Does your chicken carry a lot of water weight?
Anyone who
has ever been on a serious diet knows the meaning of water weight. It’s the weight you lose that first week or two after
you’ve restricted your regular eating to baby carrots with dip and low-sodium
chicken broth. Five pounds in a week! You can get the same results after a few
days of the stomach bug. It’s just water and it soon returns. Water weighs a
lot. I can attest to this every winter when I forget to drain the hose and end
up hauling five gallon buckets of water from the pump to the barn.
So what does water weight have to do with chicken? Let me
tell you.
If you’ve ever priced organically grown, grass-fed chicken
you’ve probably been a little frightened by the sticker price. It is expensive.
Plus it’s a little on the scrawny side, too. The first time I brought home a
$30 chicken, my husband took one look at it and asked if we were having Cornish
hens for dinner. I purchased this chicken at the farmer’s market from Lynn,
whose farm I have visited where she regaled me with stories of her early days
of raising hundreds of chickens and turkeys on their wooded property as a
single mom to the horror of her teenage son. This chicken looked perfectly fine
to me, but it certainly wasn’t plump and pink and perfect like the meat that
stretches the plastic at the grocery store.
Want to know why?
