Following up on how to butcher a whole chicken (and save £££) when you butterfly a chicken breast it will cook twice as fast because of the larger surface area and it’s not as thick.
It’s a good skill to know if you ever want to stuff a chicken breast and it generally looks nicer on a plate.
It’s pretty simple and gets a lot easier with practise.
Where to make the incision
Firstly where to actually cut the breast, the incision will be made on the outside of the breast, if you’re unsure which is the outer side look at the underside of the breast, where in inner fillet is (or was if you’ve removed it) is the inner side, so the opposite side to that one.
Making the Cut
Slice into the side of the breast about 3/5’s of the way in, then open the breast up and slice down the centre to open it out fully.
Stuff, cook, marinade etc
As you can see this gives a lot more surface area so marinades get more absorption, it’s also good for stuffing as it creates a pocket.
Now to work on the legs, start by taking one leg, if you look at the drumstick you should see some white cartilage that goes round the top of the drumstick in the traditional rounded drumstick shape.
Take your knife and gently score along this line until you hit a bone, then it’s time to get popping again, feel for the joint connection in between the thigh and drumstick and pop it out of place, then continue to slice where the bone was previously obstructing .
The oyster is supposedly the most tasty part of the chicken, its located inside the thigh and is only about the size on the end of your thumb, you can usually just gently tear it out with your hands but use a knife if you’ve not done it before.
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.
This is fairly similar to the legs, firs cut around the joint to expose the joint bone, again pop it out of place and cut through where to bone was obstructing.
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.
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.
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!
Recipes and Stuff 