The most common question I was asked in my 14 years as a butcher was “How do you cut up a whole chicken?”. It became very shocking to me how many people had zero clue, especially in this day and age where everyone lives on the internet and YouTube. Why aren’t people looking up this extremely useful information instead of watching videos of the dumbing down of society? I don’t get it. I guess that’s another topic.
Well, I couldn’t be more excited to show you how to cut up a whole chicken into 8 pieces. While most grocery stores that have a full service meat department with expert butchers that would be more than happy to cut up a chicken for you, I feel that it is very important to expand the knowledge of the mind and learn how to do it yourself. Cutting up a whole chicken is unbelievably easy. Once you understand how to, it should really only take about a minute. After cutting thousands and thousands of chickens and turkeys in my lifetime, I can cut one up in under 15 seconds.
Make sure to save the backs and neck for making chicken stock. It is very important to me to utilize as much of any animal as possible. This chicken gave it’s life for me to eat it, whether it had a choice or not. I feel by not waisting parts of it’s body, you are giving it the proper respect that it deserves. Other than not having as much flavor as bone in, this is why I don’t like buying boneless skinless. End of hippie rant.
While there are multiple ways of cutting up a chicken, this is how I like to do it:
There are a couple options of cutlery that you can use. A cleaver, chefs knife, or a fillet knife will all work. I am using s fillet knife for cutting part my chicken.Here’s a whole chicken.Start with the chicken breast side down. Let’s start by removing the wings. Focus on the wing joints that are connected the the chicken’s back. If you bend the wings back all of the way, you can feel the joint pop out of the shoulder socket. Think about it as if a person separated their shoulder.Take your knife and cut right in-between the joint on both wings. This takes very little pressure to do so.Flip the chicken breast side up. We are now going to remove the whole breast from the whole legs and back. Make cuts in the groin area of the chicken, but make sure to not cut into the thigh meat or the breast meat.Once you make these cuts, the whole breast will pretty much pull all the way back. You can easily rip the whole breast and whole legs apart from one another bare handed. Let’s start with separating the whole legs from the back.Just like the wings, fold the legs back until the thigh pops out of the hip joint.Cut right through the joint on both sides of the lower back.Cut the drumstick apart from the thigh by cutting through the joint that holds them together.Now we have the whole breast left. First turn it breast side down. The top part of the back is still connected. Cut the back out. Most of the time you will be able to rip it out bare handed.Last thing to do is to split the breasts.Cut right down the center of the sternum.And now you have a sexy cut up chicken.
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