Rotisserie chickens — those $5.99 (or less) already cooked birds that supermarkets sell — are in the news. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Americans bought well over 600 million of them last year alone, more than any other year. Our consumption of rotisserie chickens has continually increased since they became a supermarket staple in the 1990s, yet their price has not increased. Grocery stores don't want to raise their prices.
Why have they kept prices steady for 20 years? They count on making more money by keeping the price down. Many people, myself included, often buy their side dishes at the same time they buy a rotisserie chicken. Those side dishes are money makers for the grocery store.
Problems with rotisserie chickens
One grocery store can sell hundreds of rotisserie chickens a day. (Photo: Martchan/Shutterstock)
The Wall Street Journal says the majority of rotisserie chickens sold weigh about two pounds and come from chickens that are 4 weeks old. Costco sells larger chickens, aiming for three pounds, that are 11 weeks old. Anyone who has ever sliced up a rotisserie chicken knows that a big part of those birds is breast meat. These are chickens that are bred to have large breasts, which isn't the natural state for most chickens. They are almost certainly factory farmed, and whether they have a 4-week life or an 11-week life, they are raised in cramped, inhumane conditions.
There are other issues with rotisserie chickens, too. The ingredients in them aren't simply chicken and spices like sage and thyme. The ingredients in Costco's Kirkland brand rotisserie chicken are water and seasonings (salt, sodium phosphate, modified food starch, potato dextrin, carrageenan, sugar, dextrose, spice extractives). There are 460 milligrams of sodium in a 3-ounce portion of Costco's chicken. That high sodium content is common in most rotisserie chickens, and some other brands can have ingredients that contain gluten, preservatives and food dyes.
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The packaging is also problematic. The plastic clamshells that most rotisserie chickens come packaged in are large. And while they are recyclable, many of them end up in landfills.
Why not cook a whole chicken at home?
When you roast your own chicken, you know exactly what ingredients are involved — and in what amount. (Photo: Andrew Pustiakin/Shutterstock)
A roasted chicken is so easy to make at home that it's a legitimate question to ask.
There are many reasons — and all of us have experienced this at one time or another:
Not everyone has the skills to cook a whole chicken. If you've never done it, it seems intimidating. But with the correct tools, a roasting pan being the most important, it's a simple, mostly hands-off process.
Whole uncooked chickens are usually more expensive than rotisserie chickens. A $5 cooked chicken seems like a better deal than a $9 uncooked chicken, right? But that $9 uncooked chicken is probably bigger (look how small that rotisserie chicken is in the photo at the top of this page) and will yield more meat, meaning you can probably count on leftovers.
We have limited time. I usually end up buying rotisserie chicken when I don't have the ingredients at home to make a quick dinner. I'll stop at the store and grab a chicken (an organic one, if there's one available, and that adds another $2 to the price), along with mashed potatoes and vegetables. However, those side dishes cost a lot more than if I bought the ingredients and made them myself.
If you want to make something like chicken pot pie or chicken noodle soup, you need cooked chicken as one of the ingredients and a rotisserie chicken is a quick way to get it.
Sometimes, we just don't want to cook.
Tips for avoiding rotisserie chickens
Perhaps it's time we re-think how often we rely on store-bought rotisserie chickens and buy them sparingly. Here are some tips that, with some forethought, can help you reach that goal.
Buy the best chicken you can afford. Ideally, that means farm-raised, truly free-range chickens, from a trusted source. Of course, you can't always afford the ideal, so do the best you can.
If you don't have the time to roast a chicken after work, consider doing a whole chicken in the slow cooker. My favorite recipe for this is Chicken with 40 Cloves of Garlic, but there's no shortage of slow-cooker chicken recipes online. The recipe I use calls for a 7 1/2-pound chicken and cooks on low for 8-10 hours while you're at work. And, unless you're serving a lot of people, that chicken will give you leftovers for a couple of meals. Yes, it will cost more than $5, but in the end it's worth it.
If you need cooked chicken for a recipe, keep chicken breasts in the freezer. Defrost them safely in the microwave, and then cook moist chicken breasts in about 20 minutes. If you need that meat shredded for your recipe, shred them super quickly using an electric hand mixer.
As long as you've done the shopping ahead of time, these tips should have you heading to the store for a cheap chicken and expensive sides less often.
The only thing I can't help you with is the desire to not cook at all. That's all you.
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