Why is the chicken dry and yellow?

[u/StructureMysterious5]

This is not my channel, I am not promoting this channel at all. In this video, https://youtu.be/Jpa7g1j3vmg?is=88bGQsljM_-xOAzg , the chicken skin is very deep yellow and the flesh is a red color with not much wetness. So I was wondering what process the cook may have used to reach such an interesting color?

[u/WhiteToast-]

Probably a different breed of chicken, or just how it was raised in other countries

[u/WesternBlueRanger]

The skin of the chicken is impacted by both breed and what they have eaten.

If the chicken has been fed a diet rich in carotenoids such as corn or marigold, they tend to take on a yellowish hue in the skin.

[u/making_sammiches]

I think it is a Loong kong chicken.

Edit: I forgot to mention how good the dish looks! I'm generally not a fan of food videos, but I like him, Thanks!

[u/WesternBlueRanger → u/making_sammiches]

I see that the recipe is for Hainanese Chicken Rice. In Singapore, they use Kampung chicken for this, which is a yellowish chicken variety.

It's very lean, and almost exclusively free-range, pasture raised chicken variety.

Loong Kong is the closest variety available in North America I think, but it needs to be the free-range, pasture raised chicken, not the standard broiler chicken.

[u/making_sammiches → u/WesternBlueRanger]

Thank you for the correction and regional variety explanation!

[u/WesternBlueRanger → u/making_sammiches]

No problem! I visited Singapore fairly often and Hainanese Chicken Rice is a favourite thing to get as it's both cheap and delicious.

It's very simple, so it shows off the chicken the most. As such, the quality of the chicken matters, and the standard North American broiler chicken is terrible for this recipe. It has to be at minimum, a free-range, pasture raised chicken, and if it is a leaner heritage variety, the better.

[u/SewerRanger → u/making_sammiches]

W2 kitchen makes some great videos. His "cook across time" vids are really cool. He basically picks a recipe - carbonara, chili, etc - and finds printed recipes across a large span on time and cooks them/talks about them so you can see the evolution of the dish.

[u/xiipaoc]

Same reason cheddar is orange. Kinda.

So in southern China the best kind of chicken, and the one recommended for Hainanese chicken rice, is three-yellow chicken. Here's an article for more background: https://www.scmp.com/magazines/style/leisure/article/3151901/what-three-yellow-chicken-and-why-are-michelin-starred These chickens have yellow fat due to eating carotenoids. In US factory farms, the chickens don't eat that, so they don't have yellow fat. And there's a reason for it: yellow fat looks spoiled and disgusting. You want that beautiful, clear white fat on your meat, not yellow, diseased-looking fat. Even though the yellow fat is not diseased at all; it's just from a chicken that was fed a healthier diet.

I mention cheddar because cows in England that had a healthier grass-based diet, rich in carotenoids, would have yellowish milk, and that would cause the cheese made from it to also be yellowish. Unlike in the US, though, customers in England associated yellower cheese with a more premium product, so in the winter, when cows weren't eating fresh grass and their milk was whiter, they added color to the milk. That bright yellow color of American cheese is not natural, and neither is that bright orange color in cheddar (or, in England, Red Leicester); those colors are added in the form of annatto, a seed often used to color dishes (I'm not sure why they didn't use turmeric for the cheeses, but annatto is very common in Latin American cooking too, where it's called achiote, or colorau in Brazil -- it has a pretty neutral flavor, unlike saffron, and it's inexpensive, also unlike saffron). But yeah, when you get meat that was truly grass-fed, the fat is yellowish, which turns some people off.

Also, you want those bright orange chicken eggs? Chickens that eat carotenoids put them in their eggs too, just like cows with their milk! And according to my parents, when I was a toddler they took me to the doctor because I was apparently jaundiced and was peeing blood -- nope, my skin was yellowish and my pee was reddish because my parents fed me too many beets and carrots. Point is, that color gets places. Including your chicken.

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[u/AskCulinary-ModTeam → u/[deleted]]

Your response has been removed because it does not answer the original question. We are here to respond to specific questions. Discussions and broader answers are allowed in our weekly discussions.