How to identify woody chicken breasts with manual

It can result in changes in the texture usually in the upper most part of the fillet. Chicken companies spent decades breeding birds to grow rapidly and develop large breast muscles.

You can identify woody breasts by looking for a series of parallel white stripes in the meat. In addition, university of delaware researchers have identified the biomarkers, or genes, that characterize woody breast. Generally, if you’re seeing a lot of woody breasts, you could likely decrease the rate by slaughtering the birds earlier.

Breast meat with the wbc is characterized by diffuse areas of hardness and overall muscle rigidity.

If the breast meat is found to be unusually hard, it indicates the fillet has woody breast and the meat is moved into another supply chain, to be processed as ground chicken. This aspect was also noted in chicken breasts with the white striping condition (kuttappan et al., 2013). Woody breast (wb) is a major myopathy in broilers characterized by hardness of the breast fillet and can be evaluated by human palpation with a severity scale of 0 (normal) to 3 (severe). “woody breast” describes a quality issue stemming from a muscle abnormality in a small percentage of chicken meat in the u.s.