A quick google of the above question didn’t render any satisfying answers, they were all about how to make sticky chicken.
But when you handle cooked chicken, or most poultry, the fat has a sticky quality to it. Why does the fat from chicken/poultry seem to have a more adhesive quality than other fats?
I think it has a low enough melting point that it softens in contact with your skin.
I’ve never noticed chicken fat being sticky. It has a different consistency than, say, beef or pork fat, but I would never describe it as “sticky”.
I can tell you that if you ever want your hands to be softer then they’ve ever been before, butcher a couple geese. There’s some thing about goose fat that makes human skin very, very soft & moisturized.
My suspicion is that most of what we think of as “chicken fat” is really a combination of grease and melted gelatin from the skin and connective tissue from a piece of cooked chicken, and that gelatin is really what’s sticky.
I’d bet if you put the “chicken fat” in a pot of water and boiled it for a while, and let the fat congeal on the top, that fat wouldn’t be sticky at all, as the gelatin would be dissolved in the water.
Yeah, chickens just have a lot of bones and connective tissue which dissolves somewhat during cooking. That’s the sticky part. You don’t notice this with beef or pork because we rarely handle an entire carcass at once like we do with birds. Also the meat/fat to bone/ligament ratio is much lower in chickens than in cattle or hogs. Hog and cattle carcasses are used to make gelatin so we know they get sticky too.
Try cooking up a boneless chicken breast and see if it’s as sticky as a whole bird.
I know exactly what you’re talking about. I believe the posters above are correct, it’s the collagen/gelatin you’re feeling as “sticky.” The fat itself is like any other fat and not sticky. (My jar of chicken fat is not sticky, but the skin on chicken or the fat floating atop my soup–like the one I am making right now–does have a stickiness to it. When the fat solidifies and separates, though, what I skim from the top does not have this sticky quality.)
Thanks folks, the gelatin is most likely the answer.
In my experience, the stickiest crud comes from those salt-water infused birds. Birds that haven’t had their weight artificially inflated seem to have less sticky stuff. If so, then there’s still the question of what the salt is doing that is causing this. A bit of searching suggests in large quantities it does help to emulsify gelatins.
I see what you did, there.
Hehehehe, if only I were as clever as people suspect I might be!