Why have Supermarkets stopped selling fresh chickens withs giblets? This is taking away our freedom of choice to buy. Asda and Tesco never have any fresh chickens with giblets. Surely this can't be down to the salmonella scare!!!?

My guess would be they are using them to make other things like chicken liver pate.

Hi Sharpy

You've made us all ponder this one! We speculate that some supermarkets stopped selling poultry with giblets because of the 'ick' factor and that fact that more squeamish customers might be put off when dealing with hearts, livers and gizzards. Sarahlee may well have a good point there too.

As there's a trend towards more 'real food', I wouldn't be at all surprised if supermarkets don't start selling chicken with giblets again.

Have you got a butcher to visit? Perhaps s/he could provide the giblets and an answer!

I asked this at a local slaughter house and they said it was mainly due to public demand and of course money.

You might also want to know that the giblets you got where not nesecarilly* from the same bird.

*please excuse my terrible spelling.

Even when you used to get giblets quite often there wouldn't be any liver. Which I always assumed had gone to making pate. Maybe nowadays the giblets might be used for cat food.

I was wondering about this very subject myself the other day because I remember as a child helping my mum to joint the chicken and the little bag that the giblets came in which were great for adding to the stock pot.

It seems unfair that the supermarkets should only cater for a proportion of their customers as they could sell chickens with or without giblets.

There was a time when Supermarkets would sell with or without! Even my local butcher only gets them already 'pulled' : Think it is a 'money maker' and they are used for other 'ready made' products - so perhaps we should blame the 'can't cook/won't cook' public/customer demand? Anyone else enjoyed the 'cooks treat' after using neck for making gravy - pulling/sucking the meat from the bones - very tasty. Gravy was great as well - as long has you did not use the kidney - that made bitter

i actually had some giblets with my chicken at the weekend from the butchers dont normally get them just with the turkey at xmas,was going to ask about the liver but after ishkas post wondering if its a kidney ,pretty sure its a liver its quite big and a kidneys is more round as in more kidney shaped anyway i froze it as i wanted to buy some chicken livers at some point to make pate so would i be able to use that one from giblets to make pate.
and my cat got the treat of the neck

One reason giblets are no longer sold with the chicken is that the giblets, especially the liver, have a much shorter shelf life than the chicken. For the local butcher this isn't so much of a problem, but in a supermarket once the bird is packaged, having the giblets also packaged inside the bird, reduces the best before or use before date for the whole thing.
This does not apply as much to frozen chickens, but it does also explain why there is not always a "full set" of giblets with the bird.

Not entirely true Rosti, the shelf life is uneffected as the giblets are in a sealed bag, this is law. and the reason or one of the reasons you very rarely get a full set is because the giblets are seperated at slaugher mechanically and then placed in bags and put back into the birds so the giblets you get may not be from the bird you have or contain everything you would expect.

They may be in a sealed bag, but they don't last as long as the chicken itself. so once they are shoved up the end of the chicken, bag and all, the shelf life is reduced. If the the chicken is sold on it's own, without the little bag of more perrishable innards then it will be able to be given a longer best before date and to sit on the shelf longer.

I know they are all seperated from their inner bits at slaughterhouse stage etc. I am just saying that the fresh giblets do not stay fresh as long, and some of the "bits" again have shorter lives than others, therefor a little bag of "selected bits" is popped back in the ones to be frozen as some of it has already passed it's best.

Thats what I said, though not as good due to copious quantities of home made John Smiths!

Ahh, that explains it then!
Never made John Smiths, I take it it turned out well?

I have to admit when I found a giblet bag with two hearts in it once it did thow me a little, but as I only ever used the giblets to make some stock for the gravy then gave the meat to my dog, it didn't really bother me exactly what was in there.

Chicken livers for making paté I always bought specially rather than collecting them one at a time from the giblet bag.

The John Smiths homebrew turned out a treat something that cannot be said for how I am feeling today.
I was offered in the pub 3 bottles of homemade gooseberry and damson wine something that chemically NASA would have a great interest in(it also kills 99% of all known germs and leaves your intestines spotless) I was about to take them when I looked round to see the whole pub frantically shaking their heads, I decided on the John Smiths instead.

I take it the chicken with two hearts had a Tardis waiting outside?
Never been taken with pate not because of what goes in it just that to me its not very nice, Brussels, chicken liver, Duck just don't like the stuff, and finaly how the hell did you get the little ' over the e in pate?

Oh you mean like this é or I can do è or even â ä à there are lots of them you can do with keyboard shortcuts, but it does sometimes depend on the windows you are running and the site you are using. I am thinking of becoming Rostï or Rostî.

To do the é I just hold down the e while typing 130 on the numerical keyboard.

If the double hearted chicken had had a Tardis waiting outside do you think I would still be here?

Gooseberry and damson wine eh? Even sounds lethal.
I never made damson, prefer a really light goosberry one, very much like a Riesling or Chablis, grew the gooseberries in the garden too. They say that it develops it's own sparkle the following year at flowering time, but I never found that. Whereas the pink champagne I made using rhubarb had rather too much fizz and popped its corks all over me one ver hot night.

eeeeeeeeee130 eeeeeeeeee130 are you winding me up?

oops you hold down "Alt" then type e130 sorry, just looked at what I said earlier, LOL
sorry sorry sorry