1 week Ago By [email protected] (Bobby Lewis)
Costco has a fervent fan base, and its meat department is especially adored for offering high-quality cuts at good prices. Unfortunately, not all Costco meat cuts are created equal . Chicken thighs sold at Costco tend to be messy and inconvenient to work with, although this has less to do with the chicken itself and more to do with the packaging.
Chicken thighs that are butchered in-store are sold in perforated vacuum-sealed pouches, but due to poor design they are prone to leaking raw chicken liquid all the way from the display case to your refrigerator. Compounding the mess, ineffective perforations can lead to messy tearing and accidentally opened pouches. Costco chicken thighs especially suffer from these issues due to an excess amount of water in each package.
The thighs are air-chilled in order to add less water content than traditional water-chilling, but that benefit is erased by the liquid bath each thigh is soaked in. Are Other Cuts Of Costco Chicken Good To Buy? Unfortunately, the chicken issue is not limited to Costco's chicken thighs. Costco's packaged chicken breasts suffer from the same leaky, inadequate containers filled with too much liquid.
Additionally, Costco chicken breasts have lately been "spaghettified" — when rapid growth of the chicken gives its meat a stringy appearance and unusual, spongy texture. Even Costco's chicken wings suffer from many of the same packaging issues, on top of customer complaints that the wing pieces are inconsistently sized and thus difficult to cook evenly. Despite the surprisingly large number of issues with raw chicken from an otherwise highly regarded grocery chain, Costco's chicken offerings are not a total wash.
Whole chickens are a loss-leader at Costco , an item the store sells at a loss to draw customers in. If Costco is deliberately keeping the price low, you may as well take advantage. All it takes is an easy bit of butchering at home and a freezer to store the excess pieces for later.
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