Hello. Just wanted to hear your thoughts.
A friend of mine said that US chicken is already tender because the chicken is slaughtered in 3 weeks or so while young.
A chicken is tough only when it is an old chicken - then you need to tenderize (such as the yogurt marinade overnight).
The Indian cuisine method of tenderizing chicken can be skipped since modernism and modern food supply chains produce only young chickens at the grocer.
Is all this true?
Why don’t you buy enough chicken to do an experiment, making the same recipe with the same chicken, cooked in the same manner, at the same time, with a yogurt marinade and without yogurt marinade, to compare?
The yogurt isn’t necessary, but it probably makes the dish better than not using it.
I don’t know whether that is true, but because I am lazy and because I rarely use anything other than boneless, skinless chicken thighs for Indian recipes, I almost always skip the marinating step, and the chicken is always perfectly tender. I have never noticed a big difference in flavor between marinated and non-marinated chicken, either (although this may be because the smaller chunks of thigh meat I use absorb flavor more quickly during the cooking process than bone-in pieces would, negating the need for pre-flavoring).
This presupposes that yogurt marinades are only to tenderize and not to add flavor.
I rarely marinate chicken (or lamb/goat/beef) if it’s ending up in a gravy preparation, because the sauciness makes up for the flavor not having penetrated the meat.
But for kababs / dry preparations, I’ll almost always marinate ahead (sometimes marinate & freeze for subsequent cooking).
There’s a difference in flavor being on the surface vs. inside. Think of the western concept of a dry/wet brine - same idea.
