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

• Removing the legs
• Removing the wings
• Removing the breasts
• Removing inner fillets from chicken breasts
• Removing the oyster from the thigh
• Separating the leg into a thigh and a drumstick
• Removing the skin & trimming the thigh
• Removing the bone from the thigh

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.

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.

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!