Being the father of two youngsters, I’m often drawn to the quick, healthy(?) and satisfying meal for them that is chicken nuggets.
Now, given that the “nugget” isn’t actually a specific part of the chicken (I’m told they’re made of “all white meat chicken breast”), why do they have the shapes that they do?
Specifically, I’ve noticed that chicken nuggets are available in only two shapes.
One shape is Round. Well… kind of round.
The other somewhat resembles a misshapen christmas stocking.
Save a broken nugget, I’ve noticed that there seem to be only those two shapes.
Why?
Unless they’re some rare premium item that’s been punched out of a breast fillet, there’s really no reason they can’t be any arbitrary shape molded out of ground meat and whatever binder/filler that holds it together. There’s just not a need to produce them in a wide variety of shapes.
Just for giggles, go to Burger King, where you’ll find crown-shaped nuggets.
As mentioned above, there are novelty shapes out there and we have gotten them for our young children. The star ones are pretty cool IMHO. Most people are pretty conservative when it somes to food and novelty shapes may not appeal to the people that actually buy the food.
I’m sure if you saw them made, you’d see some kind of chicken “slurry” where pureed chicken is mixed with emulsifiers, preservatives, sugars, salts, coloring agents, etc that gets squirted out of a tube into a mold.
Here is a previous thread about mechanically separated chicken which describes the origin of the ‘meat’.
I’ve noticed that Ikea has particularly bad nuggets. When they are fried, there is little left inside the breading. I assume that the resulting pocket is due to the fat that has melted away.
When we eat chicken parts now, we try to have chicken strips which are (usually) from the breast or the breast filet.
If you look at a diagram of a chicken you will see that, apart from things like breast, wing and drumstick, there are in fact two areas labelled Nugget A and Nugget B, shaped exactly as you described. I am not sure where they are but no doubt a Doper who is an expert on the physiognomy of chickens will soon tell us.
Years ago, my mother bought a package of “Chicken Ring Things” (seriously, that’s what they were called on the package), which were nuggets shaped into rings, more or less like onion rings. They were actually really tasty. Never seen 'em since.
I spent about two weeks (which was all that I could stand) working at Prime Foods (a temp agency placement) a number of years ago. The main concern at this particular plant was chicken. Not the nice, water-cooled, real chicken breasts, but the prefab, mechanically-separated cookie-cutter cutlets and strips and such that went into various frozen dinners (including Weight Watchers meals.) I became familiar with the entire process by which they made said cutlets, and it went a little something like this:
A large frozen block (literally, a square cube about two feet square) of unidentifiable chicken bits are placed on a conveyor and are fed into the mechanical separator. This thing essentially chops everything up into little bits and separates the meat from the bone. For the purpose of simplicity (and because the machine doesn’t know any better), “meat” refers to anything that is not bone and, presumably, cartilage. (I didn’t actually get to see the separation process in action, as the machine had no viewing window.)
Bone and cartilage duly separated, the resulting meat slurry is then fed into a large vat, wherein a prefab powder concoction of spices, preservatives, and probably some amount of filler (flour, probably) are mixed in. Then the whole mess is sealed in the vat, doused in liquid nitrogen and mixed under pressure for several minutes. As I understand it, this resulted in both mixing the ingredients and giving the slurry a more solid consistency like that of actual chicken.
So blended, the mess is then fed via tubes to a stamping machine and another conveyor out on the main floor area. The stamping machine basically just ejected a small quantity of the chicken mixture into a predefined cutlet shape onto a conveyor belt. The cutlets would make their way along the conveyor where several people worked, assembly-line style, carrying out a specific task. The first group doused the top part of the chicken in breading. The second group (which I worked at one day) flipped the cutlets. A third group doused the other side of the now-flipped cutlets with flour. Then they travelled along the rest of the conveyor into a long oven wherein they cooked, and from there they were packaged and shipped off to whoever does the rest of the Weight Watchers dinners to be added to the rest of the meal.
And that’s how we made chicken cutlets. I imagine the process ifor nuggets isn’t much different, though it’s probably more automated than the plant I worked at was. I imagine the reason for any variation in shape at all is to attempt to impart upon them a more “natural” look. Variety in shape implies they were cut from actual chicken breasts and thus aren’t all the same. In reality though, they’re squirted out like cookie dough.
You’re basically looking at chicken sludge pressed together into the two most pleasing shapes as decided by focus groups and some sad-ass who spent 8 years in college only to wind up as some chicken nugget analyst.
You should be more concerned about feeding your kids batter fried fat nuggets.
