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 the time of that phase, 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 seductive appeal. After all, I’d just saved up my loose change for years and I had finally achieved my key financial goal. I had bought myself my first N64 console. At Costco. So, really, there was no way I was going to disrespect Costco. My terrible attitude could only muster so much as a begrudging “Costco is fine.”

But even more than they loved 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 Foods 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, although I suspect you already know that.

Five. Dollars.

Compare that to $9 for Whole Foods’, or Safeway’s which goes by weight and costs about $10 for your average “bird” - if you can 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 just right 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 of chickens to come out, but you’ll always have one 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 the inside of your car - you won’t even need to carve it at all. And it will be extra fresh and juicy. Make sure you’ve got wet wipes.

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

The Costco chicken does have one critical flaw. 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 shouldn’t trust it.

Refrigerating and subsequently reheating it as a leftover ruins the Costco chicken.

Doing so robs the chicken of everything 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.

I should say. 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 Costco chicken as a leftover robs it of all its magic and it will leave you questioning whether what happened last night was even real.

But yes. I assure you the fresh chicken was real. As you’ll doubtlessly find out next time.

One possible strategy is to avoid refrigerating and reheating your chicken altogether and to instead just eat it later when it’s at room temp. This will indeed preserve most of the flavor but it is a strategy which is safely advisable for only 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 Costco chicken: its versatility in the kitchen and then, by extension, in my mouth.

My first Costco chicken transformation was deceptively simple: I shredded and added some to a store bought chicken soup so as to beef up its protein content. Then came a quick and dirty Korean-Japanese-chicken-pho concoction of what I had lying around my pantry. Then a homemade chicken salad. 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 been meaning to try an Instagram influencer’s Hainanese Costco Chicken and Rice food hack.

But lately I’ve taken to using the Costco chicken to make stock exclusively.

Now, I know what you are thinking. And I assure you: I, too, never thought I’d become one of those nutbags who preaches about how wonderful and simple it is to make your own chicken broth.

But, I assure you, with the power of a Costco chicken in hand, it really is very simple. And it really is delightful to make. And it really is very wonderful.

My passion for Costco chicken stock means I no longer have the luxury to carve my chicken nicely, as I might have implied I do. I used to pride myself in separating the leg and thigh in one whole aesthetic piece.

Alas, I now require those leg bones for a greater purpose. My dinner plate doesn’t look as nice anymore. But now, while I’m eating my plate of ugly butchered leg meat I am satisfied knowing there is a stock pot nearby going with all her bones, along with whatever else I’ve decided to throw in there: veggies, cheese rinds, herbs, and all the rest.

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

Whence you should follow me down this path of homemade broth, which I assume you will eventually, I encourage you to begin by cheating just a little 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 a little Better Than Bouillon Chicken Stock (which is also sold at Costco) for extra richness until you’ve perfected your method.

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

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

Believe me when I assure you there is nothing more delightful than reheating a bit of stock for a soul-warming and -gratifying mug of liquid deliciousness for sipping.

We are approaching the end of my Ode to The Chicken, and I’m as surprised as you are that you’re still reading about a rotisserie chicken, so I’ll close you out with just one more surprising thought.

The number one fan of Costco rotisserie chicken in my household is not me. It’s my dog, Milou.

And although Milou agrees with me that its refrigerated leftovers aren’t particularly palatable, Milou loves Costco chicken when it’s fresh. If he had words he 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 as expressive as they come.

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