Today I'm going to show you how to break down a chicken.
It's a really great skill to have.
It's going to save you a lot of money when you go to the store and you get a whole chicken
verses buying a pre-broken down chicken with the legs, thighs, breasts, wings already broken
down.
So, what you want to do is you want to get a whole roasting chicken and there are several
ways to break it down.
What I like to do is start by breaking down the backbone and then cut into two halves.
So, take a really sharp knife.
You really need a sharp knife and find the sides of the back bone, and then just cut
right down the edge of that.
Then come over to the other side, and again this is going to be a pretty tough cut.
You want a really good sharp knife.
When you get to the edge you can kind of trim it off.
Now, you want to have a waste bucket there, so you can put in all the waste that you are
going to have.
Now, take your chicken and kind of snap it back.
You are going to follow the breast bone here, and just cut right down the middle.
This is going to leave you with two halves, so we will sit this half over here and we
will work with this half.
Now, there is some fat here on the back that I like to get rid of.
Just take your knife and trim that off.
There is a natural gap here between the breast, and the leg, and the thigh that you are just
going to follow.
Turn it around.
So, now you've got two chicken quarters.
This is great for barbeque chicken.
This is what we like to cook with a lot of times with the chicken quarters.
If you want to break this down even further, you can pop out that leg from the thigh, and
again there is a natural curve in there.
I'm going to bring out a little bit bigger knife, so I can kind of make this cut.
So there is your first leg, and there is your first thigh.
Now, you can trim this thigh up a little bit more, if you want to.
There are some pieces on here that you really probably don't need to cook with that will
make it a little bit easier when it gets to the dinner table.
You want to get any of these organs out of there.
There is a little bit more skin and fat here.
There is the first thigh, and then the wing.
We are going to take our bigger knife and we are going to cut straight down.
We've got our wing and we've got our breast.
Now, we can do a couple of things here.
We can either take out all of this bone, and have a boneless breast, which we'll do with
this guy.
And we also have the tenderloin.
This makes really nice nugget type things, you can bread that, and fry that.
Then, we've got our boneless breast.
So there you go.
That's simply how to break down a chicken into a breast, the tenderloin, the leg, the
thigh, and the wing, and you can repeat that on the second side and you'll have yourself
a broken down chicken.