POV How to Break Down a Chicken

favor and this is Kenji I'm at home and I'm going to show you how to break down a chicken today and we're also gonna make some chicken stock now there are multiple ways to break down the chicken so I'm probably gonna make this video more than once but today I'm going to show you sort of like the classic way we're gonna end up with two airline chicken breasts we're gonna end up with a couple of wings we're gonna get end up with drumsticks and thighs and we're gonna end up with a carcass that we can use for stock so start off you have your chicken here right you got your your neck here the neck we can go right into the popper stock what I really like to do first well wash my hands cuz I just touched the raw chicken what I generally like to do is before I even begin there's going to be as few points in here where you want either a kitchen towel if you don't mind it getting raw chicken on it or what I do is I use some paper towels and what I do is I tear them off and have them ready here so that I don't have to handle the roll of paper towels with chicken coated hands while I'm going all right so I got my towels here two different knives you want one sort of big heavy-duty thing I got a cleaver you can also you just use a heavy-duty chef's knife one knife one that you don't mind getting beat up and then a sort of more precision knife it can be a light chef's knife it could be a boning knife it could be an you know anything that's sharp and maneuverable so to start we're gonna take the sharp knife slit the skin just a little bit above each leg like that and then we pick it up by both legs and you kind of twist them until the bone pops out right there you see very easy and then holding it by the leg you kind of go in through here and right back here you can see there's this little chunk of meat that's called the oyster you want to make sure that comes with you so you cut all the way around the oyster and then you should be able to slip the knife very easily into the joint and there you've got one leg and then the other side you did the same thing so make sure you pick it up hold it by the leg you get under that oyster so that it comes with you there you go got a second leg now if you want to break these down into a drumstick and the thigh you can feel right where it bends you know I should be able to slip right in through that joint and there you go you've got now a drumstick and a thigh let me get a UH what can I use here I'll throw everything under this second board for now again you feel oops and sometimes you missed and that's fine then you go right through that joint you'll know when it's when you're in the right space because your knife will go through with very little force if you feel like you're really jamming or like going up against the bone is probably because you are going up against the bone which means you want to kind of reposition your knife alright so now we got this now so to get an airline chicken breast what you do is you hold it by the wing like this pick it all the way up put your knife right here about hat so this is the wing joint the the first first wing joint you put your knife about halfway through slip through the skin and then with your knife pushed against the bone you just kind of spin the whole chicken around okay until it's cut all the way through and then what you can do is you hold here you hold the chicken here and you flip it backwards like this and the wing pops right off leaving you with this nice little sort of clean bone here okay and then you can do the same thing on the other side like that flip it back wing comes right out next what we want to do is we want to get rid of the the wishbone you don't have to get rid of the wishbone but I find it makes the rest of this much easier to do so the wishbone is like so you have it here the breast side facing up okay the wishbone is the y-shaped bone that runs so this is the keel bone right through the center of the breast and the wishbone attaches right here in this kind of wise shape so what you want to do is you want to lift up the skin and feel for the bone and then run your knife tip along the top of that bone just like that and then run it underneath the bone like that and then do the same thing on the other side okay and now here's where you use your first towel so actually once it's done like that you can feel get your fingers you see you got my I got my fingers behind it there's one side of the bone and there's the other side of the bone got my fingers behind it there and I can pull it forward oops and if it breaks you make a wish pull it forward and then this this part of it pops right out and then what you do is you take your first how'll you use it to get a grip and it comes right out that's one side of it and I'll get the other side now it's totally fine if it breaks it's also totally fine to leave it in there just makes butchering the next bit a little bit easier if it's if it's out all right there's the other side so this is what the full bone looks like just like that you see it's a Y shape that can go into the stockpot alright so now what we're gonna do is we're gonna cut our airline breasts out so we got mmm ice we got our keel bone here we take our sharp knife and we run it right along one side I usually do it along the left side first so run it along the left side there okay and then you can actually just use your thumb to kind of push the meat away from the bone okay and then once you get down to this little last bit you can use your knife again and if you're uncomfortable with you know pushing pushing raw chicken meat with your thumb you can do the whole thing with the knife it doesn't really matter and what we're looking for you see how this this joint rotates right there we want to make sure that we find that find that rotation on the inside which is right over here and get our knife in between that bone that book joint and the carcass and you end up with this which is an airline breast we can trim off this little excess skin here airline breast plus a tenderloin let's put that over here and with this guy we do that little jacques pepin trick where we take our towel again a clean towel we first expose just a little bit of the end of that ligament there you see that little little ligament right there and then what you do is you grab the end of it with your towel and just scooped you don't grab the paper towel hold there and you can just hold down and then scrape off the meat and there you get a chicken tender with no ligament in it and then that ligament comes right off here okay and now for the second side second side is always a little bit harder to do just because it's not balanced but you basically do the exact same thing so the knife along one side of the keel bone you follow the contour I'll do this one with the knife so you can see without doing the thumb thing just follow the contour of the bone with the tip of your knife okay you find that little joint here which is right see you've had this moves here and then you can find the other side of it inside there it's right here let me see if I can show you more closely so this is moving like that right and then over on this side you can see where it meets right here you see right there it's where me there's like a little ball and socket joint so you make sure your knife gets in between that lap joint right there you got it and then you get your second and I'll I'm breast this one see the Tenderloin is still attached you can leave the tenderloins attached if you want or you can take them off if someone come to mangled a little bit and yeah that's how you that's how it comes off and you get your second airline breast there what do we got here we got wing wing thigh thigh drumstick drumstick breast breast um you don't need a boning knife by the way so let me show you about boning knife is real quick I just get my hands [Music] I don't know where my bunny yeah well this is similar to a boning knife so bony knife is something that looks like similar to something like this usually a boning I people actually have this is a full lap fish fillet knife but a bony knife is pretty similar a little bit flexible you know very very sharp and thin blade so you can easily get in and around all the bones and it usually has a little heel which you use for kind of scraping bones like frenching things you don't need a boning knife I remember once when I was a working at Cook's Illustrated we used to do all these guides for you know the best knives whatever we were at an editorial meeting we were trying to figure out what to do for the next equipment test and I suggested doing a boning knife and so this was at the all staff editorial meeting go so it's like at the time is probably thirty of us sitting around a table and then the I won't say his name right now but and the calls in from his house and for these meetings and I remember suggesting saying hey what about if we do boning knives and uh and then he said over the conference phone I don't know about you Kenji but at my house we don't do a lot of boning anyhow it was funny people people silently cracked up nobody laughed out loud I don't know maybe I'm gonna have an immature sense of humor but oh yeah so what you can do is you can take your chef's knife or not in this case I'm gonna I'm gonna take a cleaver we're gonna prep this Parker's for stock first what I do is I lift it up open it up so that the backbone is on one side and the breastbone is on the other then I just kind of chop right down the middle just like that and then I kind of roughly chop it up like that you really don't need to be precise at all the only goal here is to kind of increase surface area a little bit for more extraction when you're making your stock that goes right in there okay now I'm gonna do a bunch of random aromatics that I had in my fridge a leek really you can do whatever you want you know the basics are you want something kind of oniony so an onion or a leak or aliens this is a kind of western-style stock so I'm using uh onions leeks I'm gonna leave the skins on I don't mind them carrot and some celery I would say at the very minimum you want the onion in there everything else kind of optional onion carrots celery of those sort of classics the mirepoix and then I also got some thyme from the garden a few bay leaves and some black peppercorns and that's it if I was doing like a chinese-style stock like a simple homestyle Chinese stock what I would do is I would do some scallions and ginger in there mmm or if I was doing a Chinese superior stock I would do chicken I would also had some pork bones I would add some ham and then I would add some dried seafood like flounder and if I was doing say a stock for something like I don't know like a hot and sour soup like a hot and sour Thai soup I would probably add some lime leaves in there I would add some lemongrass so you know stock is really really whatever you want to do the important part is that it tastes good and you and you use what you have on hand it's not it's not saying you should be making a shopping list or necessarily it's really you know stock is something that you should be making out of odds and ends it's really sort of a kitchen efficiency and and frugality measure more than anything else so what we're gonna do now is just going to bring it to a simmer and if you want to you know if you want like a super clear broth what you can do is bring it to a simmer and then dump it all out sort of wash the bones and that sort of gets rid of some of the impurities I never bothered doing that what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna bring into a simmer and then I'm just gonna skim it every once in a while there so there's proteins and scum like like minerals and stuff that come that leach out of the bones that you don't necessarily want in the stock and so what happens is they form like a scummy bubbly layer on the surface which you'll see and you just kind of skim it off and go you don't honestly you don't even really have to skim it off all it does is will make your stalk a little bit sort of cloudy or and a little bit not quite as clean tasting which I don't think is such a big deal anyway at a restaurant you would have sort of like a big big pot of chicken stock simmering on the back of the stove and basically you know you're trained that any time you walk by it if you're cooking if you're on the line any time you walk by the stockpot and you see that there's any sort of fat or impurities on the top you would skim it off so it kind of gets regularly skimmed off it's kind of a group chore that everyone in the kitchen would participate in as it goes a chicken stock only needs to simmer for maybe two hours or so two-three hours something like a veal stock with a lot more gelatin that you want to extract that you start collagen that you want to extract and turn into gelatin something's gonna give that rich texture and mouthfeel something like a beef stock or a veal stock you would let it simmer for more like I don't know eight to twelve hours sometimes even 24 of course you can continue simmering a chicken stock until the bones really almost completely break down and that's what becomes known as sort of a bone broth that's what sort of a thick chicken a Python chicken broth a ramen broth made out of chicken would be like you simmer it until the bones start to break down and you really fully extract all the minerals and all the protein and everything in there and it turns into a sort of rich cloudy stock so that's just a you know a rich stock a rich stock is what people call bone broth these days even though it's been around for a long time all right so now I got my chicken parts here you know what I'm just gonna go ahead and throw those chicken wings in the stock also because I don't think I'm gonna use them for anything and they're gonna add some nice gelatin so the more connective tissue that a piece of meat has so that's you know like the tendons and the ligaments also the skin the more connective tissue in there the richer it's gonna make the broth and so chicken wings actually make for a nice rich broth so two chicken feet and I think that's the end of this video huh at some point I'll show you how to cook these airline chicken breasts maybe tomorrow and then we'll do some stuff with the drumsticks and the thighs as well yeah thanks for coming by I'll see you tomorrow oh um sorry before I go let me quickly show you a good way to freeze your chicken so when you're freezing anything so the enemy of freezing is thickness you want things to freeze quickly because you don't want there to be a big differential between the center and the edges so if the edges start to freeze and the sender's still raw as this sort of works it slowly works its way in it ends up rupturing a lot of cells and that means that when your meat then defrost it loses a lot more moisture so what you wanna do is you want to freeze as quickly as possible which means getting things into a thin layer so what I do for example if I'm gonna freeze my chicken breast I get him into a bag that just fits him like this and then here's the trick for getting most of the air out if you don't you know you could cryovac these of course you don't have to here you close the bag up so that just a little hole is remaining here and then you take a little bucket of water and you lower it in what happens is this is called the water displacement method and what happens is as you push it in the water forces the air out and then just before that last bit goes underwater you seal it off and you end up with you know not completely air free but a very very tight almost air free seal and that's great because it well air is what exposure to air is what gives you freezer burn um freezer burn is a sublimation so when ice transitions directly from a liquid to a solid that's called sublimation you know it doesn't turn into water first and that's what how that's what gives you freezer burn and in fact that's actually also what goes into the freeze drying process that that's how the freeze drying process works they intentionally cause sublimation by putting a vacuum on frozen unfrozen foods but it's not good for your chicken and that's how you end up with freezer burn how you end up with this sort of weird weird fibrous sections of your chicken or meat or whatever it is so dry out the bag here's the other trick put it on an aluminum baking sheet aluminum is a very good conductor of heat so when you take this and then place it into the freezer the aluminum conducts a lot of heat away from the chicken so that it freezes faster similarly when you're thawing whether it's for thawing chicken or thawing steak or thawing anything that you want to thaw if you put it on an aluminum baking sheet it'll thaw about twice as fast as if you just leave it on the cutting board and that's very important for when you're freezing things so what I do is I put it in I'll let it let it freeze in a single layer and then once it's completely frozen take it off to the baking sheet and just thought store it however the hell you want it all right now I'm really going to see you next time I'm gonna skim that chicken stock now it's been simmering for two or three hours we got a little sidetracked on my daughter and I went fishing from our wagon we kept megalodons I'm gonna give it one last final skim so this is like most of the guns that I've been pulling off as it goes I haven't time as I mentioned I was out of the house for like an hour I know some people are scared to leave things simmering on the stovetop while they're out of the house some I'm not that scared as long as you keep it on low enough of a simmer all right that's about good enough so now I'm gonna take this and all I'm gonna do is go through a fine mesh strainer if you have like a xinhua you can do that - I got a chinois I might I want to get it super clear I might pass it through that later machine was like the pointy tall pointy guys with the really fine mesh on them they're also kind of expensive so I don't think you necessarily need to have one there you go I'm gonna let this drip drip down like that and by the way these carrots and stuff make excellent excellent dog treats but there you go that's all that's chicken stock so out of like one this was like a two and a half pound chicken a pretty small guy it's out of one chicken I get about a little over a quart a pretty rich chicken stock this will be rich enough that I think it'll turn into a you know become gelatinous as it sets you could also then continue to reduce this put it back on the stove in a skillet very very slowly reduce it skim it well as it goes so that there's no fat in it and reduce it down into a sort of chicken jus which is sort of like a gelatinous thick really nice mouth coating sauce that's excellent for chicken but what I'm gonna do with this one I'm gonna save it we're gonna use it in a pan sauce for those chicken airline breasts that we took off earlier so that'll be a different video for another time but it's good to see y'all again see you later

Channel: J. Kenji López-Alt

Views: 302,574

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Id: 9FHHmx6kDGc

Length: 20min 1sec (1201 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 19 2020