I’m Dreaming of An All White Meat Christmas

Like many a modern lass, I am a great lover of turkey breast meat. It is lean and lovely, superb for deli sandwiches, delectable when breaded n’ deep fried and particularly marvellous when roasted and covered in gravy at Christmas time. It is feelings like mine that have made white meat such a premium commodity in North America - sometimes fetching three times the price of darkened wings and thighs. And though poultry farmers have spent decades breeding turkeys and chickens to grow the biggest breasts possible, it seems we just can’t get enough. So Merko Betti, a food scientist at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, has come up with a way to turn dark meat to white.

How, you ask? In this day of food technology, you might have assumed that Betti turned first to genetics. With the chicken genome sequenced and published, he could have searched for the avian genes that make dark meat dark - those responsible for the levels of muscle fat and red-coloured myoglobin. Myoglobin is a protein stored in muscles that delivers oxygen to cells during taxing aerobic exercise. Because ground-based birds such as turkeys only fly in short bursts, their breast or pectoral muscles don’t need myoglobin, hence the pure white meat. Genetic engineering and genome-directed breeding programs likely hold high promise for the all-white-bird, especially if it doesn’t need to move around at all. And indeed, Betti has plans to exploit available DNA information, but not quite yet.

Perhaps then Betti discovered some brilliantly white-meated mutant and employed a sophisticated breeding program to produce a superior (and patented) line of whiter-than-white birds? He could even have named them Allbreast(TM).

But no. Betti kept it simple. He took a heap of dark meat, ground it down, put it on ice, added water and whirled it through several extraction steps to remove the fat and myoglobin. In the end, he had a white protein concentrate, ready to be formed as nuggets, patties, fingers, maybe even re-shaped into drumsticks and re-stuck on the bird. I mean, if they can do it with tofu, I don’t see why not. Then again, maybe Tofurkey sounds more appetizing than reconstituted, de-fatted, de-pigmented poultry protein concentrate.