Chicken Breast Rings

I was in the supermarket the other day when these edible food items caught my eye in the freezer case.  Yummy Chicken Breast Rings.  Made by Canadian frozen food company Maxi Canada, they are chopped chicken breast and "rib meat," formed into rings, then coated with a seasoned crispy breading ready to cook and eat.

Wow.  How much further removed can a food be from its natural form?  There's no way I could resist buying a box of them.

Each ring weighs one ounce, and has 60 calories (about a third of which are from fat.)  Each ring also contains 200 mg of Omega-3 fatty acids, which was kind of a "WTF" sort of thing until I checked the ingredients and found that the breading contained flax meal.  The actual calories count of the rings I tried was probably a bit higher, because I fried them in a little peanut oil, turning them halfway through to brown both sides.

I have to admit, they're pretty tasty.  The outside is crunchy and flavorful, with a gentle amount of spiciness and a tiny bit too much salt.  Inside, they're soft but not spongy and obviously made of white meat chicken (the ingredient panel lists skinless chicken breast with rib meat as the primary ingredient.)  They're quite snackable even if they are a rather strange way to serve chicken.

You know what would be kind of cool?  Frying up a bunch of these and a bunch of those ready-to-cook onion rings, then tumbling them together in a bowl so you couldn't tell just by looking which ones were which.

Link:

Maxi Canada's website.  They make a bunch of other interestingly-shaped chicken bits as well.

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