What Grocery Store Has The Best Rotisserie Chicken

What Grocery Store Has The Best Rotisserie Chicken – Are premium priced chickens really twice as expensive as value brands? The answer will surprise you.

It sounds counterintuitive to go to the supermarket to buy ingredients to cook, only to walk out with a pre-cooked meal. But you know what? We are tired. When you can have a hot, ready-to-eat meal on the table before the food is even set — and for just a few bucks — rotisserie chicken is second to none.

What Grocery Store Has The Best Rotisserie Chicken

Plus, who can resist the golden-brown skin and delicious taste of crazy chicken. Slow-roasted to perfection, these succulent birds are a boon to anyone who’s ever hungry or tired. They’re convenient and affordable, relatively healthy (despite the skin and sodium), and incredibly versatile. Even if you don’t eat it off the bone, chicken soups, chicken salad, fajitas, chopped sandwiches, and more. There are some incredibly quick, weeknight-worthy recipes that call for fresh chicken, like

Why Whole Foods Is Banking On Rotisserie Chicken

But are they all created equal? Is one as good as the other? And are premium priced chickens really twice as expensive as value brands? To find out, we visited two major supermarket chains, two “healthy” markets and two budget stores. We rated each chicken on visual appeal, taste and price to find the best option. Read on to find out which chicken tastes the best, starting with our least favorite. The answer will surprise you! And for more, see Science Says One Major Side Effect of Eating Rotisserie Chicken.

The chicken from Whole Foods was neatly cut and packed in a plastic bag. It was the smallest of the bunch, weighing in at 1 pound, 12 ounces. It was also the least salty – hardly even salty. The white meat was very dry, crisp and chewy, while the dark meat was softer and noticeably chewier than the breast, although the skin was crisp on the outside and the juices pooled in the cavity.

This was one of the worst store-bought rotisserie chickens I’ve ever had, and would have been better made into another recipe rather than eaten on its own. I expect perfection at the highest price point. However, this chicken fell short in every way, from visual appeal to taste to value.

At the time of the tasting, my Kroger store was out of their standard deli rotisserie chicken, with the only upgrade, it came in a plastic bag instead of a tray. Although a plastic bag is more environmentally friendly than a large shell, rotisserie chickens do not fare well in them. Condensation accumulated in the bag made the skin wet and spongy.6254a4d1642c605c54bf1cab17d50f1e

Why Prepared Rotisserie Chickens Are Cheaper Than Ones You Cook Yourself

At two pounds, the chicken was a good size and offered plenty of meat. Peeling off the meat was a bit messy as it wasn’t bound together and the skin was softened, but it gave soft and innocent bites.

Ingredients list flavors such as onion, garlic powder, and yeast extracts. I was able to detect notes of celery and salt as part of the “natural flavors” in the ingredients list. The breast meat was on the dry side and the thighs were stringy, while the light and dark meats were chewy. When I bit down, there was a distinct powdery feel to each bite and a sticky feeling as it gripped my molars.

This three-pound behemoth chicken is recognized as one of America’s best values. It’s a popular loss leader for Costco, and it’s gaining a cult following like standard chicken to buy. In the past I’ve found it less reliable in terms of quality, although the taste is reliably fantastic. If your chosen chicken has strange spongy needles between the main muscle groups, the result is dull, watery and juicy meat.

I got lucky today and this phenomenon I got was mostly free. It was difficult to separate because the bones were thicker and harder to break than in smaller chickens. The skin was crispy and nice with a bunch of potato-based ingredients, thickeners and sugars, but no preservatives or gluten. The white meat felt substantial to the bite, thick, dense, juicy if not tender. Like Kroger’s chicken, the meat had a tendency to pull and gave the same sticky, chewy feeling to the teeth when I ate it. The dark meat was a bit tougher in texture.

Reheat Rotisserie Chicken In Air Fryer

Did you know you can get a whole cooked chicken at Costco for less than $5? I’m sure not, but that was just the first of many pleasant surprises from the Walmart Supercenter deli. This 1 pound, 13 ounce chicken comes with a “freshness guarantee” and took mine an hour off the rotisserie, it definitely delivered.

From the minute I put on my paring knife, I knew it was moist and juicy and cut cleanly. Due to the use of dried chicken stock, rosemary, parsley, lemon peel and citric acid, the spice mix had a more pronounced herbiness than the others. Beautiful brown skin revealed surprisingly bright white flesh – noticeably lighter than its rival.

In turn, the flavor unfolded as soon as I ate it, with a long sweet finish to the very soft white meat. The spice that is so good on the skin translates differently on the meat. It only penetrated halfway through the chicken (which is significantly deeper than all but my top pick), but towards the middle it got kind of artificial. This resulted in the dark meat having a distinctly gamey, almost Thanksgiving turkey flavor, with a subtle undertone.

A classic example of don’t judge a book by its cover, this deceptively simple-looking chicken from Publix in a window paper bag surprised me from the first bite. Its weight was unspecified, and its seasonings—mainly chicken broth, onion powder, spice extracts, sugar, and a bunch of thickening gum to add texture to the skin—sounded vague. But breaking it down yielded a chicken that was pretty meaty for its small size, with juiciness that I could feel with a knife.

I Tasted Four Rotisserie Chickens Including Costco

The relatively crispy golden crust had a balanced flavor and the meat underneath was healthy, rich and balanced. It was more like a good fried chicken than a spit. No bite was too salty, not even one bite was bland. The white parts were firm and juicy, lending a hint of sweetness to the marks left in my mouth, and the dark flesh was slightly richer and fattier than the white, but not significantly different. All in all, it was just a perfect example of something done right, and a truly great chicken reached its chicken potential.

I wasn’t expecting much from this bland, ugly packaged chicken from Sprouts, but it triumphed from the first bite. It’s labeled as fried chicken, but the rotating rotisserie at the deli begs to differ. It all boils down to trivial semantics, as the 1 1/2-pound chicken I sampled had a distinctly flame-kissed, charred earth flavor that put it firmly in first place.

Unlike the others – which smelled like brown chicken skin or herbs – I could smell the element of burning wood smoke as soon as I opened the plastic container. It had a drier quality to it, unlike the steam-diluted flavor of the others, and the smoke penetrated the meat to the bone, and it was instantly smoked. The ingredients list includes vinegar, parsley, onion and garlic extract and sugar; maybe the penetrating taste is due to the salt water? As far as it came, the flavor was fantastic – salty to perfection and with a deep richness and a final whisper of smoke and ash.

The breast meat was meaty and tender, and the meat retained its unique sweet taste. Every bite was juicy, not chewy or stringy, even the dark meat. The thigh and leg were also rich and flavorful, and again, smokier than the game. This was quality chicken, with obvious care in recipe development, spice mix and preparation. If I could only eat one rotisserie chicken again, this would be it.

Best Rotisserie Chicken Recipes: 13+ Amazingly Tasty Dinners!

Su-Jit Lin is a food and lifestyle writer whose work has been featured in Real Simple, HuffPost, and more. Read more about the intersecting lines that form the Su-JitTwo “X”. This provides a way to close the interaction or dismiss the notification.

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I find it very convenient to pick up chicken at the grocery store, but I wanted to

Quick And Easy Rotisserie Chicken Dinner Ideas

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