Author: SamTheChef

How to remove the breasts from a whole chicken

Now we’re left with the main cavity with the breasts attached.

Optional, remove the skink

First (unless you want to leave it on) remove the skin by starting pulling it up and the top/sides and gently glide the knife along where it’s still attached to the breast, the knife should do all the work for you be sure to apply a very small amount of pressure as you cut, too much with cut through the breasts.

Now to take the breasts off, start by feeling the centre to find the spine and slice from the top as close as you can to the bone cutting down the side of the breast.

Continue cutting round the bottom to remove the breast.

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How to remove the legs from a whole chicken

First things first, lets get the legs off!

Start by pulling the legs to the side then trim through the skin so you can see the flesh underneath.

No you need to pop out the bone joining the leg, pull the leg back and out the the left (or right, depending which leg you are removing) and you should hear or feel it pop out of place.

Now simply slice through where the joint was previously blocking the knife from cutting and you have a whole leg(s) with thigh attached.

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Save more than £10 on ingredients by learning how to butcher a chicken

I thought given the current climate (lockdown etc.) this would be a handy post as it gets full use from a whole chicken.

If you don’t already know how to, you always should rather than buying it pre cut as you can save a bunch and it’s a handy skill to know!

By buying a whole chicken and cutting it apart yourself you end up with; 2 breasts, 2 fillets, 2 thighs, 2 drumsticks, 2 wings, 2 oysters (inner thigh) and a chicken carcass you can use to make a lovely stock.

At the time of writing a medium chicken (1.3-1.5kg) costs around £2.95 so you can already see the savings.

I’ve split it up into sections, so just click the relevant link.

Let’s get to it!

Sections

You can remove the meat from the wing, but its hardly worth it, i would just cook them as wings to throw them in a stock.

You can also cut the meat in the same way you would removing the bone from the tight on the drumstick to either remove the meat or make a chicken lollipop looking thing.

Costing

So i’ve done this with a large chicken, it weighed about 1.65kg and cost me £3.70

For the sake of costing, i separated the whole chicken into 3 parts, first the 2 breasts with the inner fillet removed. Then i took the remaining meat (thighs, drumsticks, fillets and what else i could salvage from the remains) and diced it all up. I then used the remains (carass, skin, wings and any offcuts) to make a stock which i froze into stock cubes, which i can tell you are about 2-3x more powerful than what you’d get from a shop.

2 breasts from a large chicken (1.65kg) with the inner fillets removed

As you can see here the 2 breasts with the fillets removed have a combined weight of 522g.

Todays price (at tesco) for chicken breasts is £5.85/kg so that’s £3.05 worth of chicken breast.

diced chicken meat (2 thighs, 2 drumsticks, 2 inner fillets, 2 oysters and a little bit scraped from the carcass

The remaining meat that i diced up came to a total weight of 486g, it’s mainly brown meat which is generally better for dishes using diced meat (curries etc.)

The cost of diced chicken breast is the same as above (£5.85/kg) so i’ve reduced it a bit as thighs and drumsticks are cheaper, however the meat being removed from the bones adds a value, anyway lets say its about £4/kg.

That makes the diced meats value £1.94 making the total value around £5.

I boiled the rest up (bones, skins, carcass) with some onion and carrot and reduced it down to about 700ml of pretty potent chicken stock which i froze in ice cube trays and keep in the freezer in a bag.

As you can see, they weigh 3x more than a regular Oxo cube, are 100% homemade and generally have a stronger and more concentrated flavour.

So i got 18 stock cubes from the chicken remains which is the equivalent of 56 Oxo cubes which based on today’s price would cost you £7!

Added onto the value of the meat that comes to £13 worth of ingredients for a mere £2.95!

Amazing how much you can save when you do things yourself!

Syrup mug cake recipe

I only discovered these things a while ago and they’re great!

With the use of a microwave these mug cakes take a grand total of about 4-5 minutes to make.

To the recipe!

Ingredients

  • 1 egg
  • 50g butter
  • 30g caster sugar
  • 50g self raising flour
  • 4-8 tbsp golden syrup

Equipment

  • A mug
  • Small mixing bowl
  • Scales
  • Wooden spoon
  • Microwave

Prep and cooking (5 minutes)

  1. Weigh the butter and sugar in a mixing bowl and beat with a wooden spoon until pale and creamy.
  2. Add the egg and beat well until combined with the butter and sugar.
  3. Sift the flour (if you have a sieve) and mix well until you have a nice cake batter, add 2-4tbsp of golden syrup and mix well. If it’s really (too) thick add a little milk.
  4. Rub a little butter or oil around the inside of the mug the put another 2-4 tbsp of golden syrup in the bottom of the mug.
  5. Fill the mug with the cake batter, it should be somewhere around 1/3 full.
  6. This part depends on your microwave because let’s face it, they’re all different. I find it usually takes about a minute and a half on full power (850w) but you’ll have to experiment.
  7. When it’s done go round the edges with a knife or pallet knife and turn it out onto a plate.
  8. Enjoy!

Costing

61p per cake

As you can see the most costly part is the butter, if you substitute this for a plant/oil based spread it can cut the cost to as little as 41p per cake.

Nutrition

Nutritional values per cake, as you can see it packs quite a calorific punch🤛.

Here the nutrition info per cake if you’re using a plant/oil spread instead of butter, not much budge though it’s about 20kcal less than butter, the biggest difference is the amount of fat but that only just over a gram.

More recipes soon!

Equipment guide- knives: Chefs knife

As the name suggests, the go to tool for a chef that needs a knife. Here’s a short guide about this type of blade including,

  • What a chefs knife is
  • What it’s used for
  • What it’s made of
  • How to hold it
  • Sharpening

What is it?

Thought not my favourite general use blade I find having a large chefs knife (20cm) can be a handy thing to have at times, some go as big as 30cm (good for cakes or pies).

Also known as a cooks knife, this tool was first created mainly for the purpose of disjointing and cutting up large joints of beef, but these days it’s (probably) the most commonly used knife is western kitchens/cooking.

The western version of the chefs/cooks knife comes mainly in 2 forms;

The French style blade; which has a longer flat edge and then curves up to the tip nearer the end of the blade, like walking along a path and having a steep hill halfway along, or,

The German style blade; which is more of one big curve up to the tip of the blade, like walking along a path that is a continuous but not so steep hill.

The most common size I know of is about 18-20cm but they can vary from 14cm all the way up to 36cm, big! The width of the blade tends to be around 3-4 inches at the large end (where the handle is).

The Japanese version of a western chefs/cooks knife is called a gyuto, which apparently literally translates to ‘beef knife’.

A Chinese chefs knife on the other hand is completely different! If you saw one you would probably think that it’s a meat cleaver, though the blades are much thinner.

A santoku knife (possibly my favourite) is also a Japanese style chef/cooks knife. It’s similar in size and appearance, but usually a bit smaller (12-16cm) and blade is completely straight like a ruler (or a cleaver) and has a curve on the top, rather than the sharp edge of the blade. It’s also more lightweight, and tends to be much sharper.

A chefs knife is for general all purpose use, including;

  • Slicing
  • Dicing
  • Mincing
  • Vegetables
  • Meat
  • Fish
  • Light butchery, can come in handy for large joints of meat

What are they made of

Most commonly they’ll be made from stainless steel or carbon steel but they also come as ceramic or various other grades or mixtures (laminated), I’ve got a santoku style one that made of molybdenum steel it’s incredibly light and thin.

Generally speaking carbon steel will be easier to sharpen and should stay sharper longer, but can be prone to rusting and staining so watch out how you clean it and store it, they require quite a bit of care if you want it to last.

Good old stainless steel is hardy stuff and will last for years, but comes in many forms, as far as I know there are literally 100s (1000s) of types of stainless steel. The drawbacks are, especially with low grades of stainless steel, that it won’t hold a sharp edge for very long so will need sharpening more often which in turn wares the blade down faster.

High grades of stainless steel (such as the one I mentioned above) can actually work more effectively that carbon steel, but as you’d expect it tends to be more expensive.

Laminated knives are layered layers of different metals, usually a mixture of carbon and stainless steels, trying to make the best use of metals at each part of the knife.

A ceramic blade is quite an interesting thing, they are completely non reactive, which is nice as it will ensure no metaly taste will transfer to the food (I.e. rust) and also they won’t rust or discolour (it’s ceramic). They hold a sharp edge extremely well but the drawback here is that they require specialist equipment for sharpening, which is fine if you have time to go out the way to get it sharpened. Also it is ceramic, so it can get chipped or break if dropped.

How to hold it

Is up to you really, but generally the post effective way to hold it is with your index finger and thumb gripping the base of the blade, with the handle resting in your palm.

Sharpening

Click here to see how to sharpen knives.

Bbq cider pulled pork

Something that’s certainly gotten more popular in recent years, I like using cider for the apple flavour with a bit of bbq sauce to finish it off.

This method uses a slow cooker, if you don’t have one just use an ovenproof dish with a lid/tinfoil and the oven on about 110°c.

Ingredients (makes about 2kg of pulled pork)

  • About 2.5kg of pork shoulder
  • 1-2 litres of cider (I just use cheap stuff from Tesco/Asda)
  • 200-300g bbq sauce
  • Salt and pepper

Prep and cooking (8-15 hours)

  1. Cut the pork into smaller chunks, about 200-300g each and put it in the slow cooker.
  2. Cover the pork with salt and pepper (don’t overdo it with the salt)
  3. Pour in the cider until the pork is about 3/4 covered. Put the cooker on low and leave for 8-15 hours.
  4. When it’s ready take it out of the cooker into a large bowl or roasting pan/plastic tub. Let it cool down for 5-10 minutes and remove any liquid from the slow cooker into measuring jug, or, put it in saucepan and put it on a high heat to boil (and reduce).
  5. If reducing the liquid remember to keep an eye on it and remove from the heat when done. Return to the pork and remove all the fat, it should be easy enough to tear with your hands, if it’s still hot some vinyl/food gloves come in handy.
  6. Now get 2 forks, or some meat claws (eBay or amazon), and pull the pork, it should easily come apart into strands, if not it needs more cooking, bear in mind the more meat you use in the same pot the longer it will need to cook.
  7. Now put the pulled meat back into the slow cooker and add the bbq sauce, mix well and add the stock.
  8. Put the slow cooker on high and cook for 15-30 minutes.
  9. Perfect in a bun with a load of fresh coleslaw on top 👌🏻

Costing

The above recipe costs a total of about £6 and makes 7-10 portions, so somewhere between 50-80p per serving, a lot cheap than you’d pay for it premade!

Nutrition

Here’s the nutrition info per 100g

More recipes soon!