Taco bell famously admit a few years ago that their beef filling was only 88% beef.
CBC did an investigative report in Canada recently that revealed subway's chicken was only 50% chicken. [0] The rest being a smörgåsbord of fillers. The 4 other chains studied in the tests didn't do much better.
[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/marketplace-chicken-fast-fo...
There is also nothing “gross” about the additives used in the filling, which are primarily there to improve texture. They are widely used and perfectly safe: https://firstwefeast.com/eat/2014/05/tacobell-beef-ingredien.... (For some reason people go “eww” when soy lecithin is used at Taco Bell, but don’t utter a peep when it’s used in some fancy foam in a high end restaurant. It’s all in peoples’ heads, and there is also a large amount of classism involved.)
So... do they have a way crazier quality control process? Absolutely. Will the result be better food safety than the Michelin-starred place down the street? Not a chance.
Your linked article makes the point that other chains hit the expected values for prepared chicken, Subway was an outlier.
I have no idea what Subway is selling. Subway squicks me out, as does Taco Bell.
COLD CUT COMBO: Turkey Bologna: Mechanically separated turkey, water, contains less than 2% of: salt, corn syrup solids, potassium lactate, dextrose, sodium diacetate, sodium erythorbate, sodium nitrite, flavorings. Turkey Ham: Cured turkey thigh meat, salt, contains less than 2% of: potassium lactate, brown sugar, sodium tripolyphosphate, dextrose, sodium diacetate, sodium erythorbate, smoke flavor, sodium nitrite, water. Turkey Salami: Dark turkey, mechanically separated turkey, water, salt, contains less than 2% of: potassium lactate, sugar, sodium tripolyphosphate, dextrose, spice and flavorings, sodium diacetate, sodium erythorbate, smoke flavor, sodium nitrite
So plant based milks can't be called milk, plant based proteins can't be called meats, but hot dogs can be called hot dogs and have no dog meat in them, riced cauliflower is under attack, Parmesan (cheese byproduct and sawdust) in a can is considered not misleading, a California Port wine is impossible but nobody cares, etc
Subway's Salami, Ham, and Bologna can be made with turkey instead of the cuts you'd expect because money.
It's always about money. They want consumers buying their products in stores and if you buy enough product for your restaurants you can call it anything you want.
America.
Nitpicky, but this is itself misleading. Canned parm is mostly actual cheese, it's just... not very good. "Sawdust" is there in small amounts for anti-caking purposes, not bulking.
(turkey based) is all over their signs, menus, etc in the fine print.
Which is sad, IMO.
"All white meat chicken breast" is a bug, not a feature, IMO. Leg and thigh meat has so much more flavor and is much more juicy than breast meat.
Wings are tolerated because they're small and predictable, but I've been seeing the rise of "boneless wings" too. People generally don't have a problem with the thighs and legs of the chicken if it's served differently or just as "chicken" in another product. But on the bone it's messy.
When I cook any recipe with chicken, I replace the chicken breast with boneless thighs (Which actually is thigh meat with the bones removed), and it comes out so much better.
It's only “much more juicy” if you prepare or cook the breast meat wrong. Of course, you often do that if you you cook them together since dark meat needs to be cooked to a higher temperature for food safety reasons.
But, yeah, dark meat has a lot more flavor (and dark meat cooked on the bone has the best.)
I don't mind KFC but Taco Bell meat always seemed a bit...off and low quality.
Tl:dr; yes it is true, inputs are the same as what you get in the store, but the outputs are vastly different. You have to factor in additives and preservation process. There really is a simple "sniff" test/heuristic I have developed after my decades in food service, and it's not really a secret, but seems like some aren't in on it, and it goes like this: If it goes bad, it's good, if it doesn't go bad, it isn't good. (Good is obviously subjective here, so my criteria is obviously "real" food in the sense that it is minimally processed and preserved and minimal chemical additives)
For what it is worth, McDonald's says on their web site that this is not true. So either you are mistaken or McDonald's is committing fraud. Do you have a source for your claim?
From the McD's web site ( https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/about-our-food/our-food-y... ):
"Every one of our burgers is made with 100% pure beef and cooked and prepared with salt, pepper and nothing else—no fillers, no additives, no preservatives."
"Do you use so-called 'pink slime' in your burgers or beef treated with ammonia?"
"Nope. Our beef patties are made from 100% pure beef. Nothing else is added. No fillers, no additives and no preservatives.
"Some consumers may be familiar with the practice of using lean, finely textured beef sometimes treated with ammonia, which is referred to by some as “pink slime.” We do not use this. "
I haven't read this page recently (it certainly has changed much), but on skimming through, none of the terminology McDonalds uses on their website are meaningful in the sense that the standards there is no official definition and could not be distinguished between similar competitors that make similar claims besides simply what they say, and, more importantly, there is no regulated term between what constitutes beef being “pure” or “not pure” or otherwise put. It’s just some “thing” they say about their beef and we have to take them up on their word. Now if they said “we use USDA organic ground beef” that might have some teeth. It’s the same thing between a bag of candy telling you they no longer use artificial flavors and now use “natural” flavors.
Now the question of do I believe they have changed? Possibly. Do the burgers taste different? No, so common sense tells me you don’t drastically change your process like this and still get the same tasting burger from 20 years ago.
But I will actually do something uncommon here and admit I could be wrong, and have an outdated understanding of their process.
"100% Beef Patty. Ingredients: 100% Pure USDA Inspected Beef; No Fillers, No Extenders. Prepared with Grill Seasoning (Salt, Black Pepper)."
That seems pretty clear to me. USDA defines beef as flesh of cattle. If there is anything but "flesh of cattle" in the patty, McDonald's is committing fraud.
> After a months-long evaluation, the United States Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) determined in December that BPI’s signature product—the offering famously called “pink slime” in an ABC News exposé that got the network in a lot of trouble—can be labeled “ground beef.” Legally speaking, it’s now no different from ordinary hamburger, and could even be sold directly to the public.
[1] https://newfoodeconomy.org/bpi-pink-slime-ground-beef-usda-r...
I will say I remain skeptical on exactly how they can go from the ammonia wash + chemical food flavoring process to using fresh beef and not have any discernible difference in taste or food safety, but kudos to them.
(TG'd meat was a faddish fine dining trend a few years back, and it's pretty neat; for instance, you can make a solid, ribeye-like slab of skirt steak by "gluing" layers of skirt together, which is pretty delicious. It's also a technique that's been used in sausagemaking for a long time.)
A neighborhood sushi place has an even bigger problem with spoilage than a friend chicken shack, but, for pretty intuitive reasons (I think?), I'd trust any well established sushi place with ahi and salmon than I would my own fridge.
Further: while fast food input costs are the highest single line item in their cost breakdowns, they don't come close to dominating, and labor plus rent dwarfs inputs even before you factor in franchise fees, marketing, and other expenses.
FYI, in the US it is common to mummify fish with carbon monoxide. It preserves the fish's color despite age. The best way to stop oxidation is to add a reducing agent!
I don't think CO is a problem, but it is a hack restaurants use that consumers are unlikely to be aware of which masks the visual indications of freshness.
Freezing is hugely deleterious to ground beef quality. It changes the texture irrevocably. The two major differences between fast food burgers and fast casual burgers are frozen/fresh and cooked in advance/cooked to order. All the more expensive, more lauded burgers like Five Guys, Shake Shack, In 'n' Out, etc are fresh beef. McDonald's launched a fresh beef quarter pounder to universally positive reviews.
[Former Yum! engineer]
It's a food-safety and labeling term, not indicative of the relative quality of what's inside and doesn't, alone, mean that the ground beef sold by Taco Bell is or isn't excellent or crappy.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18995204
TLDR: "Meat content in the hamburgers ranged from 2.1% to 14.8% (median, 12.1%)."
From a more culinary perspective, you do probably want some fat in your burger. Depending on your tastes, I'm not sure the presence of 'plant matter' is particularly sinister either; I, for one, like a few onions in mine.
Those numbers should be right about what you'd expect.
> Meat and poultry are composed of naturally occurring water, muscle, connective tissue, fat, and bone. People eat meat for the muscle. The muscle is approximately 75% water (although different cuts may have more or less water) and 20% protein, with the remaining 5% representing a combination of fat, carbohydrate, and minerals.
The protein/fat balance should be expected to be a bit off from straight muscle cuts, as it's typical for a burger to have fat added to the mix in.
It is unclear from the abstract whether they were measuring the entire hamburger, including the bun and other condiments, or just the burger portion.
[1] https://www.consumerreports.org/overuse-of-antibiotics/what-...
You can always do better. But I'd like to see a well-grounded argument that KFC-grade chicken is somehow "shitty". I think it's possible that there is one (I think the argument that all fast-food chicken is necessarily shitty is much harder to defend) --- but I haven't seen it yet.
I'd say if you buy your meat from a local butcher and you know the actual source of the meat, then you'd likely say that raising chickens in high capacity growth sheds doesn't put out what many would define as quality birds. [0] The chicken is likely fine for consumption, agreed. But if you were born, pumped full of feed to make you as fat as fast as possible, and barely had room to move during that time - would you qualify yourself as healthy? Just as an athlete vs a couch potato have significantly different body composition one could assert this is also true for chickens. In the grand scheme you get what you pay for. In a race to the bottom of cheap meat you need scale and it's much easier to throw lots of chickens in a small place than it is to free-range them.
Finally, while subjective, it's a common pattern to leverage MSG in products that are of generally low quality. I don't know anyone who puts MSG in recipes using pricier butcher cuts, I know I never have. KFC has Monosodium Glutamate in most things they sell.
I guess if you want to stand on a soap box and call out that KFC meat quality isn't "shitty" just because nobody has proven it to you, then more power to you. But, it's hard to argue that there isn't a difference of quality by a mass producer of chicken vs non-mass producing vendors. I mean, it's why people pay more for a friendlier and healthier growth environment for said meats. "Shitty" in the sense of this argument seems rather subjective anyway. But I will say it's hard to argue mass produced chicken isn't "shitty" for the environment. [1][2]
[0] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2999689/The-35-day-... [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221431731... [2] https://academic.oup.com/nutritionreviews/article/77/4/197/5...
Your request doesn't have an objective answer, so I'm not sure what you were looking for other than to present something indefensible. But, you also gloss over the main points of how "shitty" this practice is for the environment and instead you try to deflect with a backhanded "you're wealthy" comment.
At least I presented some points to the conversation.
Summary, too much fat, salt, antibiotics.
Chicken tastes watery because they soak it in salt.
Brining if you can call it that is only step 2. Here's the steps they use to prepare.
https://gizmodo.com/this-is-how-kfc-actually-makes-their-fri...
Are those the steps Cooking illustrated gave you? Are you cooking your own kfc at home now?
You seem like the guy who went to the coke/pepsi taste test challenge and said they both taste the same.. they taste like 7up.
I'm not exactly sure what you were trying to do with that link, but I'm pretty sure your intended outcome wasn't to show that KFC fried chicken is just like any other fried chicken, but with stricter recipes and industrial machines.
Thanks! I feel a lot better about KFC chicken now!
Just like grandma.
- Unless you are in the SLT of KFC, you have absolutely no way to know what's in their spice blend. It is one of the most closely guarded recipes in the world.
- There's famously 11 spices in the original recipe. So not only could you not possibly know what's in it (and therefore what's questionable), but you didn't even get the number of ingredients right to criticize.
- Based on all the various copycat recipes out there, I highly doubt that 10 out of the 11 ingredients (same proportion that you used, just adjusted for accuracy) are questionable. You know, unless "salt", "flour", "thyme", "garlic salt", etc. are all questionable. There's only so much that can go in a spice blend after all.
Let's address the mystery of the 11 spices. Here they are..
2/3 Ts Salt 1/2 Ts Thyme 1/2 Ts Basil 1/3 Ts Oregano 1 Ts Celery salt 1 Ts Black pepper 1 Ts Dried mustard 4 Ts Paprika 2 Ts Garlic salt 1 Ts Ground ginger 3 Ts White pepper
Have fun frying tonight.
> and 26 questionable substances out of 29 for the spices.
Maybe you should take your own advice there, buddy. I was specifically replying to what you said in your comment.
Furthermore, you can very well guess what's in the spice blend, but you still have no way to actually confirm it, nor any way to confirm it's the current recipe, or if the recipe diverged from the first one used (which was indeed leaked).
https://www.chatelaine.com/food/trends/kfc-secret-recipe-rev...
Secrets like this need to be out in the open.
There is nuance. Take the time to understand it or don't waste your time commenting at all.
{Type of meat} - {FCR, Edible Weight} - {Conversion efficiency %, caloric} - {Conversion efficiency %, protein}
Beef - 36 - 2.9% - 2.5%
Pork - 6 - 9% - 9%
Chicken - 4.2 - 13% - 21%
(specifics vary according to method, but cross species comparisons remain similar)
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/10/1...
I believe the big "Pink Slime" news story halted some of this, or at least led to many fast food companies publicly decrying it. But there was definitely a point when this ammonium hydroxide treated slurry was used to cut the real stuff.
https://www.rspca.org.uk/whatwedo/latest/details/-/articleNa...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/chicken-supe...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/23/-sp-revealed-d...
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/sep/28/uks-top-sup...
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/sep/28/uks-top-sup...
Why do you even care. They can "quality" up their meat all they want but in the end they are still a fast food chain that primarily sells buckets of meat. I don't need a citation to think that is disgusting, and if you don't then go take that argument somewhere where it's on topic. Jeez.
So they're actually doing the right thing in 2019 and replacing part of their product with non-meat. I hope it goes all the way, or at least make meat be the expensive "special occasion" option.
https://www.tacobell.com/ingredients
> Seasoned Beef: Beef, water, seasoning [cellulose, chili pepper, maltodextrin, salt, oats (contains wheat), soy lecithin, spices, tomato powder, sugar, onion powder, citric acid, natural flavors (including smoke flavor), torula yeast, cocoa, disodium inosinate & guanylate, dextrose, lactic acid, modified corn starch], salt, sodium phosphates. Contains: Soy, Wheat
I occasionally make my own (with tastier cheeses than you get in commercial products) for its melting characteristics.
I'm not saying Tyson chicken is good; it's CAFO meat, which is not great for the environment or for flavor. But it's not "barely meat"; it's meat that basically sets the standard for meat quality in one of the meat-eatingest countries in the world, and has set that standard for over 50 years.
† Don't get me started on how irresponsible the public interest campaign against transglutaminase franken-meat is.