It's Saturday night, im bored......I need to know if you always season your chicken.....

[MobyDicksTinyCanoe]

Ive been sat scrolling through recipe videos on TikTok (( don't judge me)) and cant help but notice the amount of screechy hysteria in the comments section over ' unsesoned chicken'.

But to me it is seasoned, for example a normal roast chicken with salt and pepper rubbed into the skin.... Which is exactly what I do. I might rub some garlic butter under the skin and stick an onion or lemon up its backside but that's as good as it gets.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy peri peri chicken or whatever as much as anyone but it just doesnt always need it...... One poor woman was being mocked for not seasoning chicken in a heavy cream / garlic /cheesey potatoes dish. And again id argue it doesnt need it. The chicken should hold onto the other flavours.

My cack handed research has seen that most these comments seem to come from Americans..... Are there chickens less tasty? Or am I just Belinda from Blandtown?

So Yabu, and your food is shite and a waste of calories

Or yanbu. There's no need to empty the contents of your spice rack everytime you cook a damn chicken.

I thank you.

I'm sure when I went to restaurants in France Germany Austria Spain Italy etc (cities) I didn't find it sort of. Different in terms of salt/pepper/ other things.

In Singapore the food was yummy but I found it v salty. And I love salt. Food here got salt cut massively years ago and at first it was -doesn't taste right- but now I don't notice at all. It's what you're used to, to a large extent.

Goodness gracious me- going out for an 'english- bland food

Oh, yes - that remains one of my all-time favourite sketches.

'I'll have the steak and kidney pee'
'You won't shit for a week'

That's true, growing up we always used "it's a bit English" as short-hand for dry, plain, bland tasting things.

There are people who don't season chicken??????? Next they will say they are boiling it 🤣

What?! Some people really arent seasoning chicken???

@Bobsyer

Americans (in particular) have the sheer audacity to say brits serve up shit unseasoned food and then call dumping several tins of food and read made sauces into a dish and calling it a meal.

I’m only half kidding.

'add a can of Cambell's soup and have a tube of ketchup'

Americans have a fucking cheek.

*half

@Coffeepants

Disagree. I come from a country that has far better quality of meat than the Uk and still the chicken needs to be seasoned. Salt and pepper won’t cut it. But appreciate that if you’ve not grown up eating food that way, it might taste perfectly good seasoned with salt and pepper.

where do you come from?

American seasoning is split less along racial than regional lines. In New England, I’d do chicken or turkey with seat, pepper, poultry seasoning,, and lemon juice inside and out. Midwesterners and Mormons are notorious for their combinations of canned soup, mayo, and ketchup in appealing bland casseroles.

A preference to wash meat is very dependent on the culture you've grown up in. It would never occur to me to wash chicken (or any other meat) as washing meat does not improve flavour, and I would prefer not to splash salmonella about.

When people say 'season', do they not mean salt & pepper ? I always thought it meant that.

@Bobsyer

No one says the French cook shit food, and their meals are more similar to ours than the others quoted here. Simple flavours that work together can be all that’s needed - some meals only need salt and pepper. No one says that pasta aglio e olio is shit when that uses just garlic, parsley and Parmesan. Not everything requires a heavy battering of spices.

Exactly. But some people think that unless it's been coated in basic bastard hot sauce, it's unpalatable.

I wondered about this last night when I was talking to my euro/Canadian friend, who seemed to think 'seasoning' meant 'any kind of flavour' whereas I think 'seasoning' means salt and pepper. Everything else is spice, aromatics etc. She said something she'd eaten recently "wasn't seasoned" and therefore she had to put hot sauce on it. I would think if something wasn't seasoned, it needed salt.

And yes ugh my apparently well-travelled American friend served us all roast chicken from a recipe she loved, and it was completely without salt ffs, and was totally tasteless and bland and she thought it was wonderful. She'd lived in Czech for two years for goodness sake, I'm not an expert in Czech food but I assume it has some kind of flavour.

I do Nigellas roast chicken. It's always comes out moist with crispy skin and makes the most amazing 'gravy'

Soft butter smeared thickly all over chook and loads of sea salt all over.

Sea salt in the cavity and as many halved lemons as you can shove in.

Hot oven

Take out lemons and remove bird to rest.

Pan on stove which now has butter, chicken juices and squash the lemons to remove the juice. Tiny bit of water. Bubble while you slice the chook. Served with cauli cheese, broccoli and juicy stuff. and yorkshires.

Bloody amazing

That was my dinner last night, roasted chicken breast with a bit of salt and pepper, and a sprinkle of oregano. I have developed a lot of food intolerances the last few years, and actually eat it several times a week. I still make recipes for my family, but my days of chicken parmesan or butter chicken are over.

I do kick it up a notch with lemon sometimes.

If you wouldn't eat a meat without seasoning it then what's the point of eating that meat? Might as well use a vegetable or something you like the flavour of as it is.

Of course if you eat heavily spiced food your whole life you will think chicken seasoned with salt and pepper is bland. It's like having suga in your tea. A preference.

And to the comment about British meat. We do have some excellent meat here but it is expensive. What we don't have is great cheap meat for the masses.

pinged the food in the videos is seasoned. But its how id season it, using salt, pepper, lemon, butter, garlic etc its seasoned. It just isnt ambushed with a million and one spices. Poor sods are being mauled in the comments.
And tbh I pay about £15 for a corn fed, free range chicken. It tastes amazing...... Why the hell would I want to cover that up when enhancing it is enough? 🤔

EVERYTHING is seasoned and washed but then I'm Black so that's how we roll.

If I'm making roast chicken then it would be made with halved onion and lemons and usually rosemary inside it, and then rubbed with butter, salt and pepper outside.

I'm then going to serve it with gravy and veg which is all the seasoning it needs really?

The same would apply if e.g. I'm making a pasta sauce with chicken - the flavours are coming from the sauce which would have onions, garlic, herbs etc so I wouldn't think the chicken itself needed seasoning?

But e.g. for something like fajitas obviously you'd season the chicken as that would be a key part of the dish's flavouring.

I tend to think a blanket rule one way or the other is never going to work as different dishes need different ingredients (quelle surprise!).

Why do people wash chicken? Worried I should be washing it now. Is it dirty?

Season always.

@FestiveMayo

Why do people wash chicken? Worried I should be washing it now. Is it dirty?

It's a cultural thing mainly.. I'm from an ethnic minority and have very strong recollections of my mum washing the chicken under the tap.. The NHS actually recommends that you actually don't wash meat as it spreads bacteria, however it's an instilled tradition that many ethnic minorities still follow.