Supermarket meat

[greenmarsupial]

A bit of a random one... has anyone else noticed that supermarket meat (mostly Tesco, I haven't done a lot of market research!) is really watery? It feels like it's been plumped up to weigh more or something.

Chicken breasts are impossible to seal in a frying pan as they just ooze so much water. A whole chicken had loads of water in the roasting tin and was generally a bit horrible looking. Mince is also really hard to brown and I keep having to pour liquid out of a pan. None of it is off, it just all has excess liquid.

Is this actually a thing? Would it be better if I bought meat at the butcher? It's so off putting that I have significantly cut down our meat intake which is no bad thing I suppose!

Random😆

Yes OP this is very much a thing, and why I very rarely buy supermarket meat (and when I lived in Sweden, which doesn't have ANY independent butchers, essentially found myself vegetarian against my own inclination 😀). We had this one winter - did the exact same roast leg of lamb on top of root vegetables a week or so apart, except the second time was improvised and our normal butcher was out of stock so bought elsewhere (not even a supermarket.) Result: the wretched animal ended up overflowing the roasting tin because it lost so much water in the process!! Needless to say we haven't been back to butcher B for any but the most trivial purchases since.

Do you have anyone locally who can recommend a really good butcher? Maybe even a specialist poultry supplier? Anyone listed with a local Slow Food chapter if that's a thing in the UK?

It feels like it's been plumped up to weigh more or something.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plumping

It's unclear to what extent this is legal in the UK or the EU; sources I can find are from a decade ago. But a quick look on the Tesco website finds frozen chicken that has been plumped up this way.

Oh interesting! It feels quite recent to me- a fresh chicken would have been fine a year ago and I would have done the roast potatoes in the same tray. Now they would just be soggy! Maybe they've brought it back from the 70s.

Yuck! That's exactly what I'm finding. We do have a good local butcher. It's a combination of being lazy and only normally using meat as an ingredient rather than the main part of the meal that makes me just add it to my online order rather than going separately for it. Will try today though and see if there is a difference.