Cooking chicken in the oven sometimes creates very strange effects. Where does the fluid come from? Is this a normal phenomenon? Can a similar effect be avoided?

There are only a few reasons that cause an abundance of moisture when cooking chicken carcasses in the oven. They are really worth considering.

Moisture during baking: normal limits

Cooking on the hotplate allows excess moisture to evaporate in a timely manner. Even the lid is not always able to restrain the steam with which the water leaves. The oven is a closed red-hot space, from where the couple simply has nowhere to go - it leaves the space much less actively.

Air is able to take a certain amount of moisture, but when it is saturated, the process stops. Remaining not only under the lid, but also in the oven, the chicken cannot get rid of moisture as it is released. Therefore, the result will be wetter than the one that could be cooked on the burner. However, that’s why meat is placed in the oven: it manages to steam in its own juices, become softer, more appetizing.

However, excessive moisture is useless, and with a chicken it happens that it simply floats in water. Why can poultry meat produce so much juice?

Chicken carcasses and commerce

If you start cooking frozen carcasses, it will create a risk of “flooding” of a delicious dish. Frozen chicken can have more water in its composition, when you buy this fact, no one will notice what unscrupulous sellers use. Before cooking, the carcass must be thawed.Having noticed the abundance of water during defrosting, the buyer has the right to file a complaint against the supplier or manufacturer. You can also just remember the brand, do not buy more of this product.

Sometimes poultry meat that was fed with poor-quality dry compound feed turns out to be excessively wet. Eating it, the chickens drank a lot, which made the meat waterlogged, tasteless. However, even if we talk about such a problem, such as cheating customers, the main reason for the presence of huge volumes of water in the meat is the use of injectors.

How are chicken carcasses pumped?

Injectors are equipment created originally for pumping brines and marinades of meat, which must be smoked in the future. However, in the field of food production, they quickly realized that this equipment can be used to increase the weight of meat products, and in particular chicken carcasses, by pumping ordinary water. Extrusion allows you to increase the weight of the same legs by more than a third, visually it will be practically not noticeable. Moreover, today thickeners and agents that increase the ability of meat to absorb water are actively used.

Visually “pumped up” chicken will not differ from normal, only during the frying process it will begin to secrete excess water, which will be especially noticeable when cooking in the oven, because it will have nowhere to evaporate.

How to distinguish good from "pumped" chicken?

If you don’t want to buy water at the price of meat and face “flooding” of the pan when cooking chicken in the oven, you should carefully consider the choice of the initial product.Suppliers of good chicken do not hide the appearance of the goods, offering carcasses in transparent packaging. Colored packaging suggests that the product may not be of the highest quality. In addition, frozen poultry is more often processed than offered chilled. Punctures on the skin, an overly puffy appearance of the carcass indicate that it is not worth buying.

Thus, water when roasting chicken can be allocated for natural reasons, then it is not too much. A large amount of moisture is released from the “pumped” poultry, indicating the dishonesty of the product supplier.