With rapid economic growth and globalisation of the food industry in Asian countries, including South Korea, meat production and consumption have increased remarkably in recent years. Accordingly, an approximate five-fold increase in per capita chicken meat consumption was reported during the last four decades in Korea ( Jayasena et al., 2013). This increasing demand for chicken meat is mainly fulfilled by a few fast-growing commercial broiler (CB) strains (Choe et al., 2010), with little contribution from the slow-growing indigenous chicken breed known as the Korean native chicken (KNC). Because of their unique flavour and texture, KNCs are highly preferred to CBs by Korean consumers (Jayasena et al., 2013). In addition to these unique characteristics, these indigenous chickens contain considerable amounts of certain endogenous bioactive compounds such as carnosine and anserine (Jung et al., 2013); these can be considered additional nutritional quality factors.