Should You Rinse Canned Chicken Before Eating It?

Using canned chicken is a great way to add extra protein to a quick meal, and like fresh chicken, there is a right way to prepare it. It might be easier to simply crack open the can, drain the juice, and toss it into your recipe, but you should be rinsing it before doing anything else. While canned chicken may be perfectly safe to eat without rinsing, including this step in your preparation process can make or break your meal.

Rinsing your canned chicken after draining it helps one of the most important aspects of any meal: the flavor. The liquid that canned chicken is stored in is filled with preservatives that prolong the chicken's shelf life, but it's not meant to serve as a marinade. While a common myth about canned foods is that the water inside is unhealthy, canning liquid can leave an overly salty taste. There can also often be a metallic flavor that comes as a result of being in the can for potentially a few years, so it doesn't hurt to rinse that away.

If you want to add canned chicken to a recipe, treat it the same as you would any canned product, like beans. Rinsing it off will remove any undesirable flavors and open the door to adding your own seasonings. If you still want a salty final dish, do yourself a favor and take the extra steps to rinse and season your chicken yourself.

While a quick rinse can significantly improve the quality of the meat, there are plenty of other upgrades for canned chicken you can employ. A little bit of seasoning goes a long way, and even though the chicken is already cooked, that doesn't mean it won't benefit from being gussied up before going into your recipe. In the same vein, marinating it for a short time can fill the chicken with enough flavor to make up for the time spent in the can.

Another way to spruce up your canned chicken is to steam it. The canning process can dry the chicken out after it's removed from the liquid in the can, so steaming it will infuse the chicken with some of the moisture that was lost. Canned chicken is pre-cooked before packaging, so it won't need to be steamed for long. Cook it in a steamer basket over a pot of boiling water until it's heated through to make sure that as much moisture as possible gets into the meat, but not for so long that it starts falling apart.

Given the inherent disadvantage of eating plain canned chicken compared to fresh chicken, give the canned stuff a chance by cooking it into something it works best in. You can use canned chicken for crispy chicken patties or some three-ingredient chicken nuggets, given that it's often already shredded.