I literally have cooked over a million pounds of chicken in my life. So I think I can speak with some authority on the matter of chicken being dry and wether or not this is because of the quality of the chicken or more the preparation of it. I personally can’t imagine a place like Tony’s getting chicken so bad that it’s really difficult to prepare and not be dry. Breast meat is very easy to dry out not a lot room for error if the chicken was dry that’s on the kitchen not the cut of meat.
Have you not heard of "woody breast?" I imagine you have if you have cooked that much chicken, and it is becoming a pervasive problem in the poultry industry. You can recognize it as raw breasts that have thin white lines running across them. The meat is tough and rubbery and NO way of cooking it helps. You basically need to grind it up in order for it to be a decent consistency.
I have gotten increasingly frustrated as a consumer with this kind of chicken. I am at the point where I examine every package of chicken I buy and have stopped buying larger amounts in bulk packaging where I can't see each individual breast. It is a problem with traditionally raised, organic, and free range chicken. It has nothing to do with what the chickens are fed, antibiotics, etc. It's a genetic issue that poultry industry heads are frantically trying to eliminate. It only affects the breast meat, not the thighs or legs. One solution is to switch to dark meat, but that's not what most Americans want.
The majority of woody breast ends up being used in low quality processed foods (like nuggets and patties), but restaurants can end up with it too because suppliers don't specifically screen for it and chicken is not graded like beef is, so there is no way to really avoid getting some. What a restaurant CAN do is NOT grill up and serve those pieces to patrons. But that would require throwing away a LOT of chicken. So, the end result at a place like Tony's is, they serve customers the woody chicken. And yes, sometimes it is so bad that you literally can't chew it. Has happened to me several times at home.
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