Which chicken part is your favorite? The one you would buy if you could only buy one. The one you immediately go for when presented with a whole chicken.
I’m a vegetarian now, but back in my meat-eating days, if you left me alone with any fully cooked poultry, in five minutes that bird would be nekkid. I am addicted to the crispy skin.
I went with drumstick but it was difficult not to pick wings. I do love me some wings.
Breasts are the bee’s knees.
I’ll eat it all, including offal.
You left off my favorite part: the nugget.
Didn’t see my favourite there. The Oyster
The trick is, leave it till last then they will have been sitting in the lovely chicken juices for some time.
mmmm, that’s some good eatin’
Drumstick, maybe wings. All the other parts are too much trouble to pick apart.
Overall, my favorite is the wing, followed closely by the thigh, drumstick, and the liver. Then a bit further down, the breast. But I do like it all.
I end buying and eating the breast the most because I try to eat light, it works well for stir fries and pounded into cutlets, and it seems my local grocery is always having them on sale for like $1.49 a pound (boneless, skinless) which is a damned good price for a lean protein like breast. For stews, soup, or anything that’s not cooked very quickly, though, I go for my preferred cuts: the wing and the thigh.
I don’t know that this counts, but as much as I love a roast chicken, my favorite part of roasting one is afterwards, boiling the carcass into broth and making chicken noodle soup out of it. If that counts, then the carcass is my favorite part. If it doesn’t, I like the thigh.
Actually, if I have a whole roast chicken to work with, I do like getting dibs on the oysters.
Another write-in for the oysters. I’ve liked them since before I knew they had a name.
Oyster followed by skin followed by heart followed by thigh.
My favorite thing to do with hearts is to split them, remove the vein and wash in salted water to remove any blood.
In a small covered casserole plop the cleaned hearts, a few chopped garlic cloves, a hefty pinch of italian seasonings and cover with red wine. Bake gently at 250 for 4 or 5 hours. Serve over noodles or with fresh bread.
Seriously perfect on a cold winter afternoon.
I like dark meat better, so my preference is for whole chicken legs - drumstick and thigh. Given a choice I’ll take the thigh, if only because my kids always grab the drumsticks now and I’m used to it.
I do like wings but they’re mostly skin and bone. Back in the day I used to love fried chicken skin, but I find all that fat a bit hard to digest now.
Shit. I picked thigh, but I didn’t notice wings – you can take the boy out of Buffalo, but put a Buffalo in the boy and he don’t holler.
I picked drumstick but I would have voted for skin if it had been a choice.
We are lucky in our family as we all like different parts, so the carcass ends up picked clean.
However, my wife made the fatal mistake of introducing our small children to crispy chicken skin.
She didn’t stop to consider that, thanks to geometry, buying a chicken double the weight doesn’t give you double the amount of skin.
The moral of this tale? skin lovers in larger families are on a hiding to nothing and they need to remain single or, married with a skin-averse partner.
The same goes for pork crackling, but that is for another thread.
Drumstick followed closely by wing, but it really depends on how it’s prepared. Roasted and sitting in its own juices? Oyster. BBQed? Thigh. Stir fry? Breast. But for eating it fried with mashed potatoes and gravy and cole slaw and a biscuit, like God intended, then it’s drumsticks and wings all the way.
There is more chicken flavor in one fried gizzard than the rest of the chicken combined.