make essentially meat slurry," he stated in a University of Georgia announcement. "We then centrifuge it at a high speed, whichbreaks up the meat. What settles out are the raw, extracted layers." Out of the process he gets three distinct layers of extracts: fat, water and meat. When the modified dark meat is cooked, it looks incredibly similar to breast meat, he claims. Unmodified thigh meat when cooked is much darker than his creation. The prepackaged grilled chicken can be used to top salads and could be made specifically for restaurants, he said. If average consumers took it home and let it thaw before cooking, they would beleft with a puddle of water and meat gunk. Fletcher admits that the market opportunity for his dark-meat project "is probably not now". Yesterday's scraps that demand high prices now are ribs, Buffalo wings and hamburger meat, heargues. "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." The same path to glory could eventually raise the leftover dark-meat portions of a chicken to a more favoured spot on the menu. "Food shortages will occur again," he stated. "It's a political issue, not an agricultural issue. It's always nice to have potential ways to keep the food market healthyand nutritious. This project gives us a better way to utilize dark meat, instead of just sending it to other countries." External links to companies or organisations mentioned in this story: University of Georgia