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How to: Deal with a chicken.
Buying a pack of two chicken breasts will cost you the same as buying a whole chicken, so here is a thread for those of you who would be a little daunted if you were faced with a whole chicken.
Yow will need A large saucepan, this must be big enough to fit the bones and some water into. A sharp knife you only really need the one but a heavy cleaver will come in useful. An onion, carrot and some herbs, anything you have will be good but they are not totally necessary.
Roughly cut up the vegetables, no need to peel them, put them into your pot, but leave out any herbs that you may be using.
with the chicken facing to wards you, pull the leg, down and away from the body, cut through the flap of skin.
hold the leg in one hand and the body in the other, if you bend the leg down far enough you will hear a pop, this is the joint coming loose,
After this pop you can cut between the bones and remove the leg, try to keep the knife as close to the body as possible. Repeat this on both sides.
Turn the chicken round, and feel along the middle of the breasts for the breastbone, slide your knife down next to this and keeping it as close to the bone as possible cut off the breasts.
Removing the wings is exactly the same procedure as the legs.
Cut the remaining bones in half, so they will fit in your pot, this is easies if you Bend the backbone until it breaks and then cut through there.
You now have a cut up chicken. Depending on what you want to use your chicken for you have either finished or you can carry on, I normally carry on as the end products take up less room in the freezer.
To turn the legs into chicken cubes that you can use for curry or kebabs etc pull the skin off of the leg.
Turn the leg over so that the side that you have cut away from the chicken is up. cut alongside the thigh bone and then slide the knife underneath to remove it repeat the same procedure for the drumstick and then dice up the meat from these.
[Now you have a fully destroyed chicken!
As an idea what to do with these pieces;
The chicken in the pictures is large (2.3kg) so each breast will easily feed two I take the inner fillets out of the breasts and add these too the wings, this makes a portion of sticky wings/breast meat, or a stir fry etc. The diced legs get used for pie or curry and the breasts are often turned into stir fry.
There is of course one more thing to do.
The stock, put enough water into the pan to cover the bones, and bring this to the boil, as soon as it boils turn it down and skim off any scum that comes to the surface. After it has stopped producing scum, add any herbs that you like and cook for about 2 hours.
Let the stock cool, and take out the bones, take all the meat off of the bones and put to one side, on your first attempt there will be lots of meat left, but as you get better there will be less and less. Throw all the bones away. You now have an almost made chicken soup! add some cut up vegetables and the chicken pieces and there is another meal.
So in short one chicken costing £4.50 has just made 8 meals, obviously if you don't want that much chicken just buy a smaller one.
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Originally Posted by Sigurd
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