Making chicken nuggets from scratch

One of my favourite foods, homemade with excellent ingredients… Should be a winner, right? (Nope.)

For someone who thinks and reads about food as much as I do, and who cooks as much as I do, you might think that I’m a bit of a foodie and have a sophisticated palate. The truth: my palate is not very sophisticated at all, and I’ve learnt in the past couple of years that what I genuinely appreciate and enjoy are good quality ingredients cooked well. But before I reached this point of appreciating good food, I had another love — chicken nuggets. 

What’s not to love about chicken nuggets? They’re salty, crispy, and easy to chew, with none of the other fiddly bits of chicken like bones. I remember the joy in getting lunch order from the canteen at primary school, the six crumbed nuggets with the little packet of tomato sauce that would come in the paper bag that the lunch monitor would distribute*. And the nuggets from Macca’s, with the sweet and sour sauce, where in each six pack there would be nuggets with different textures and some were always a bit silkier than the others. Silkier is probably not the right word (and this is why I’m not a professional food writer). But you know — some were a bit smoother and there was always the one that was a bit less smooth and more dry. (I would really appreciate it at this point if there is anyone else out there who was also a Macca’s nugget enthusiast in Australia in the 1990s and 2000s who can confirm my texture memories). Nuggets and I go way back. The only thing better were chicken chipees, which were basically nuggets but shaped like chips (I found this ad from 1995 for chicken chipees which is AMAZING. I’m convinced that 90s Australia was a golden age of television advertising).

But then I kind of broke up with chicken nuggets. I read Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser and Salt Sugar Fat by Michael Moss that started the journey into this current food obsession. Then I read books like Meathooked by Marta Zaraska, The Meat Racket by Christopher Leonard, and Big Chicken by Maryn McKenna which narrowed the focus onto just meat and chicken. Plus there was all the reading and listening I was doing about ultraprocessed foods that led me to trying to reduce how much UPF we were consuming. All of that kind of ruined nuggets for me — the breaded chicken version of learning how the sausage was made. I still loved small, convenient, easy to chew, breaded chunks of chicken, though. So the answer to still eating nuggets while avoiding UPF and industrial agriculture was to make my own.

I’d made chicken nuggets years before, but that involved chopping chicken breast into nugget-sized chunks and then breading and baking them — they were fine, but the texture was still too chicken-y and not nugget-y enough. I wanted nugget-y, and for that, I needed ground chicken. So it was with much delight that I learnt late last year that Pasturebird was going to start selling ground chicken. It meant that I could attempt making chicken nuggets with chicken that I liked and knew tasted good, and I didn’t have to grind my own chicken (we actually have a meat grinder that we picked up at a garage sale because I was planning on grinding my own chicken to make nuggets once the kitchen reno was complete. I might never do this now). 

A few weeks ago, the day finally came. I had my ground chicken. I’d read a couple of recipes and I picked the one that I was going to follow. I had the spices, the bread, the eggs, the milk, the breadcrumbs (in both recipes I read, you needed to add milk and bread to the nugget mixture. This was unexpected but hey, I was a total nugget-making novice so who was I to argue with two recipes telling me to dissolve slices of bread in milk and mixing that with the chicken?). I set up my nugget-making stations. 

An hour and a half later, they came out of the oven and I had a huge batch of chicken nuggets, beautifully golden brown and perfectly nugget-shaped. The verdict? ‘I like the ones from the supermarket better.’ Like a dagger through the heart! Zero appreciation for the time and effort in sourcing ingredients and making the damn things. The worst part was that I agreed with her. They were just… fine. Maybe even a little less than fine. I will say that they were more satiating than the nuggets you get from the supermarket or from Macca’s. And the texture was mostly there. But it was just… eh. Charlie ate about three, Tilly ate one, and then the rest of that huge batch of nuggets was consumed by me and my husband over the next few days. 

This nugget experience was a lesson in recipes, I think. I’m not sure why I didn’t love them. I knew they would be different from the ones from supermarkets and fast food chains, but I was using very good chicken, bread, milk, eggs, and spices. Every ingredient that went into those nuggets were ingredients that we regularly buy and love, and the process was not that different to other breaded and baked things that I make and enjoy (like arancini and chicken schnitzels). But somehow, these just did not hit the mark. 

I’m not giving up just yet, though. I’ll get more ground chicken and try another recipe. Maybe it was the spices. Maybe it was the kind of bread that was used. Can I skip the bread and milk bit and just mix the ground chicken with different/less/more spices and then do the dredging/breading process? Whatever will happen then? Why was there milk and bread mixed in with the chicken in the first place?! 

Oi. This whole reducing UPF thing is proving trickier than I anticipated when it comes to nuggets. But surely, surely, there must be a way. 

*There is so much Australian English and context here that I can’t even translate this with footnotes per word. Just trust that the processed, breaded chicken experiences of my childhood were great.