In Praise of the Costco Chicken

There’s that dumb phase of adolescence we all go through.

The one in which everything about our parents is stupid.

What our parents think is stupid. Their advice is stupid. And the food they’ve been feeding us for our entire lives suddenly sucks.

I was a particularly dumb adolescent.

Around that phase of my life, my immigrant family discovered and fell in love with Costco.

Now, I should say, the magnificence of Costco is such that even my own adolescent shittiness could not resist its seduction. After all, I’d just saved up my loose change for years and I had finally achieved my financial goal: I had bought myself my first N64 console. At Costco. No way was I going to disrespect Costco after that. My terrible attitude could only muster so much as a begrudging “Costco is fine.”

But even more than loving Costco, my parents really loved the Costco chicken. And therefore I hated the Costco chicken.

God. I was so stupid back then.

The Costco chicken is without a doubt one of humanity’s all time Great Achievements. It’s on par with the Moon landing, the McDonald’s double cheeseburger, and globally standardized shipping containers.

The Costco chicken is delicious. It’s juicy. It’s savory. Its skin is fatty and Maillarded to perfection.

By contrast, the Whole Food chicken is terrible. It’s dry, it’s tasteless, it doesn’t even have any color. And don’t bother bringing up the Safeway chicken - I’m not convinced that food product has previously been alive at any point.

The Costco chicken costs $5, as I’d expect you are already aware.

Five. Dollars.

Compare that to $9 for Whole Foods’, or Safeway’s at around $10 for your average “bird,” if we’ll call it a bird. Somehow the grocery store ready-to-eat rotisserie chicken market is one in which quality is inversely correlated with price. It defies the laws of economics.

The chicken’s nutritional macros are incredible. Totals will depend on the size of your particular chicken, of course, but you can figure a whole chicken will come out to something like 120 grams of protein and 40 grams of fat, assuming you eat the skin.. which of course you will.

Carbs? Negligible.

Serve the chicken with Kirkland frozen broccoli, made quick and easy, and you’re well on your way to your summer body goal.

The chicken is nutritionally ideal. (We don’t look at sodium in my household).

But have I mentioned the Costco chicken is insanely delicious?

That chicken has been perfectly brined in a solution which is borderline overseasoned - which is perfect by my book - and it’s rotisseried to perfection.

The Costco chicken is consistent. In fact it is consistent in all three core product dimensions: quality, price, and availability. Which if you think about it is pretty wild. You may sometimes have to wait a few minutes for the next batch to come out, but the chicken will always be there for you.

The Costco chicken is just like that ex you once had: the one who treated you a little too well for how you deserved; the one you took for granted and eventually spurned away; the one who with the benefit of hindsight you realize you didn’t deserve in the first place. Just as I did not deserve the chicken in my teenage years.

The Costco chicken is dinner, ready and served in an instant. No wonder my mom loved that thing. All you need to do is take it home and break it down, which is absurdly easy to do given how tender its meat and how easy it comes apart. But if you’re willing to go barbarian-mode on it - fingers and mouth straight out of the bag from within the comfort of your car - you won’t even need to take it apart and it will be extra fresh and juicy and satisfying to boot. Make sure you’ve got wet wipes.

Ballads should be passed down and sung in praise of the Costco chicken. Or fan merch, at minimum.

The Costco chicken does have one critical flaw. An Achilles heel. Which of course it does, because if it was absolutely perfect that would be quite suspicious and it would violate the fundamental laws of nature and we wouldn’t be able to trust it.

Refrigerating and subsequently reheating leftover the Costco chicken ruins it.

The typical leftovers playbook strips the chicken of every attribute which makes it amazing. The meat goes from impossibly moist to fully dry, the chew isn’t all that great, and the flavor somehow totally dissipates.

Now, that leftover Costco chicken is still better than the Whole Foods chicken served fresh, mind you, and we will speak no more of Safeway, but experiencing the Costco chicken in this state robs it of all its magic and the experience will leave you questioning whether what happened last night was even real.

But in fact, yes. That fresh Costco chicken was real. As you’ll find out next time.

One possible strategy is to avoid refrigerating and reheating the chicken altogether, and instead eat it later at room temp. This will indeed preserve most of the flavor but this is a strategy which is advisable only for so long. Even my gluttony must eventually face the bounds of reality and biology.

There are two solutions to this leftovers problem:

(1) Transform the Costco chicken into new food products. More on this in a second.

(2) Get more fresh Costco chicken.

And so we arrive at what I’ve come to realize might be the greatest thing about the Costco chicken: its versatility in the kitchen and, by extension, in my mouth.

My first transformation of the Costco chicken was simple - I shredded and added it to some store bought chicken soup to beef up the protein content. Then came a quick a dirty Frankenstein’d Korean-Japanese-chicken-pho variant. Then homemade chicken salad (I learned from experience that removing the skin was critical for this one). And then a New York Times chicken cream veggie pasta (Italians: forgive me for committing that most American food crime of combining chicken and pasta). I’ve also seen and I’m meaning to try one Instagram influencer’s Hainanese Costco chicken and rice hack.

But lately I’ve have taken to is using the Costco chicken for homemade chicken stock.

Now, I know what you are thinking. And I assure you: I, too, thought I’d be the last to turn into one of those nutbags who tell you how wonderful and simple and worthwhile it is to make homemade chicken broth.

But I assure you that with the power of the Costco chicken in hand it really is very simple, and it really is delightful to do, and it really is very wonderful.

My passion for Costco chicken stock means I no longer have the luxury to break down my chicken nicely, as I implied I do earlier. I used to pride myself in separated the leg and thigh in one aesthetic piece onto the plate. Alas, now I require those leg bones for a greater purpose! My dinner plate doesn’t look as nice anymore, but while I’m eating butchered up leg meat I am satisfied knowing there is nearby a stock pot going with all her bones and whatever else I’ve serendipitously decided to throw in there - veggies, cheese rinds, herbs, etc.

I’m still figuring this all out. My perpetual-ziplock-of-leftover-vegetable-scraps-in-the-freezer strategy is a work in progress, and I haven’t worked out a great refrigeration container for my broth once its done simmering.

Whence you should follow me down this path, I encourage you to begin by cheating a bit, just like I do.

Use fresh whole vegetables if you don’t have enough scraps stashed away, which you won’t at first, and top up your broth with some Better Than Bouillon Chicken Stock (also sold at Costco) for extra richness until you’ve developed your sixth sense for the ratios and perfected your routine.

But I’ll tell you something really amazing. Now, any chicken we haven’t finished by the end of dinner gets thrown into the pot, meat and all, alongside my whole week’s worth of scraps and bits frozen and thereto stashed away. It’s all extra flavor! And! There’s no more leftovers and no more waste. Win win.

This ritual of stock making has taken on such importance that I’m seriously considering doubling up on my volume of Costco chicken purchases. Purely so as to have more chicken offering I can proffer up as sacrifice to the stock pot.

Believe me when I assure you there is nothing more delightful than pulling out and reheating a bit of chicken stock for a soul-warming and wholly-gratifying mug of liquid deliciousness to sip on.

We are approaching the end of my Ode to The Chicken, and I’m just as surprised as you are that you’ve chosen to spend quite this long reading about a gosh darn rotisserie chicken, so I’ll close you out with just one more thought.

Despite everything you’ve read, the number one fan of the Costco rotisserie chicken in my household is not I. It’s my dog, Milou.

And although Milou agrees with me that the refrigerated leftovers aren’t anything special and not particularly palatable, Milou loves the Costco chicken when it’s fresh. If he had words, my dog would be the first to tell you that the night of a Costco run is hands down the best night of the week.

A shitty and temperamental and hormone-addled human teenager, Milou is not! He’s as earnest and expressive as they come.

And even better than enjoying it myself is watching Milou chow down on his chicken dinner right by my side.