A tale of two chickens

[DailyDi]

Why does a "boneless wing" cost so much more than a "Nugget?"

[barnburner]

Boneless wings usually use a higher quality single piece of chicken meat while most nuggets are a mix of chicken stuff usually pureed into a goop and poured into moulds to make a uniform shape and size. Im not saying that the goop is bad tho.

[FretaBWet]

I think a secondary reason is that nuggets are geared more for children  while wings are geared for adults. I think most parents would have a problem with nuggets being as expensive as the wings they order for themselves.

Hugs

Freta

[spoonchicken]

It's actually... a secret "chicken thing" that I'm not at liberty to divulge 🥄🐔

[ValentinesStuff]

6 hours ago, DailyDi said:

Why does a "boneless wing" cost so much more than a "Nugget?"

I know chickens have wings, but shouldn't the roosters have the nuggets?

[DailyDi]

16 minutes ago, ValentinesStuff said:

I know chickens have wings, but shouldn't the roosters have the nuggets?

And there goes my appetite for nuggets lol

[feralfreak]

4 hours ago, spoonchicken said:

It's actually... a secret "chicken thing" that I'm not at liberty to divulge 🥄🐔

aww c'mon,,, you wanna tell

[Little Sherri]

The best "boneless wings" are comprised of a portion of deboned dark meat, because wings are dark meat, whereas chicken nuggets are usually amorphous pieces of white meat, often mixed with, yes, pink goo pressed from "chicken frames" - chicken thoraxes, basically, after the premium breast meat has been removed, that then get squeezed to produce a guck that is sieved to remove minute bone fragments, and then mixed with mulched breast meat, at around a 20% ratio (20% goo). 

Good quality chicken nuggets are often called chicken "strips" and consist of breaded strips of whole chicken breast. You can see the grain in the meat, which means it wasn't pureed and extruded. If you tear your chicken wing, nugget, or strip apart with your fingers, and the contents become granular rather than stringy, when rolled between the fingers, then it was mechanically processed and they can put anything they want in there, within the confines of the law. 

However, I'm sure that a lot of places have discovered that they can take chicken nuggets they used to sell to kids for $6.99, and put wing sauces on them, call them "boneless wings" and now get $11.99 for them. Just like the top-tier "Southern" or Carolina chicken sandwiches use at least some dark meat in their breaded chicken, while other places just take their boring white chicken patty that comes frozen, all in the same size and shape, and put "Carolina sauce" on it, and try to pass it off as something exciting. If the patty is irregular, IE not round or square, and it has folds, crispy bits hanging off of it, etc, then it's probably made from whole chicken. If it's symmetrical in all respects and, in a package, 20 of them would look identical, then what you have is a processed, formed product.