Japanese chicken

[prasantrin]

Could someone explain to me why Japanese chickens have such tough skin? To me, eating the crisp skin off a roast chicken is on the greatest pleasures. But every chicken I've roasted in Japan has has really thick tough skin. And that includes the very expensive chicken from Kyushu my landlord served us.

Is there a particular type of chicken I should be looking for in order to get thin skin?

[v. gautam]

I do not know about the skin thickness but I have heard good things about the egg & meat quality of the NAGOYA chicken. There is a concerted effort to bring this breed back into production, and several strains have been bred.[K. Kino. Poultry Institute, Aichi-ken Agricultural Research Center, Nagakute, Aichi]

"There are 7 breeding farms in Aichi prefecture that produce commercial Nagoya chicks. In 1999, they provided 580 thousand commercial chicks mainly to 26 poultry farms in this area. The grown birds are dispatched to 12 slaughterhouses. The meat is sold at many department stores and supermarkets locally and in many cities in Japan, and the price is about $40/kg, which is about 5 times higher than that of broiler meat....

Generally Nagoya's meat is tough and tasty, and we tried to investigate what factors affect the hard texture and the taste.... Japanese people enjoy chicken raw meat for "Sashimi", boiled meat for "Sukiyaki", "Mizutaki" or "Shyabu-shyabu" and baked meat for "Yakitori". The hard texture and tasty meat of Nagoya is more preferable for such Japanese cooking"

Giant Shamo is another excellent meat bird. If you want to do exceptional Indian cooking, these two breeds are the ones you need, not the Rock Cornish flabby broilers sold in the US.