I Found a Completely New, Unorthodox Way to Eat Chicken. You’re Not Gonna Like It. (2024)

The following fact is indisputable: Steak tastes its best when it’s medium rare. The same is true for salmon, tuna, and really, any other cut of quality seafood, which is often served either entirely raw or lightly seared. We have evolved past the outmoded kitchen guidelines that claimed that pork must be cooked to a parched, bone-white opacity, starving the meat of its luxuriant juices. And then there’s duck, which, despite being poultry, tastes most heavenly when it’s crisp on the outside and cherry red in the middle.

When you bundle all of these observations together, you are left with no choice but to conclude that animal protein is most delicious when slightly undone. If you extrapolate this point even further, then surely, undercooked chicken must also be outrageously yummy, and we’ve all been missing out on the epicurean range of America’s favorite dinner plate for generations. It’s a hypothesis worth considering because, if you haven’t noticed, chicken sucks. It’s boring. The amount of attention necessary to inject the faintest whiff of dynamism into the bird has been the bane of chefs for centuries. And if strategic undercooking is the secret to unlocking the protein’s finer qualities, then it must be a noble pursuit. This is the basis of my lifelong fascination with the culinary potential of pink chicken, and why I set out to find a way to sink my teeth into a wad of breast meat cooked to an exquisite medium rare.

I have always been an adventurous eater. I’ve sampled ruby-red horse sashimi in Tokyo, poached duck’s blood in Chongqing, and steamed mantis shrimp—with all of its spindling centipedelike legs intact—in Bangkok. As such, I tend to think Americans are annoying and precious with what they allow into their stomachs. Thankfully, the culture appears to be in the midst of a nutritional reckoning, with countless influencers pushing heterodox eating habits on their platforms. Raw milk is having a moment, so is raw honey, and raw liver. We must also mention the existence of the Instagram account Raw Chicken Experiment, which has garnered over 400,000 Instagram followers, all of whom watch an unnamed man consume raw chicken, day after day, until he gets a “tummy ache.” (Currently, he’s on his 101^st dinner of refrigerator-cold unpasteurized poultry.)

However, it must be reiterated that no food scientist on the planet would endorse the idea of consuming chicken that hasn’t been fully pasteurized. “We risk consuming bacteria which can lead to food poisoning,” said Julia Zumpano, a dietician at the Cleveland Clinic who laid out the assortment of bowel-destroying microbes present in raw chicken, E. coli being the most common. Zumpano, like every other registered dietician, recommends bringing poultry of any variety up to 165 degrees, which is a temperature hot enough to incinerate all of those bacterial agents, guaranteeing a safe digestion. This isn’t a regulatory overreach, either. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1 out of every 25 packages of chicken in the grocery store is contaminated with salmonella, which means that if you are routinely chowing on the rubbery pink of unpasteurized poultry, there is a good chance that you may soon be making several grim treks to the bathroom. Humans have understood this concept for millennia. In American colonial homes, one of the most popular ways to cook chicken was to hang it from a string in front of a fireplace. According to the Greenwich Historical Society, children would often be tasked with spinning the string in front of the hearth, to ensure every part of the bird was fully pasteurized before eating.

But that hasn’t stopped some of the planet’s more intrepid eaters from throwing caution to the wind, and scarfing down raw chicken. After all, if you know where to look, you can find chefs willing to experiment with the dark arts of undercooked poultry. The most famous of these traditions is surely Japan’s notorious torisashi, colloquially known in the Western Hemisphere as chicken sashimi, which is essentially chicken breast that’s either served completely raw or has been put under intense heat for a couple of milliseconds until its left with a charred exterior surrounding a wet, cold, coral-pink interior. Torisashi is hard to find in America, though you can track it down at certain audacious yakitori counters—like the famous Berkeley restaurant Ippuku, which contains a whole gallery on its Yelp page of patrons gawking at its chicken tartare. (“I’ll still give this place three stars even though I got food poisoning,” reads one review. “Other than that it’s a pretty legit joint.”)

Torisashi tends to be more of a regional delicacy in Japan, particularly in the Kyushu city of Miyazaki. The dish has an ardent cult of fans, like 39-year-old New Zealander William Heath, who tells me he was previously married to a woman from Miyazaki. During his trips to the island, Heath estimates he ate torisashi over 200 times, and he rates it as one of his favorite meals.

“It has the texture of sashimi salmon. A meaty yet yielding texture. Most times I’ve eaten it, it’s been with a sear, like a blue steak. Generally with a ponzu sauce, white onions, and wasabi. It’s not slimy like what you’d expect with raw chicken,” he said. “Some places serve it with a raw egg. Imagine that in the Western world! If you can push yourself a little bit beyond what you’ve been taught your whole life, you open up to a whole world of tastes and flavors that are, without being dramatic, awe-inspiring.”

Heath said he was never concerned about the potential health fallout from the dish—particularly when he was eating with other diners who reveled in the sinewy tang of raw breast meat. (“Japanese food is notorious for being stringent to cleanliness,” he said. “And any fast food seen as safe, like McDonald’s or Subway, has the chance to make you ill.”) Of course, Japan’s own Ministry of Health has pushed back on Heath’s assertion that the country has mastered the art of preparing unpasteurized poultry without the risk of personal contamination, to the point of issuing a warning to travelers imploring them to avoid consuming “raw or inadequately cooked chicken” while visiting the island. I’m also not surprised to hear that despite Heath’s fondness for the dish, he’s never attempted to replicate torisashi himself.

“I don’t have the skills, knowledge, or expertise to do it correctly,” he said, comparing torisashi, aptly, to the highly toxic fugu pufferfish that appears on the menu of certain high-end sushi restaurants.

All of this is to say if I wanted to eat undercooked chicken without maxing out my deductible, then torisashi was probably off the table. I needed to think outside the box, which, before long, brought me to the wondrous world of sous vide. The French innovation, in which protein is placed into vacuum-sealed plastic bags and poached in water that has been heated to an uber-precise temperature, is most commonly used to cook red meat. But I had heard that there existed a method to use the machine to bring chicken up to a delectable 140 degrees—the same temperature range for a ruddy medium steak—while still eradicating those pesky colonies of E. coli and salmonella.

The method was popularized by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, a chef and food writer, and the author of The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science. In an article he published on Serious Eats, Lopez-Alt argued that pasteurizing chicken is a process that involves both time and heat. Yes, the prescribed 165-degree threshold for poultry will eliminate hostile bacteria in the blink of an eye, but holding the protein at a lower temperature will eventually accomplish the same task over a longer cooking duration. That might be difficult to accomplish on a finicky stovetop, but a sous vide circulator, built to maintain a specific level of heat for hours on end, is perfect for the job.

“At 165 degrees you achieve pasteurization nearly instantly. It’s the bacterial equivalent of shoving a stick of dynamite into an anthill,” wrote Lopez-Alt. “At 136 degrees, on the other hand, it takes a little over an hour for the bacteria to slowly wither to death in the heat.”

Many in the sous vide community have become enthralled by the promise of 140-degree chicken. Cole Wagoner, who works in marketing and frequently shows off the dish on his social feeds, claims that subtemperature poultry is so radically different from the staid blandness of conventional roasted chicken breast that it can almost have a psychotropic effect on a diner’s brain.

“It’s the difference between a medium-rare steak and a well-done steak,” he said. “You cut into it and see an immediate difference. It’s the same flavor, but the amount of natural moisture you get with the sous vide method is profound.”

But Wagoner also mentions that his dish tends to get a polarized response from his dinner guests. Sometimes, after he carves a light-pink chicken breast at the table, his friends and family will whip out their phones and order a circulator for themselves to get in on the revolution. Other folks—like Wagoner’s parents—are so disgusted by the sight that they refuse to even try it.

“I haven’t had many converts,” continued Wagoner. “I haven’t had people say, ‘That looks gross’ and after trying it, they decide they love it.”

After trying the method myself, I can understand where Wagoner is coming from. I arrived at the Slate office kitchen armed with two boneless, skinless chicken breasts, which were subsequently bagged, vacuum-sealed, and dunked in a colleague’s circulator. We set the timer for two hours, at 140 degrees, in accordance with the recipe outlined by Lopez-Alt. I didn’t have high hopes. Poached chicken, in any variety, is never the most visually appealing dish, and once the timer went off, we pulled two grotty, lukewarm hunks of poultry from the depths of the machine. Both of them had turned pallid in their bags, which were stained by the muddy secretion of their juices. Bon appétit?

To my relief, nothing about the chicken breasts appeared to be viscerally undercooked. Yes, they lacked some of the appetizing wrinkles chefs use to spruce up some of the more tiresome items in their inventory—no grill marks, or cast-iron caramelization, or evidence of a marinade or spice blend—but they didn’t look poisonous, either. My colleague had brought along a kitchen torch, and he sizzled the exterior until the chicken looked less pale and more edible. We got to carving afterward, and the knife passed through the meat with almost no resistance, revealing a few light-pink rings complementing the ruffled whiteness of the protein. My dream had finally come true. Medium-rare chicken was at hand.

Wagoner was right. So was Heath. Undercooked chicken will change everything you believed about cooking poultry. The chicken was unbelievably soft. Almost gelatinous, with the physical consistency of an overnight brisket. It was juicy to the point of being disorienting. Slicing into the breast meat was like puncturing a water balloon—ultra-indulgent and almost sinful, you could peel off splinters of white meat with your fingertips and let them melt in your mouth. The flavor profile didn’t change much, though. This was still definitely chicken, but a heightened, more primal chicken—almost gamey, bearing evidence of once being alive.

But was it good? That’s a question I’ve been struggling to answer. Like most Americans, I have been conditioned to expect a very narrow set of possibilities with my chicken. It is the weeknight protein, a dish that is primarily kept on the menu to cater to fussy eaters, and even at its best—say, a whole roast bird on a perch of root vegetables, golden brown and oozing with rendered butter—the dining experience is pleasantly mild. But at 140 degrees, chicken subverts so many of those comforts that it no longer fits into its domestic reliability. I imagine sitting at a dinner table with my family who are all wide-eyed and zonked-out after experiencing this decadent chicken odyssey—a version of their favorite boring white meat with all of its positive qualities cranked up toward an overripe extreme. We’d be satiated but overwhelmed, and I think that makes sous vide chicken difficult to dish up on a random Tuesday evening.

That said, I was pleased to confirm my theory. Yes, as it turns out, a medium-rare chicken does taste amazing, in perfect lockstep with all the other animals I like to eat. I wrapped up the other breast and packed it away, and started fantasizing about all the ways it could be served. Maybe a medium-rare chicken salad? Or a medium-rare chicken cutlet, ripped out of the sous vide and then breaded and flash-fried? The possibilities were endless. First things first though, I offered a forkful of my experiment to some of my other Slate colleagues, hoping that they, too, would see the light. I was rejected across the board. No surprises there. We may have finally come up with a way to make medium-rare chicken, but it might be much longer before anyone wants to eat it.