Kid’s food no more – how chefs are redefining the chicken nugget

Chicken nuggets are something you buy for your picky four-year-old, not something you would expect on a fine dining menu, right? Wrong, according to several chefs interviewed by Food and Wine Magazine. These chefs use refined techniques to create nostalgic nuggets that they feel are worthy of a place on a fine dining menu.

Traditional nuggets are the very definition of ultra-processed foods, and while the chef-driven nuggets don’t have any unpronounceable ingredients, they do involve a lot of processing – mainly the mechanical kind. Chefs are either grinding or pureeing various chicken parts to make a mixture that is then either shaped by piping or, in the case of the dino nuggets from Andrew Moorman, chef de cuisine at New Orleans’ Turkey and the Wolf, cooked sous vide and spread out onto a tray to be frozen then cut into dinosaur shapes.

The nuggets appeal to people through nostalgia or a sense of playfulness, although the chefs are serious about how they serve these bite-size offerings. Some garnish with fancy items like caviar or truffle, or serve them with special dipping sauces. While you might think that nuggets would be a cost-effective menu item, most of the chefs interviewed said they lost money on them. “It’s a loss-leader for us,” says chef Brandon Cavazos of Oakland, California-based Burdell restaurant. “We really love these nuggets, and the caviar is some of the best I’ve ever tried, so we really want people to eat them.”