Taking the darkness out of chicken meat

Poultry and food scientist Daniel Fletcher is turning dark chicken meat into something more valuable: white meat. The breast meat is preferred and so dark meat has evolved into being a by-product of the chicken industry. This is due in large part to dark meat's fat content and its distinctive taste, making it less plastic, or able to be moulded into shapes, than white meat.

Dark meat gets its colour from myoglobin, which plays a key role in transporting oxygen and shows up in the muscles an animal uses most often. Chickens walk, but rarely fly. That's why leg meat is dark and wing and breast meat is white.

Through centrifuge and other extraction methods, Fletcher is 'creating' white meat. Dark meat's disadvantages are its fat content and colour. And that's what he removes.

"We grind the meat up, add excess water and make essentially meat slurry," he said. "We then centrifuge it at a high-speed, which breaks up the meat. What settles out are the raw, extracted layers."

The result is three distinct layers: fat, water and extracted meat.

When the modified dark meat, in this case, thigh, is cooked, it looks incredibly similar to breast meat. Out of the skillet, unmodified thigh meat is much darker. The chicken, whitened by removing much of the fat that colours it, is intended for restaurants and fast food businesses.

Fletcher compares using the modified dark meat to a restaurant-style grilled chicken sandwich popular today. The chicken 'breast' starts out as a 'frozen shingle' of processed chicken with grill marks burned into it.

The prepackaged grilled chicken, which also tops salads, is made specifically for restaurants. If the average consumer took it home and let it thaw before cooking, he'd be left with a puddle of water and meat.

"This type of product fits into that scheme of food," Fletcher said.

"Food is an extremely dynamic portion of life," he said. "A lot of foods we now consider good foods were yesterday's by-products."

Yesterday's scraps that demand high prices now are ribs, Buffalo wings and hamburger meat.

Today's leftovers are the dark-meat portions of a chicken, at least in the United States.

The market opportunity for the dark-meat project "is probably not now," he said. "But it could be a hot product tomorrow.

Food shortages will occur again. It's a political issue, not an agricultural issue. It's always nice to have potential ways to keep the food market healthy and nutritious.

"This project gives us a better way to utilise dark meat, instead of just sending it to other countries," he said.