Trying Everything Out

On our first day in the kitchen, we began to prepare our three different possible products. The first was Chicken Meatloaf. The second product was Buffalo Chicken Poppers. The third product was Flaming Hot Chicken Cheese Sticks. We quickly ran into an issue while grinding the chicken for our products. The grinder was not capable of grinding the whole chicken breast. As a result, we used a larger grinder and also cut the chicken into pieces before running it through the grinder. Once we achieved a consistent chicken formulation, we combined the additional ingredients for each of the products. Once prepared, the meatloaf was cooked at 350 F for 30 minutes. After cooking the meatloaf, we noticed that the color was yellow and not appealing. We tried changing this color by adding food coloring to the ingredients to give the product a brown appearance. This did not work. As the meatloaf was cooking we began preparing the Buffalo Chicken Poppers. For this product, the ground chicken was pre-cooked before adding it with the other ingredients. We cooked this product at 500 F for 4 minutes. The original recipe called for 8 minutes of cook time, but due to the breading being thicker they cooked much quicker. When tasting the product, we found that the ratio of breading to meat was too high. After cooking these two products, we began preparing our final product. For this product, we chose to prepare it two different ways. One way we added precooked chicken to the melted cheese and the other we added raw chicken to the melted cheese. We then chilled the cheese and chicken formulation to allow it to solidify. These combined products were then sliced into strips, battered, and fried. We battered a few of these chicken cheese sticks with traditional breadcrumbs and the others with Flaming Hot Cheetos. As a group we decided that the Flaming Hot Cheetos added more flavor and eye appeal. After making this product, as a group we decided that the Flaming Hot Chicken Cheese Sticks were our favorite product and chose this as our product that we will develop for this project.