For Ariane Daguin, the daughter of French restaurateurs and founder of high-end meat purveyor D’Artagnan, her first bites of American chicken were nothing short of terrible.
“I didn’t understand,” she says, the memory of disgust still audible in her voice decades later. “It tasted like fish sometimes. Other times it was tasteless.” A big part of the reason, she soon discovered, was because of the way the chickens were cooled after slaughtering: with a dunk in a cold water and chlorine bath.
“It’s probably part of the reason I started the company,” Daguin says.
After a bird is killed, de-feathered, and eviscerated, its body temperature needs to be brought down quickly to stop and prevent the spread of pathogens such as salmonella. In the U.S. this is usually done by submerging the chickens in tanks of ice water, often treated with antimicrobial agents like chlorine or hydrogen peroxide. But in Daguin’s native France and the rest of the European Union, doing such a thing to a chicken was nearly sacrilege. The chicken will absorb some of that water, and whatever else is in it—say, chemicals or bacteria—diluting its natural flavor and changing the texture.
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