One case in point that has flipped-flopped for me is with chicken.  When I first started cooking for myself (even at my most budget-challenged points) I used to think boneless, skinless chicken breasts were worth the premium price because they cooked fast and there was little-to-no waste to throw away.  Hmmph!  Later, I realized despite the short cooking time, I often spent more time standing over the stove, constantly checking to see that they were cooked through but not over-cooked (a disaster with lean boneless chicken breast meat).   In the meantime, my attendance at the stove meant I wasn’t really able to do much else in the kitchen without risking my chicken breasts, even with my reasonably good kitchen multi-tasking skills.  Somehow those 30-minute meals were turning into 30 minutes of too much stress, often with something for the meal over- or under-done or forgotten altogether.

 

Also, buying primarily chicken breasts, a “premium” part of the chicken, sort of flies in the face of “nose-to-tail eating”, which is an ethic that encourages the consumption of all the edible parts of the animals whose lives we take for our food.  I’m trying to embrace that traditional ethic more in my cooking choices.  Using up as much of the animal as possible also reduces the waste stream at the processing facility as well as at home.

 

And then there is the nutrition differences.  I’ve come to see boneless chicken breasts as very much a overly processed food product, like skimmed milk, white flour, and refined sugar.  Full of protein to be sure, but without the full complement of fat and minerals that are available with a whole chicken.   Humans did not evolve eating only lean muscle meat.  Until quite recently, fat was prized, and was always utilized instead of discarded.  I’m even using the giblets now, instead of discarding them (though sometimes it is the cats who benefit, not me).

 

The final straw for me were cheap grocery store varieties of boneless chicken breast that actually have the texture of wet paper towels (that’s all I could picture when I closed my eyes and chewed).  When I tried to economize with the cheapest boneless chicken breasts, they just simply weren’t good eating much of the time, no matter how carefully I cooked them.  That’s no bargain, either.  Choosing better chicken sources was the key to cooking chicken with excellent texture/flavor and buying a whole chicken was the key to economizing on the cost of the chicken.