Twice recently now I’ve cooked bone-in chicken breasts and leg-thigh quarters, and both times the breasts have taken significantly longer to get to ~ 163°F than the leg/thighs take to get to ~ 173°F.
For example, using a Serious Eats method, cooking at 450°F (kind of like the Thomas Keller version but this was just about breasts, not his whole chicken method) they suggested 35-45 minutes for the breasts. I put the breast and leg/thigh quarters in at the same time and when I got around to checking temps at 40 minutes, the leg/thigh quarters had hit 175°F but the breasts were still in the mid 140s and took another 15 minutes.
I’ve always heard/read/believed that dark meat cooks more slowly, so I’m a bit puzzled by this, especially twice in a row.
I did not butcher the chicken myself, so likely the package of breasts did not belong to the same animals as the package of leg/thighs. Maybe the breasts came from overall larger animals than the leg/thigh parts, but I’m kind of doubtful.
Maybe it’s just that we’ve bred chickens to be top-heavy and in general the breasts on a given bird are larger proportionally than the leg/thigh parts than they used to be?
