Its guest blog day! My parents and sister were kind enough to put together this post for you! When I was growing up in Africa, my parents had to cut up any chicken we ate. So I tapped into their skills for this! I hope it is helpful for those of you living in places where you need to butcher your own chickens!
Intro by my Mom. Knife work by my Dad. Photography by my Loving Little Sister.
We all get to use skills overseas that we learned growing up and those skills often come to our rescue or make life a little easier. Who knew the man I married would cut many a (tough) chicken while we lived in West Africa - a skill he learned as a teenager while working with the butcher in his dad's small town grocery store. And because that man is a busy doctor and therefore not always available, I had to learn how to cut up a chicken, too, but not quite as professional looking as below.
Step 1: Trim
Working on a clean surface with a sizable sharp knife, trim fat and excess skin from the chicken.
Step 2: Wings
Place the chicken face down on the cutting board. Pull the wing back and cut towards the middle. Slice a little bit of meat at the side of the wing to enter and cut through the joint space. You could then fold the wing into a triangle for easy frying or cut through the joints for small buffalo wing type pieces.
Step 3: Leg and Thigh
Lay the chicken on it's back. Cut between the chicken and the thigh into the flesh. Then push the leg downward to expose the joint space. Cut through the joint to remove the leg and thigh completely.
Separate the thigh from the leg by cutting through the connecting joint.
Step 4: Wish Bone
On the breast of the chicken, feel for the tip of the wish bone with your thumb. Cut directly into the meat of the breast just to the far side of the bone, entering approx. 1.5 cm. Then turn the knife toward the front of the chicken and cut the wish bone away.
Step 5: The Back and Backbone
Cut along the edge of each rib until you reach the backbone. Then cut with a knife along each side of the backbone to separate the ribs from the upper part of the backbone. Note: you should be cutting through joints between the bones, not through the bones themselves.
Cut the narrow upper part of the back (the backbone) from the wider lower part of the back (some say the best chicken meat on the bird). The backbone can be discarded, as it has little meat, or could be stewed for broth.
Step 6: Chicken Butt
Some cultures consider this a favored piece of meat but in most western cultures we don't do much with it. Hold it and cut a triangle toward the back to remove it.
Step 7: Breasts
Split the breast right through the sternal bone so that the pieces are equal in size and shape. This requires a big knife or a cleaver to hack through the bone. The chicken we worked with was quite large, so we split the breasts again into two smaller pieces.
Step 8: The Line Up
Top to bottom, left to right: gizzards and innards (giblet gravy); scraps and backbone (great for making your own chicken stock!); wings; back; breasts (these cut in half as they were quite large); legs; thighs; wish bone
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