How to cut a chicken quickly and efficiently

2024 Author: Isabella Gilson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:14

Of course, in today's world there is no need to hunt animals or farm animals. All the extraction of food comes down to going to the supermarket. But there you can already buy everything that your heart desires, already lovingly divided into pieces and packaged. But what if you want to treat yourself to a delicious chicken, but the budget is limited? Learn how to properly butcher your own chicken.

Where to start?

Of course, from a trip to the store. First, the chicken must be selected. Standing at the windows, it is better to turn your attention to chilled products. It is stored for 5 days, but the taste and useful properties in the carcass are better preserved. Moreover, chilled poultry is more suitable for preparing second courses and soups.

Proper gutting

So how do you carve a chicken? Yes, very easy! The main thing is to have a cutting board and a sharp knife at hand.

Traditionally, the carcass is divided into an even number of parts. There may be fewer of them, and they will be larger, or more, and then, accordingly, the parts will be small. The size of the pieces dictates how they are cooked. So let's get started.

The first thing to start with butchering a bird is washing it with running water and removing the remaining feathers. The water temperature can be any that is comfortable for the hands. If the carcass has legs, which are also dirty, then the first thing they do is get rid of them as the most contaminated part. With some luck, the paws will remain clean, then they will go for jelly or broth.

Next, the knife is inserted into the anus of the chicken carcass, and the carcass is cut along the abdomen. You can not make sudden movements with a knife, so as not to pierce the rectum of the carcass and not throw it out later.

The legs separate at the joint.

To make it easier to get the offal, you need to expand the cut made earlier in both directions.

All unnecessary is removed, but special attention should be paid to the gallbladder. It should not be hit with a knife, because if it spills, the meat will be bitter. You can distinguish the gallbladder from everything else by its green-yellow color.

You need to go through the carcass with a knife from the inside and, if necessary, make a few more cuts to make it easier to remove the offal.

Shake out the entire contents of the chicken into a deep dish.

The gut holding the rest is cut off. To do this, the knife is threaded as far as possible. Now you need to get those insides that are suitable for food - the heart, ventricle, liver. The rest is thrown away. We figured out the gutting, now we figure out how to cut the chicken into portions.

Dividing the carcass into pieces

This method of cutting is good if the meat is then stewed or baked. All you need is the same asevisceration, plus kitchen scissors.

It doesn't matter if you have experience cutting chicken or not at all. Even a child can handle it, because the set of actions is minimal. How to cut a chicken into pieces, anyone will understand.

First cut off the legs. To cut them off, you need to cut the skin between the thighs and the body of the bird. Next, the leg must be pulled to the side and twist the joint. Now it will be very easy to cut off the ham itself and divide it into a drumstick and a thigh.

Wings are cut off according to the same principle: first, the wing is taken to the side, and then the joint is twisted. Since the end parts of the wings are unsuitable for food, they are used in the same way as the paws - for broth.

The breast and back are divided. The chicken is placed on its back and cut along the sides with scissors. With this method of cutting, ribs are cut through, and this is normal.

The separated breast is placed skin side down on a cutting board and cut in half vertically. In this case, you need to apply enough effort, because it is difficult to cut through the cartilage.

You end up with 8 pieces of chicken: two breast halves, two wings, two thighs, two drumsticks.

Cutting chicken for roll

How to cut a chicken for a roll? To do this, you will have to remove all the bones.

The chicken carcass is placed on a cutting board. The first incision is made in the middle of the breast, and the white meat is cut off the bones. Continuing to make sharp cuts, separate the column of the spine and the bones of the breast from the veins and meat. It is necessary to do everything as accurately and accurately as possible, because otherwise the meat will be very difficult to separate.from bones.

The phalanges of the wings are removed in the same way as tubular bones. The best way to remove the bones is to turn them out of the meat with a knife. To remove the bone from the lower leg, the incision must be made to the bone.

Excess fat and small bones are removed last.

Two ways of butchering

From time to time, the hostess is faced with the question: how to cut a chicken for stuffing? There are two methods. Consider them further.

Public method

You need to start from the back, because there is a lot of meat in it. With a sharp knife, the meat is separated from the bone, starting with the tail. In the course of the separation, the bones on the lower leg and wings are removed. But if the recipe does not require wings, then they can simply be cut off.

Private method

This method works on the principle of things turned inside out. Very carefully, cuts are made on both sides in the tail section. Carefully moving along the chicken, they twist the body, separating the skeleton.

The legs are cut and jerked off the carcass. The fillet is cut from the cartilage and the wings are broken off. Meat and skin are removed from the drumstick with circular incisions, while chopping off the bones.

Now you know how to carve a chicken.