Woody breast chicken has been around for at least 5 years, as evidenced by the link Saregama posted on “Weird chicken lately”. I’ve not seen it in organic chicken before, but looked at an organic chicken that my local Market Basket carries this past weekend, and saw the striations in the breast meat. I passed.
Per this Reddit convo, one person notes: "It’s supposedly due to a muscle abnormality that develops in the breast muscles of some chickens. Though apparently no one has figured out what directly causes that abnormality.
But personally I think it’s fair to assume it probably has something to due with the way most commercially produced chickens are bred (to have unnaturally oversized breast muscles) and/or how they’re raised (cramped quarters allowing for little movement, poor diet and hygeine, etc)."
Another correlates it to bird size - so it seems to be the Frankenchicken breasts that have those white lines in the meat, although someone else is calling that “white stripe disease” and it doesn’t have anything to do with woody chicken but the fast growth rate - which is due to the corn and soy that birds (and lots of antibiotics) are now fed early in a chick’s life to get up to their humongous size in 30-45 days.
Oh, I’m familiar, and experienced it once about 8 years ago. I meant I hope it doesn’t become a trend at Trader Joe’s with wherever they are sourcing poultry!
I don’t think these are new but I couldn’t find any previous reference to these, so adding these here in case anyone was curious to try them.
Trader Joe’s Thai Noodle Bowls - Peanut Satay, Red Curry and Garlic Sauce
They all come in a bowl with a silver foil packet of sauce, and a packet of sauce ‘fresh’ noodles that look like thin udon noodles. Add sauce to noodles, microwave, stir and enjoy.
Except there was no enjoyment of these, so the NAY NAY NAY. These are flat out gross. I thought they could be good when it’s too busy to grab lunch. The worst is by far the garlic sauce flavor, but they are all things I would never eat or buy again. There’s a strange sweetness to them (something I find in a lot of Trader Joe’s prepared foods). Avoid these; you are far better off grabbing a salad or sandwich from their prepared foods for lunch.
You are lucky that you have “real butcher counters” available to you. Not everyone does.
That said, we stopped buying TJ’s organic ground beef for burgers bc it sucked last time. The hot Italian sausages, OTOH, are the hottest I’ve ever had, which is why we continue to buy those at TJ’s.
Just got the Fearless Flyer in the mail, and am very much intrigued by the mango cream bars (those sound really excellent), and the Caesar salads with chicken / salmon.
I do wish they carried unsalted cultured butter besides salted, and I’ll probably never quite understand the appeal of any of the frozen noodle dishes. By the time “squiggly knife cut noodles in spicy garlic sesame sauce” are thawed and cooked, I can likely make that from scratch — like most of the other pasta meals they offer
I have wondered about those. They must be popular or they wouldn’t still be around. Maybe the same purchaser group as mandarin chicken.
They’ve got a new flavor of the squiggly cut A-Sha / momofuku noodles — garlic sesame.
I didn’t use the flavor packets last time but the noodles were good (in noodle soups and bowls with my own mix of seasonings).
(But I realized after having finally put away all the various noodles I acquired over a few Chinatown trips that I need more noodles like I need a hole in the head, so I put them aside at checkout )
I was trying to find more info on line and the reviews are definitely mixed, from meh to pretty decent, so I was quite surprised at how they taste. It does seem that some users tend to add things into the noodles too, so that might make enough of a difference. I ate them straight with only the sauce and the noodles. Everyone though was consistently thumbs down on the garlic sauce flavor, and the description was overwhelmingly chemical/processed taste (accurate!).
Tonight my daughter made the Corn & Burrata? Ravioli. First she cut the kernels from one ear of white corn, briefly sautéed, added some sautéed sliced mushrooms, parm, fresh chives, fresh parsley.
I’ve been resisting these since they came out, but I finally succumbed. If you like bacalhau — the potato and cod dip — there’s little not to like here. They are quite rich.
(I baked them 3/4 of the way, then pried them out of the aluminum shells and finished baking directly on the sheet so that the pastry browned evenly.)
I’ve tried them and they’re quite good. The “cream” part of them kind of gets drowned out by the frozen mango purée and IMHO, they’d get a “VERY good” from me if they were ALL mango. I think the old-fashioned “creamsicle” combination of orange and vanilla works better. But no doubt about it, they are good and I would give them a “yea” over a “meh”.
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