How to cut up a chicken

Hormone and antibiotic free meats are healthier in my opinion. This is because many of these substances are fat-soluble and so are stored within the fat cells of the animal.

The problem is that these meats are much more expensive — often 2-4 times as costly — as regular meat. Boneless skinless chicken breasts, for example, are about $2.50 for mystery meat brand, and up to $7.99 for organic.

I hate the idea of paying so much for the meat, and I’m looking for ways to cut down on the cost. One option is to buy a whole chicken. Organic boneless-skinless chicken breasts at our store are $24.99 a kilo. A whole organic chicken is only $9.99 a kilo. This is down towards the cost of regular meat. (A chicken’s bone mass is not that high, so it seems like a good deal.)

We’ve bought these chickens to roast before, but I’ve always been intimidated to actually go ahead and butcher one myself. Today, I decided that it can’t be that hard. Guess what? I looked it up and it looks really easy!

Here’s two different instruction sites on cutting up a chicken. The first separates the legs from the bird first, good if you want to cook the breast in one dish and the legs in another. The second butterflies the whole bird, good if you want to serve half chickens with both light and dark meat in each portion. Both look like they’ll be easy to do the first try.

Quartering method

And while I’m talking about chickens, here’s a pet peeve of mine. A chicken does not have breasts although it has a breast. These are not mammary glands. The meaning of the word breast here is the second sense, namely “the fore or ventral part of the body between the neck and the abdomen” (Merriam-Webster).

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› food     2007-07-28 19:20   ...0