The cooking tips & tricks thread

[knapplc]

Butchering a Whole Chicken

There are tons of ways to cut up a whole chicken. You can end up with your standard eight parts (2 wings, 2 breasts, 2 thighs & 2 legs) or you can mix and match pieces and sizes. These parts of the chicken cook differently, and you'll want to gauge your cuts to how you're going to cook your chicken.

There are 200 websites out there describing how to butcher a chicken so I'm not going to get into too much detail here. It's pretty easy and gets easier with practice.

 

Choose a knife that best fits your hand, but will also let you get into the joints with precision. By that I mean, don't use a giant 10" butcher knife, but don't use a paring knife, either. A medium sized, sharp knife that you can manipulate easily and precisely is what you want.

 

I cut the thigh/leg quarters off first by slicing the fatty skin between the thigh & breast until I can just about lay the thigh/leg down flat on the board. From there I find the joint, stick the point of my knife in the joint & twist to separate. Sever the rest, then I pinch the back side of the leg/thigh (where the kneecap would be if it were a human leg) to find the joint. Another small cut into that skin shows where the joint is, then the end of the knife goes in that, twist to separate, and finish by cutting it as evenly as possible.

 

Next I remove the wings by twisting the wing to find the joint, then again with the tip of the knife into the joint to separate, but I tend to cut a knob of meat out of the lower breast to go onto the wing "drumstick" so it has some bite to it. Kinda like the first picture below, but a bit more meat.

 

To separate the breast I turn the carcass so the neck cavity faces me, then I draw my knife straight down the middle of the breastbone. From there I go down the bone with the blade in successive cuts, peeling away the breast as I go. You have to be careful not to get any of the thin rib bones at the bottom, but it's pretty self-explanatory. Just slice & pull.

 

 

Your basic cut-up chicken looks like this:



You've got your two legs, thighs, breasts & wings, and you've got your back and the back skin. This person pulled the tenderloin off the inside of the breast, and I do that when I'm frying chicken because it's a pretty handy size of white meat for kiddos, basically just a natural Chicken Finger. This person left the nibs on the ends of the wings, but nobody eats those, so I cut them off. The leg quarters are whole here, but I never leave them whole because they're pretty much a pain to eat that way, and grilling whole quarters isn't any easier than separating the two.

 

Every part of this chicken is useful, and you should throw none of it away. Your breasts, legs, thighs & wings are good eating, obviously, but the back, skin & wing nibs are gold for broth & stock. I talked about this in the first post in this thread, and this is where the bulk of your chicken bits for broth come from. That's all flavor - don't waste flavor. In the website I got this pic from, the lady describes salting & frying the back skin as a treat, and you can do that if you want, but if you're just using the back for stock then don't bother peeling the skin off.

 

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One thing to note - you should treat raw chicken like having poison in your kitchen. DO NOT WASH RAW CHICKEN. In a conventional home kitchen there isn't enough separation between cooking areas & your sink to avoid overspray/splashing. Washing chicken splashes bacteria all over the place, and unless you're willing to wash your sink & about a two-foot radius around it with bleach every time you wash a chicken, it's not worth the contamination risk. Any bacteria on the chicken will die if cooked properly, so rather than washing your raw chicken, focus on proper cooking.

 

Speaking of contamination - you should always use different cutting boards for vegetables and meats. I have eight cutting boards at home, four for vegetables and four for meat. I differentiate between them by scorching the corner of the meat boards with flame. It's not pretty, I guess, but I'm not in my kitchen to look pretty, I'm there to make good food as safely as possible.

 

I get them at Sam's Club, and they're less than $10 apiece.

 

LINK

 

They're big enough to butcher a turkey, or to chop piles of vegetables at a time. Cutting boards are essential, cheap, and super-handy.

 

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Below is a picture of pretty much how I cut up chicken for frying, with the two legs on the left, the breast cut into four pieces next to that (the tenderloins are still on these breast pieces - you can see them at the bottom), the wings with the nibs removed, and the thighs on the bottom right. Those are all reasonably similar-sized pieces, so you won't have too much of a disparity in frying time there.

 

If you look at the sheer volume of that breast, and think about trying to fry that whole, you can imagine it'll take about twice as long as any other piece. The longer your chicken stays in that grease the more likely it is to get that nasty burnt-grease flavor, so cut it in half and speed up the process.

 

 

 

Speaking of Chicken Fingers, I make my own out of store-bought whole chicken breasts. I remove the skin (which is saved for broth), then just rip them into uneven, kinda ragged pieces of similar sizes. The breast rips apart pretty easily if you stick your thumb through the meat, and the ragged (as in, not precisely cut into strips) looks better than utilitarian straight-cut pieces.

[darkhorse85]

Good post knapp. I used to watch my mom and grandma butcher chickens when I was young. The only part of the process I took part in was lopping the heads off and defeathering them after dipping the carcass in boiling water. It's an interesting process start to finish.

[JJ Husker]

I hate to be a one trick pony in this thread but I just had a whole new world opened up to me tonight. Pork chops on the grill? BRINE THEM FIRST. Holy crap, best chops ever EVAR.

 

The brine-

4 cups water

1/4 cup kosher salt

1/4 cup brown sugar

Whatever seasoning/spices you like on your pork (I used Jim Baldridge seasoning-a North Platte product)

Disolve salt and sugar in the water, add seasonings, pour over pork chops in a ziplock bag, and put in fridge for 4-8 hours. May want to double bag or put it in a bowl in case it leaks.

Remove from brine, rinse, and pat dry.

Grill like normal.

+1 this post when you experience a whole new grilled pork chop.

[HUSKER FREAK]

I hate to be a one trick pony in this thread but I just had a whole new world opened up to me tonight. Pork chops on the grill? BRINE THEM FIRST. Holy crap, best chops ever EVAR.

 

The brine-

4 cups water

1/4 cup kosher salt

1/4 cup brown sugar

Whatever seasoning/spices you like on your pork (I used Jim Baldridge seasoning-a North Platte product)

Disolve salt and sugar in the water, add seasonings, pour over pork chops in a ziplock bag, and put in fridge for 4-8 hours. May want to double bag or put it in a bowl in case it leaks.

Remove from brine, rinse, and pat dry.

 

I do this with chicken as well. Turns out really good and moist.

Grill like normal.

+1 this post when you experience a whole new grilled pork chop.

[BigRedBuster]

Knapp, butchering a chicken is a lost art that I have watched my mother do probably a thousand times. Her family used to raise chickens and supply them to the Hastings hospital already butchered. (Many many many years ago). I have never seen anyone be able to do it as fast as she could. She would leave the tenderloins on the back though. That was one of my favorite pieces of fried chicken.

[knapplc]

Chicken butchering horror story - I was frying chicken for Father's Day, and in the middle of butchering Chicken #2, some cord-thing fell out as I was removing the breast. I chopped the breast into three pieces (easier frying) and put them in the bowl before paying any attention to this thing. I figured it was butcher paper or whatever that bag is they put the giblets in. Turns out that cord-thing was the tenderloin, so rotted & dessicated it was barely recognizable as meat.

 

I had already put 3/4 of that chicken into the bowl with the other cut-up chicken, meaning if there was any contamination, the other chicken was contaminated now, too. So I pitched two whole chickens & carcasses and had to scurry back to the store to get parts & pieces to fry up for dinner.

 

I scalded the hell out of my hands washing that crap off me, then I went over that butcher board, counter top & sink three times before I was satisfied that I'd cleaned it all properly. I was an unhappy camper.

[suh_fan93]

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