$20 Whole Chicken Vs. $78 Whole Chicken

Whole chickens. Chicken is one of the most common whole served animals. And so that's why I thought it would be worthy of doing a whole episode about. Why didn't you say worth it? What? Is it worth it? Today on Worth It, we're gonna be trying three whole chickens at three drastically different price points to find out which one is the most worth it at its price. We've had whole chickens before. In the fried chicken episode, the last chicken was a whole chicken. In the cream soups episode, the last soup was a whole chicken. I am salivating as you say that. You get the fat, the skin, the cartilage, the whole thing. It's true, you wouldn't watch a movie, an act at a time, you'd watch the whole thing. And when you describe a very attractive individual, they're often described as the whole package. Andrew, where are we going first? So our first whole chicken is going to come from Domestic Barbecue in Covina, where we're gonna be speaking with Milton and Erica about their whole chicken. It is prepared in halves, but the menu item is a whole chicken. This chicken is both smoked, fried, and grilled. You say both if it's three things? What? Both, yes. Smoked, fried, grilled? Yes. Is that the whole Lee Trinity or what? Yes. How would you describe Domestic? California-style barbecue. It's not Texas-style, it's not Mississippi-style, it's our stamp on barbecue. We take a lot of the regional classic barbecue technique and some of the flavors, and then we blend it into our own. We use different wood blends, different dry rubs. It's the flavor and balance between the wood and the seasonings that we use that make it unique. Where does your background in barbecue come from? Passionate. Backyard. Backyard, passionate. I went to culinary school to become a chef, and barbecue's always been in my background, doing it on the weekends with family, with friends. It's one of those processes that takes so much time that you really gotta love it to do it on a regular basis. We are interested in the whole chicken that you guys have. Can you talk a little bit more about how it found its way on the menu? We used to go to a ton of barbecue spots. One of the things that was always missing on the menu was chicken. So when we opened up Domestic, he's like, let's do something completely different and do chicken. It's really hard to execute, just because any misstep can over-dry the bird. We split through the spine, and then we do something called a dry brine. The red brine, you usually dip it in until you leave it, you soak it. The dry brining draws out the moisture from the chicken itself. It's osmosis, so it's pulling out the moisture from the chicken and replacing it with the salt that we're having our dry rub. We put it into a smoker. Anywhere from two hours to two hours and 45 minutes. We actually deep fry our chicken real quickly just to crisp up the skin. Throw it on the grill, get some nice cross marks on the breast side of it. We glaze it with our house-made barbecue sauce, so you're getting a sweet tackiness that comes with crispy skin and moist chicken. You're hitting all the senses texturally. The chicken's getting the full spa treatment, you know? It really is. We're giving it the respect it deserves. It's a very simple item, but we want to transform it and make it something spectacular. My favorite part of the chicken is always the drumstick. I'm down to start there. Wow. I swear I'm usually better at this. Remember when he said 20 minutes would be enough time? I am skilled at the anatomy of a chicken. Boom, there we go. Ready? That's what you want. Cheers, Steven. Look at the juice drip. Cheers. It's straight up drippin'. Wow. That meat is so tender. I never thought chicken that's cooked for that long could still retain so much moisture. I roasted chicken for like five minutes too long. It's dry as f**k. I don't know what sorcery they're doing to this thing. Mm, good. You wanna take a little side break? I do, yeah. Our bacon mac and cheese starts with a base of bechamel with Gouiche, real cheddar, real mozzarella, real jack cheese. Oh my goodness. God damn, that's good. This is my fantasy. I love melty cheese. All right, I'm gonna get a breast chunk. The often maligned portion of the chicken. People think it's too dry. It's boring. It's because it's easy to cook wrong. The breast is good. Look at the juices running down my hand. From the breast. And our cornbread is a little bit sweeter, whereas if you go to the deep south, it's more savory. It's a salt profile with a little bit of sweetness added on top, or vice versa. Whole chicken, whole cornbread. Whole corn in the whole cornbread. Whoa, it's actually corn. You don't see that a lot. Whoa, that cornbread is so good. I'm not gonna lie, I was like, oh, this looks like it's gonna suck. You were ready for it to be bad. I was ready for it to be bad. Well, like, the texture of it looks like it's a typical cornbread. Like, you know, it's like dry and like crusty, but it's fluffy and sweet. Before our next whole chicken. A whole chicken fact. Adam Driver, who attended Juilliard, has said that in college, he regularly ate an entire rotisserie chicken himself. Adam Driver went to Juilliard? I mean, depending on what else I ate over the course of a day, a whole chicken is not that crazy. Like, I crushed half a chicken yesterday and I didn't even break a sweat. You were a little sweaty. So our next whole chicken, we're going to Saucy Chick. We're gonna be speaking with Rhea and Marcel. We're gonna be trying their rotisserie dinner to share. They actually do two styles of rotisserie chicken. We're gonna be trying both. I always love family style meals. For sure. And a whole chicken, unless you're Adam Driver, great to share. How did you guys get started? Both Marcel and I work corporate jobs. And in 2020, we worked for the same company and we were both furloughed. And we now found ourselves with lots of time on our hands and a family to support. So we asked friends and family if we could feed them for donations. But what ended up happening was that they would tell other people and all of a sudden we were feeding, like, friends of friends of friends. So here we are. The whole chicken meal consists of one whole chicken, two sides, a packet of eight mejerado tortillas, one sauce, and pickled onions. You have the option to add a sauce sampler. We have, you know, about five different scratch-crafted sauces, five different sides. One of our sides that I kind of stole from my mom was the mom's beans. She would only make it during Thanksgiving and Christmas. And everyone asked, did your mom make the beans? And so it's a pinto bean whip, chorizo, jalapeno, some olives, and some cheese. And mom's love. I'm Mexican. We've always had the traditional enchiladas, the abondigas. Conversely, I'm Indian, South Asian descent. Growing up, we never bought ghee. Like, ghee is just something that you made at home. Same thing with yogurt. Both our cultures use coconut, peanuts, cumin, chilies, lime. Really finding the through line between our cultures and then bringing them together for, like, this epic explosion or collision of flavors, yeah. Sometimes it's a collaboration, other times it's a collision, right? We do two different rotisserie chicken. One is fabil, which is inspired by the Yucatan. So it's achiote seeds, citrus, apple cider vinegar, garlic. It's traditionally pork. We just chicken-bite it. And then the Indian-inspired chicken is jeera chicken. It's marinated in caramelized onions, garlic, ginger. That recipe was really inspired by my dad. We get the chicken in, getting it brined. We let it rest for about six to eight hours, and then we marinate the chickens. We do marinate inside, under the skin. At minimum, it's a 24-hour window where they'll sit marinated. The oven itself holds up to 21 chickens, seven spits. It cooks anywhere between 45 to 50 minutes. We'll wrap it in foil, get it packaged, ready for delivery. I had another question. Yeah. Which chicken is better? Jeera. Fabil. Looks like we rented out quite the house. Con-saucy chicken is only to go right now. We have one of each chicken, the pabil and the jeera. All of the sauces, the kachumber salad, the mom's beans, the Mayakoba beans, charred Aldi cauliflower, jeera rice, and of course, the tortillas as well. I know what I want first. Mom's beans. Beans, yeah. It's not just for Thanksgiving anymore. I've never had beans that tasted like that. It's got kicks to it. Like, fresh kicks. Like, this guy just bought sneakers from Nike.com. I don't know where you buy sneakers. It almost tastes like a cheese dip, but it's not a cheese dip, it's a beans. So we have two chickens, pabil, jeera. So I'm gonna grab one of these. You gotta twist. I don't want the meat to all fall off. I see, I see. The meat is so tender, I'm gonna lose it. Shut up, I know how to cut a chicken. Do you just want that? I'll take that one, yeah. Thank you, thank you very much. You did a good job cutting that one up. This is chicken, man. This is chicken. Cheers. Cheers, Steven. Pabil. Oh, man. My hand's been pabiled. Instant reaction, so much flavor. It's not particularly juicy, but it feels like there's flavor just gushing out, though. And now, onto the jeera. Whoa. Oh, yeah. Whoa. This is all the benefits of a spice without being spicy. It's spice-y. I think we should be calling things spicy when they are of spices, not hot. That's a good point. Why do we say spicy? We should just be calling spicy food pain. Man, I can say confidently, I've never had a rotisserie chicken like this before in my life. For each of you, what is your favorite combination and single bite? Terrapin piece of tortilla. I want all sauces, and I just create little bites, and I include everything on it. And I'm a burrito guy. Ria's favorite bite. Something very bold, which is that you could mix all the sauces together, and it could still be delicious. How can this be good? I wanna say which part tasted really good, but it's so many parts, and it all tasted so good. This is a high-speed collision, but then instead of like a train wreck, they merge and become one super train. Okay, burrito time. Okay. This is the way that Marcel likes it. Mom's beans, rice, cauliflower, pickled onions. Yes. That is good. This reminds me a lot of something called Nyonya cooking. I haven't heard of that. Nyonya is a term that describes this generation of Malaysian women who married Chinese men. Their cross-cultural marriage created this beautiful new cuisine. And now, through the beauty of marriage, we were able to reach the depths of flavor layerage in this meal. That's beautiful, Steven. Should we turn the lights on? You know how you know a meal is great? When you start eating it when it's daylight, and you don't even realize it turned nighttime because you were just in a time warp of flavor. That was so good, man. Before we move on to our final whole chicken, we're actually gonna make a special trip to the Natural History Museum of LA County. Chicken fact! I'm Luis Chiappe. I'm the director of the Dinosaur Institute here at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. A common dinosaur trivia factoid is that chickens are the closest related living species to dinosaurs. Is that true? Not entirely, because, you know, all birds are more closely related to dinosaurs, so I wouldn't just single out the chicken. Not only are they closely related to dinosaurs, they are dinosaurs. So a chicken is a dinosaur? Yes. How are you allowed to say that? They're the descendants of dinosaurs, just like we are mammals because we descended from a mammal. We're also primates because we descended from a primate. So when looking at a modern chicken in relation to something like a T-Rex, are there certain things that we can point out as being very similar? Absolutely. Like, for example, you could point at that boomerang-shaped bone. That is called the furcula, technically, but that is essentially the ancestor of the wishbone. If you look at a chicken, they have three main toes, like a T-Rex, and of course, they leave a tridactyl footprint. Some of the relatives of T-Rex were also feathered, and we have exceptional fossils that have been found around the world with their feathers in place. So the T-Rex might have been feathered. Yes. Like a giant chicken. Yes, exactly. Do you have a favorite way of preparing chicken? I do. I kind of like butterfly the chicken on the grill, and I do it all the time. You do this in the field, like in your research? I do it in the field. So you're researching dinosaurs consuming dinosaurs. Exactly. All in one day. Yes. That's amazing. Now that we've fed our brains, where are we gonna feed our tummies? Our last whole chicken is gonna be at Citroën. We're gonna be speaking with Chef de Cuisine, Hilary Henderson, about their Dirty Bird for Two. Citroën is actually the evolved form of a restaurant we've previously visited on the show, a restaurant called Melisse, as in our egg video. And Hilary, we actually interviewed when she worked at Cut Beverly Hills for our first steak video. Wow, so much is happening here. I just had a flashback to Cut, just like seeing that Wagyu certificate for the first time. That was a real entrance into fine dining that I had never experienced before. Yeah, new thing. That was like five years ago. Was it? 2016, right? Yeah, because I had just taken over the role of CBC at Cut. Oh really? Like first week. And you just took over this role, right? Yeah. Okay, so let us know when you change jobs again. Okay. So Citroën is, I don't wanna say it's more casual because it is still totally fine dining, but you can come in and get the Dirty Chicken. You don't have to order a tasting menu, but you still have the option. First of all, is that the official name, Dirty Chicken? The official name on the menu is the Dirty Chicken for Two. The chickens go into a super heavy salt brine for two hours. We glaze them with a tamarind and kiwi and miso. Then the dirty crust, panko breadcrumbs, confit, Meyer lemon, garlic, herbs, super aromatic. And then that goes in the oven. And then this is the most specific part of that procedure, the temperature at which the chicken is cooked. The goal here is to have that crispy texture outside. The skin gets super thin and then the inside is really juicy. It's almost like more condensed. Your final product, when it hits the table, is like the best chicken you'll ever eat. We'll present the whole chicken to the guests and then we bring it back into the kitchen and we carve. Chicken may not seem creative, but I think the creativity and the artistry in being a chef lies really in the discipline and the fundamentals. So like figuring out how to cook this whole four and a half pound chicken to perfection is really like, I think, the art of it so that it is perfect. Comes out in a beautiful copper cassoulet. Dirty chicken for two. Can I ask you about this serving spoon? Yes. It's like a non-spoon. They are elusive. They're really expensive, too. That makes me want it even more. Yeah, like a $65 spoon. What? It's like a deconstructed spatula, right? And you just used it perfectly. Like that. Yep. Okay, thank you. My pleasure. My instinct is to grab a leg. Let's do it. How is this not fried? Look at the skin. It does resemble a fried chicken. Cheers, Steven. Cheers. That's an incredible chicken. There's nothing I like more than being in a fine dining restaurant like this and just getting it in with my hands. There's luxury and then the level above luxury is approaching casualness. So tender. So it's just kind of like covered in tiny crunchies. Yeah, let's talk about the crunchies. It's not like a single crust like with fried chicken. It's like a fruit crumble that has the craggly top. Fried chicken is the pie. As this chicken is to crumble. Whoa. There we go. Touch your tongue to the bone itself. It's seasoned. This is a chicken that I want to clean. Yes, yes, yes. Sorry to the sound people. Shall we take a side break? Which one do you want to do? We have perfectly buttery whipped potatoes, creamed morels cooked in white wine, and then a ragu of seasonal vegetables. So corn, chanterelles, roasted garlic, and spinach. Ooh, look at that whole piece of garlic in there. Do you see that? Oh my gosh. The whole clove of roasted garlic. That was a lot of different sensations. Ooh, creamy mushrooms. I want that with the mashed potato. Can I have this together? I think we are missing out by not experiencing this all together. Oh yeah. Oh my God. It's like a potato milkshake. Breast time. I get to use these spoons now. Spoons like that make me say, why? But then you think, you know, why not? Woo. Yeah, you got to get all the different stuff on the plate. Thank you. Thank you, gravy, for all that you do. Man, that lemon though, it's like a triangle in an orchestra. It's like, da-ding, da-ding. It's interesting to go to a restaurant of this level. A lot of the time, what you come for is a dish that you cannot anticipate. But this is kind of the opposite end of the spectrum. It's like the perfect roast chicken dinner executed perfectly in a way I could not do. That's kind of the secret to the whole chicken. The familiarity. Right. Oh, that's really good. I think we need to give a special shout out in this episode to all of the different sides. The mac and cheese, that cornbread, the cauliflower, mom's beans. Mom's beans. Whole chicken. Steven, it's time to pick our Worth It winners. They were all great. I gotta say, man, saucy chick takes the cake. And by cake, I mean the whole chicken. It was the moment when I mixed all the sauces together and had that bite. It's game over. That is unique and special, but I think I'm gonna give my Worth It winner to domestic. No way. Yes. I feel like chicken is often an afterthought on barbecue menus, but at domestic, there is so much thought into each cooking method and proportion and sauce and seasoning that's going into that chicken. That's my Worth It winner. Unbelievable value. Adam, who's your Worth It winner? Citron. Dirty chicken for two. That does it for our whole dinosaur episode. Next time on Worth It, we're doing desserts.