This Popular Pizza Chain's Chicken May Not Be 100% Authentic

The ingredients in a pizza are usually self-explanatory. While any pizza place might have a secret recipe for the sauce or a special way they make its crust, it's the toppings that are easiest to figure out. If you want onion on a pizza, they put onion on it. That's the whole ingredient. If you want bacon, they put bacon on it. And if you want chicken, you'd expect to get pieces of chicken. But that's not entirely true. When you order chicken on your Domino's pizza, it is not 100% pure chicken. It's not the same as chopping up a chicken breast and adding it to your homemade pizza.

In its list of ingredients, Domino's has two types of chicken toppings: Grilled chicken and barbecued chicken with sauce. For grilled chicken, the ingredients include chicken, seasonings, and modified food starch. Made from tapioca, corn, rice, potato, and other sources, food starch is often added to processed chicken to maintain texture. 

You may have noticed that the chicken you cook at home becomes tender and falls apart over time, which is how pulled or shredded chicken is made. But fast food chicken has a consistency unlike any chicken you can make yourself. It's almost gelatinous. This texture is due to the starches, which give it a boost so it holds up during packaging, shipping, and preparation.

Let's go back to those seasonings for a moment. The grilled chicken, the simplest kind you might expect to be "just" chicken, contains a fairly extensive list of ingredients beyond the starch. The meat itself is boneless, skinless chicken breast and rib meat. So far, so good. However, the ingredient list also includes water and various seasonings made with yeast extract, onion, garlic, and chicken flavor. Additionally, there are flavor enhancers and several dairy ingredients, such as whey, buttermilk powder, sodium caseinate, and lipolyzed butter oil. If you have a dairy allergy, keep that in mind.

If you opt for BBQ chicken pizza, the sauce obviously has many seasonings. But the chicken itself is different from the grilled chicken. This one contains chicken, but also water and isolated soy protein, which is used as a binder, emulsifier, and protein replacement. If you don't have a soy allergy, it's not a bad form of protein, but it's not chicken. Other ingredients include spices, hickory liquid smoke, torula yeast (used as a flavor enhancer), and lemon juice concentrate.

For a fast food chain as widespread as Domino's, consistency in ingredients is essential. Processed chicken is one way restaurants can give their customers a predictable and reliable product. Think of a Chicken McNugget. No matter where you go, it's always the same, but it's not like any chicken you'd make at home. The processing is needed for consistency and reliability in taste and texture. That's necessarily negative, but it does mean processed chicken contains more ingredients than you might expect from a product labeled simply as chicken.