DoctorOz: Frozen Chicken Secrets: What You Need to Know

Today in Oz, investigation into frozen chicken. It's not just nuggets of frozen chicken strips. The freezer aisle is full of all kinds of pre-cooked chicken that you can heat up real quickly. Frozen foods have actually jumped up 22% since the start of the pandemic. Food just like the ones you saw. Now we investigate what happens when chicken goes from the freezer into your microwave. That's the challenge. We uncover what's really in the most popular frozen chicken meals that make them so delicious and comforting and the healthiest frozen chicken you should stock up on. Joining us is a chef who has spent the last year freezing every food she loves to uncover the science behind the Mally Rosen. You've got Southern roots that apparently make you especially fond of chicken. Why is that? Oh yeah, I mean, who doesn't love fried chicken, breaded chicken, grilled chicken? But the frozen chicken gets a bad rap. You know, when you look at chickens that have a ton of ingredients in them, okay. But there's a lot of products on the market now that are great. That freezing just locks in the freshness and it can be a lot better than you think. It's cost effective. Let's take some of these to task and see what's good, what's not in the frozen chicken section, starting with America's guilty pleasure, everybody. Let's be honest about this. Frozen breaded chicken, like tenders and nuggets and cutlets and patties. And the breading on these products, the ingredients in them, could actually be very similar to what you'd make if you made them homemade. Absolutely, it's the same stuff that you'd have at home. So, you know, it's not the healthiest thing, but it's not so terrible and you just wanna look at the ingredients. What about the chicken underneath the breading? Yeah, so it's the chicken cuts that you may not see in the store, like the chicken rib, right, which you might not be familiar with, but it's still a great cut. And the only other ingredient that's underneath is often the brine. You'll sometimes see water or stock as the second ingredient, and that's all it is. You just wanna look out for the sodium in that, but otherwise, it's good cuts of meat. Now, because so many folks are of the belief that they have gluten issues, there's a whole bunch of gluten-free alternatives to breading, which I didn't think they could actually make, but they've hacked it. So walk us through whether these are worthwhile. Right, well, I mean, hack is kind of the word because they're trying to take something that's flour and turn it into something else. So they're using other ingredients that are still just other starches, right? Rice corn flour, yellow corn flour are a great example. So they have to get that crispiness. So it's not necessarily healthier for you. It's just less wheat. So if you do have celiac or a real intolerance, great, but otherwise, go for the real stuff. I always say, even if you have those issues, I'd rather you just eat foods that naturally don't have gluten in them than try to change it and manipulate it because you're gonna pay a price. Next, grilled frozen chicken. These things always amazed me, whether it's strips or chicken breasts, they all seem to have little grill marks on them. What is that about? Yes, well, unfortunately, it does not mean that there's somebody standing at the chicken factory next to a grill. It's a branding, usually. I mean, that's kind of what they learned from fast food, right? They're just branding it, and then to give it that grill flavor, they're often adding in just kind of smoke flavoring. You'll see that on the package. So as much as we might think that breaded chicken is not as healthy for you, it can be more natural because you know what's going into it. I'm always concerned about whether they're dry or not, which is my one pet peeve about poultry in general. If it's not dry, I can eat anything, but dry food's like a sponge soaking the moisture out of my mouth. How do they avoid that? So again, it's a brine, which is just what you would do at home. So there's nothing inherently bad about that. If you see on the ingredients, again, that water or that stock, that's a good thing. You just wanna look out for the sodium because in that water or stock, they can also add flavorings and a lot of salt. So it's really about the sodium content, not necessarily that it was brined. All right, now frozen chicken meals have become especially popular where they do all the work for you. Suella's joining us. She says her freezer is stocked with them. To the brim, Suella, what kinds of food do you have in there? What do you like and why do you love them so much? I love them. My freezer is always stocked, fully stocked with all different types of chicken. Chicken Parmesan, chicken teriyaki, orange chicken. I love it because it's quick, it's easy, and it's something that I can do. I actually, I have some already being made right now. Well, before you put a bite in your mouth, let me ask Ali about these meals because sometimes they can have a hidden ingredient that makes Suella and others crave them so much. Yeah, I mean, it's sugar, right? It always comes back down to sugar. With a lot of these meals, they have great ingredients in them. They have the chicken, they have the vegetables, but it's in that glaze, the thing that makes it so delicious, can have up to 30 grams of sugar, which is too much. That's why I know you love these meals. So Ali has a little hack to help you control some of the sugar in these frozen dishes. Are you ready for this? Yes. Yeah, so you wanna look for the ones that come with a packet, right? Because you can cut that packet open and put half as much sauce on there, and then you're cutting the sugar by 50%. But when you have one of these things, you wanna look for frozen vegetables. They're just as good as regular vegetables because they're frozen right at the peak of freshness. You wanna look for ingredients like rice or something that's on the healthier side, and then, you know, just cut the glaze in half and you have everything you need. I look at this and I think, I could actually do with a lot less of that stuff on top because that's not why I bought this dish. Exactly. You can sort of tell here they mixed it in so you can't even, you know, you can pretend you don't see it here, but you know it's there when you taste it. Right. Suella, keep that in mind when you pull those things out of the freezer. Pick the ones that have a little less sugar in them. Will do. Thanks for joining us. All right, up next, Ali's revealing the frozen chicken hack that will change your life, I'm serious, in a microwave chicken bowl. You can make at home for a quick and healthy meal. Stick around. We're back with our investigation into frozen chicken. We have secret frozen chicken hacks that chefs say they use all the time. Chef Ali Rosen is back along with Chef Matt Abdu who's gonna be cooking up his go-to frozen chicken bowl for when he is sick and tired of cooking and the kids are still hungry. Doesn't get any much better than that. Listen, this stuff is easy to do. How much easier does it have to be than getting a bag of frozen chicken, grilled chicken in particular, that needs to be just heated up, you can throw it on salads for a quick lunch and you're out of the woods. So Ali, you actually say we can save money as well if we learn how to cook the chicken ourselves, grill it ourselves and freeze it ourselves. Right, and it's not that much work. You know, I think a lot of people look at meal prep and they go, I don't wanna do this. But this is something that you can do in less than an hour. You can cook 10 pounds of chicken all at once and then you have it to throw on your salads or to put in things and you can control the seasonings, you can control the flavors. So it's definitely worth your time. Put your chef hat on. Well, how is it when you're running a big kitchen that you would prep a month's worth of frozen chicken at once? Yeah, so I like to brine it and you'll be very happy to hear that brine it in yogurt. You can do Greek yogurt if you'd like. Oh, I love that. I love show-offs, Ali. Exactly, anytime we can use yogurt. But just yogurt and some salt and that brines it, that helps to keep it moist because as we were talking about earlier, the worst possible thing when you're eating chicken is that kind of like very dry, terrible chicken. This, because of the acidity that's in the yogurt and the salt, it will brine it and so it'll keep it tender. So you just want to do this with all of the chicken breasts that you get. And you can do this with kind of any chicken as well. You can pick the cuts of meat that you like. I mean, that's the other good thing about buying it yourself, right? Like I love chicken thighs more than the breast, but if you have different people in your family, you know, you can buy a whole chicken. I'm a thigh person too. Yeah. This has more flavor. It's the bone. I mean, the bone, keeping the bone in it keeps it moist when it's cooking. So, but we still love our chicken breasts. They're very easy for people. So if you do this, it'll make it easy. You want to do this just, you can do it for as little as 15 minutes, just stick it back in the fridge or you can do it up to an hour. But if you're doing 10 pounds of this, you know, you can just kind of leave it all like this and then you can start cooking as you go. But for this, we would put this in the oven under the broiler. I'm sorry, first you put it in the, you let it marinate for 15 minutes or so or you put it in the freezer? No, you don't have to put it in the fridge. I mean, just 15 minutes to an hour, that's it. And you put it in. We would put it on the top to broil it. You want to do it three to four minutes on each side. I'll move that up there. And that's it, exactly. And then what you have is all that beautiful char that you would get from grilling, but just with the broiler, super easy. And because again, it's under the broiler, it's getting the char on the outside, but it doesn't have time to kind of overcook on the inside. And so then from here, what you're going to do is either cook them into strips, make sure I can use some tongs here, and you're just going to take that chicken. And I like to just cut them up into cubes. You want to kind of pre-freeze them. So just like throw them in the freezer for an hour, and then you can just put them in a bag here, super easy. Or you can just wrap them up in Saran Wrap. The main thing to keep in mind is that you really want to use a heavy duty Saran Wrap. And if you don't have a heavy duty Saran Wrap, just do it a couple of times because Saran Wrap can be porous and air is the enemy of all frozen foods. So as long as there's no air touching it, same within here, you want to push out as much air as possible. Then you can just throw these in the fridge to defrost and you have chicken ready to go anytime you need it. There's three reasons I love this. One, you know exactly what's in your chicken. Two, it saves money. And three, if the pros are doing this, why wouldn't we? Exactly, it's that brine. It's the same thing they're using in the frozen ones already. We're just brining it ourselves. I'm proud of you with the yogurt, by the way. All right, that's good. Thanks, Allie. Next, we have a Mexican street corn taco bowl using frozen pre-cooked grilled chicken. Guys, it's easy, it's simple. It's a microwave meal you can make in 15 minutes. And Matt says he makes his chicken bowl when he's sick and tired of cooking. Do the kids like it? Well, my son and my wife, they love this dish. And obviously, I'm a chef. I'm in the kitchen every single day. Sometimes when I get home, the last thing I want to do is make a very involved meal. This is super quick. It's ready to go in 15 minutes. And it has all the delicious flavor of that sort of crave-worthy fast food version of this particular dish. All right, so all I do is, you do the cooking, I'll do the microwave. All right, so- What am I microwaving? So the first thing we're gonna start off with, in the microwave, you got a bag of cauliflower rice. I love using that cauliflower rice thing. It's a really healthy version, lots of good fiber in it. So we're gonna use that as our rice component to start off this taco bowl. So that's gonna go in the microwave for about five minutes in the bag, and it's ready to go. In our saute pan here, we're starting off with about one tablespoon of olive oil. To that, we have some red onions and red bell peppers that we've diced up. And then from here, we're just gonna dump in the rest of our ingredients. We have some of that beautiful frozen, grilled, cooked chicken strips. We're using the bought version, but you can absolutely use, if you're like Allie and prepped it up in your freezer, by all means, use that. That's just gonna go right into our bowl. With that, we're gonna add in some charred grilled corn. Again, right out of the freezer section, super easy, quick, right out of the bag, goes right in. And some canned black beans. Just important, make sure you rinse them and drain them and rinse them first before you put them in so you don't get all that starchy bean water in there. And then the last thing is, we're gonna add some little bit of water just to kind of bring it all together. And one of those pre-made taco seasoning packets. Now, if you wanna make your own seasoning, you absolutely can, but this just makes it super quick and easy. If a chef uses it, I'm in. Oh, absolutely. I mean, look, not every day needs to be a super gourmet meal. Sometimes you just gotta get a delicious meal on the table for the family. So you're gonna mix all that up and you're gonna let that simmer for about five minutes. While that's simmering, the cauliflower rice is working in the microwave. I love this extra fiber you put in the meal from this. Forget about getting rid of just the rice. The actual benefit of cauliflower is there. And it's delicious and it tastes really good, especially when it's combined with all these flavors. So then it's gonna simmer in your pan for about five to seven minutes or until all the flavors kind of come together. You can see the water mixes with the seasoning, so it gives it that nice, really great coating and flavor. And then we're gonna take it right from our pot and we're gonna just plate it up on top of our bowl of cauliflower rice. It's nice and hot right out of the microwave. I might do this. I mean, look at this. This is super simple, it's quick, it's easy. Got all those flavors. It's gorgeous looking in color. And what makes it the Mexican street corn is this delicious thing that we can't forget. This is, traditionally, Mexican street corn has a combination of mayonnaise and sour cream with things like cilantro and lime juice and a little garlic and chili. But we're gonna add a Greek yogurt for that in place to get, again, those healthy attributes to it. Top it off with a little bit of grated shredded cheese. It's a presentation, isn't it? Always. A couple of sprigs of some fresh cilantro, get it all on there. And then, last but not least, a little bit of some sliced avocado because I love avocado. Folks, and there you have it. Look at this, folks. Take a look at that. I mean, come on now. I mean, how do you beat this? You know, literally, I mean, we said 15 minutes, but it's less than that. I mean, it's quick. It's a quick and delicious. Give it a bite, tell me what you think. The flavors are all there. It's really sort of fun and refreshing, but really sort of satiating, too, and kind of craves that thing you're looking for in a taco bowl. You know, we're talking about chicken. It's moist chicken. Yeah. That's always my biggest fear. If you can freeze chicken, the way that Ali just showed us, or pre-store bought. The brining trick is key, as Ali said. I mean, that's what really is gonna block it, that moisture and a lot of that flavor that you get. Another use for Greek yogurt. Anyway, Matt's Bowl, it has 430 milligrams less sodium and 30 grams less sugar than some of the boxed frozen meals that we looked at. This is fantastic. Matt, thank you very much. Oh, thank you. It's my pleasure being here. We're gonna post this recipe while I eat it, and all the frozen chicken hacks you've seen online, and you can get more of Ali's freezer tips and all of her insights and recipes in her upcoming book, Modern Freezer Meals.