Crushed bones and cartilage, sugar, additives, palm oil ... The nuggets, which benefit from the good graces of chicken aficionados who are the French, hide an unappealing reality. The origin of chickens, raised in batteries abroad, and their questionable composition are all arguments to start cooking your nuggets yourself.

Adored by children, an asset of parents who are not very cooks, the nugget, if it is not the finest delicacies, nevertheless enjoys a popularity rating that no spinach can match. But does this chicken nugget, breaded and fried, really deserve the honors that are awarded to it? The answer is neither yes nor no, but: it all depends on their composition.

Fat, salt, sugar

With 28 kg per year, and per capita, chicken is the only meat whose consumption has been constantly increasing since the 1990s. Now, if the Frenchman is such a big eater of chicken, perhaps he wants to know what 'he really has on his plate. Let him be ready: in the case of the sacrosanct nuggets, the nutritional labels very often follow the trifling little appetizing: fat, salt, sugar.

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Most of the nugget brands found in the supermarket chain also sit on the bench for bad students. On average, for 100 g of nuggets, their product contains 11 g of fat, 17 g of fast carbohydrates, 2 g of salt, and a mysterious mixture called "preparation based on chicken meat treated in reconstituted cured meat". On this point, Laurent Mariotte enlightens us: this enigmatic formula designates nothing less than battery chicken from which we took the skin, the bones, the cartilage, and which we mixed.

None of these materials come from chickens raised outdoors. What is more, most of the time, poultry come from farms in Belgium, the Netherlands, Poland, Ukraine, or even Germany. The nugget dough is none other than water-soaked meat and artificially added additives to increase weight.

The quality alternative: the homemade nugget

If, by using an irreproachable composition, some brands have succeeded, the best solution to be sure of eating healthy (and without palm oil) is still to cook yourself. Only eggs, onions, cheese spread, breadcrumbs, spices, condiments and chicken breasts will suffice ... And a good reflex: that of always choosing a chicken raised in France, and outdoors.

>> Find the recipe for Laurent Mariotte's homemade nuggets