Turkey or Rotisserie chicken? We did an exhaustive probe to maximize your Thanksgiving value experience
Thanks in advance for the Pulitzer!
It’s poultry week, or what many of us call: “I can’t believe I gotta spend an afternoon with these f***in people again”. For some, Thanksgiving is about eating yourself into another coronary, but for us it’s devoted to finding the best turkey value. The winner of the holiday is the person who can locate the cheapest 20 lb turkey (and don’t even think about spending over 2 bucks a pound).
However, if you really want to maximize value and save time, forget turkey altogether. It’s dry, flavorless, and impossible to cook. Do yourself a favor and buy the so called loved ones a few juicy, symmetrically cooked rotisserie birds from Costco for $4.99. Screw tradition! Get a rotisserie -- no more fighting over two measly turkey legs. Zero defrosting, and you don’t even need to preheat the oven!
Lucky for you, we compiled the OJM NYC Rotisserie Value Guide to help you find the best rotisserie for every occasion.
Five Supermarkets
We went to five of New York City’s finest institutions to purchase our chicken test subjects:
Key Food (🐔)
Expert Analysis: The Key Food chicken from Perdue is pretty bad. It’s dry, unevenly cooked, and despite being fresh out of the oven, was hard and lacked the sort of oily discharge we expect from our rotisserie chickens. It was too smoky and needed salt. Oof.
Union Market (🐔🐔🐔🐔🐔)
Expert Analysis: A fine chicken. At $6.18/lb this is a relatively expensive bird (it’s supposed to be $5.99/lb -- next time we’ll bring our own scale to the counter). This chicken is well worth it, though the per pound pricing eliminates our usual strategy of inspecting every chicken and selecting the heaviest. Zoom in to see exactly how well-cooked and oil-secreting it is. If you look closely you can see juice dripping off the scale.
Zabar’s (🐔🐔)
Expert Analysis: We schlepped all the way to the UWS for this? Where the hell is the skin? This thing is barely cooked. Zabar’s can do a lot of things, but rotisserie is not their comparative advantage. That said, if you’re gonna, go on a Wednesday. Only on Wednesday does Zabar’s offer an impressive $1 discount -- $11.99 instead of $12.99 (which brings the cost down to $5.43/lb from $5.89 assuming it’s the same size chicken).
Whole Foods (🐔🐔🐔)
Whole Foods offers solid value at $4.02/lb. We also appreciate that they have organic and non-organic options. The organic chicken is a few bucks more. Unfortunately, like Zabar’s, Whole Foods does many things well, but rotisserie chickens are not one of them. This chicken gets a better rating than Zabar’s only because of its juice, and parts of the thighs are well cooked. The skin has a nice salt ratio. Meh.
Costco (🐔🐔🐔🐔🐔)
What more can we say about Item 87745? It’s consistently cooked to perfection – juicy, salty, and pumped with chemicals. If there is a downside to the $4.99 chicken from Costco, one could argue that it’s a far cry from organic. However, it’s not like it’s poisonous or anything! For many, this is America. Cheap, tasty, packed with protein, salt, and preservatives. It’s the gold standard of American rotisserie chicken. Be careful trying to find one during peak hours -- we recommend going at odd times to avoid waiting in line, or worse: going home with a goose egg instead of a chicken.
Traif