2 tips for buying and cooking chicken

Delicious and healthy, chicken is one of the best meats to add to your regular diet. Here are some tips for properly buying and cooking chicken:

• Light colouring aside, the truth is that lean chicken is much less fatty than lean pork.
• An 85-gram (three-ounce) serving of broiled, skinless chicken breast provides 140 calories, 27 from fat and only one-third of that fat is saturated.
• The same serving of roasted lean pork loin provides 275 calories, 189 of them from fat, half of it saturated.
• To top it off, the chicken serving has six more grams of protein than the same amount of pork.
• Try healthier ground chicken or turkey. Whenever you find yourself reaching for a package of ground meat, switch over to the poultry section instead and pick up some ground chicken, ground turkey or even some soy crumbles.
• All of them work just as well as ground beef for meatballs, meat loaf or chili. However, this simple substitution can cut more than 30 percent of the calories and at least half of the fat and saturated fat in an 85-gram (three-ounce) serving.
• When it's smothered in a zesty tomato sauce or flavoured with seasonings, you'll never be able to tell the difference.
• If you are feeling a little gun-shy about abandoning the beef, use half turkey and half lean beef, or half soy crumbles and half beef.

• Roast a chicken breast down. Cooked in the traditional way with breast side up, the white meat of a chicken is dry and worn out by the time the dark meat is done, but most cookbooks don't tell you what to do about it.
• Try flipping the bird over, as amateur (and admired) cook Laure Dixon does. Chicken cooked with its backside up and breast down produces meat that is moist and tender throughout.
• One small piece of special but inexpensive equipment, a V-rack, is helpful for the inverted roasting.
• Without that rack, you can prop up the chicken on a long cylinder of rolled-up aluminum foil.
• Roast in a preheated 200°C (400°F) oven until a meat thermometer inserted into the thickest part of the thigh reads 80°C (175°F).
• Another way to roast a chicken, favoured by some cooks in the Provence region of France, is to set it on one kilogram (two pounds) of garlic cloves (yes!) and roast as above.
• A more modest version calls for 40 cloves to be inserted into the cavity before roasting. Either way, the cooking makes the garlic much milder, and those who enjoy it can eat the cloves like a vegetable.

It's pretty clear that chicken and turkey are healthier than red meats, and you can substitute them in many meals. Try it out the next time you have a dinner party -- see if your friends notice the difference.

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