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| gettyimagesbank |
By Yoon Ja-young
A well-known food columnist has slammed Korean fried chicken for being too small.
Food critic Hwang Kyo-ik recently made a series of postings on his Facebook claiming that Korean fried chicken is too expensive and that therefore, the meat doesn't taste that good.
"Korean chicken is not tasty. It is not tasty because the chicken is small," he wrote.
He said that the fried chicken currently being served at chicken restaurants in Korea is made from small broiler chickens weighing about 1.5 kilograms.
"Some people insist that these small broiler chickens taste better than big broiler chickens. I wonder if they have ever tried big broiler chickens weighing around 3 kilograms."
He presented data from the Rural Development Administration comparing small and large chicken. The report cites increasing costs and tasteless meat as the key problems of producing small chicken, while large chicken can reduce production costs by 20 percent.
He said that consumers in other countries enjoy fried chicken made using bigger chickens.
"Korean fried chicken is enjoyed not for the taste of the meat itself, but for the taste of the sauce. It is also expensive," Hwang said.
He added that Korean consumers should complain about companies that sell the meat of small but expensive chickens.
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| Food columnist Hwang Kyo-ik / Yonhap |
Hwang said that he will continue to bring up the issue.
"When I said in an interview a few years ago that chicken are tasteless due to their small size, I received a barrage of criticism online, such as 'Hwang Kyo-ik doesn't know food,' 'Koreans prefer small chickens' and 'foreigners say that Korean chicken tastes good,'" he said.
Hwang said that some people tend deliberately to ignore this information, because they want to believe that Korean fried chicken, which they grew up eating, tastes better than that in other countries.
He has been criticizing the small size of Korean chickens for several years. He has pointed out that chickens here are slaughtered too early, while the meat features better flavors and texture when a chicken is allowed to grow more. He said in a radio interview in 2019 that Korean fried chicken restaurants have developed good frying techniques and unique sauces to hide the fact that the chicken meat here is not tasty. He has claimed that the meat from bigger chickens would taste even better. He has said that chickens should not be slaughtered until they reach at least 3 kilograms in weight.
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