For a weeknight dinner, few things beat a whole or half roasted chicken in my book. But my personal goal as well as our goal at The Chopping Block, is to bring home cooks to the next skill level. So, while there’s nothing wrong at all with taking your whole chicken, seasoning it with whatever you desire and throwing it in the oven, I want to offer a new technique to make your weeknight chicken a little more exciting.
My all-time favorite way to prepare chicken is a (mostly) deboned half-chicken. This technique is a little on the advanced side, but if you have ever butchered a chicken it shouldn’t be anything you can’t handle. Only one tool is required for this, which is a sharp boning knife. While you can absolutely butcher a chicken with a chef’s knife, I highly recommend a boning knife in this situation since we will actually remove bones and get in some tight spaces, which a chef’s knife is too large for. I also can’t emphasize the importance of a sharp knife for butchery, a dull knife will result in very rugged cuts.
Start by removing the wings to create an airline breast. Run your knife around the base of the wing down to the bone. Bend the wing backwards and the wing should pop right off, leaving the drumette bone attached to the breast.
Next, run your knife directly in the middle of the breasts like so.
Work your way all the way down the breast plate and cut the skin between the thigh and carcass. Turn the chicken on its side, pop the thigh bone out of its socket and remove the whole half of the chicken.
Lay the chicken skin side down and slide the tip of your knife under the thigh bone and cut away from the leg to release the bone.
There is a similar way of doing this by cutting the leg open, but I like to keep it intact as much as possible. So, we are going to use the tip of the knife to cut around the leg joint. Start pulling out the leg bone and scrape down the sides of the bone as the leg turns inside-out. Cut the through skin at the base of the drumstick to remove the bone, and turn the leg back outside-out.
You have so many options of what you can do from here. One step I love to take is to cure it for a few hours with some salt and other spices. For this chicken, I used kosher salt, Herbs de Provence, black pepper and lemon zest and let it sit uncovered in the fridge on a wire rack for at least 3 hours, but overnight is preferred.
Now it is just a matter of cooking it, which you can pan sear and finish in the oven (my favorite), roast it, or fry it. Salting the skin in advance will help the skin get really crispy by drawing out moisture.
Now for my favorite part of this technique, slicing the entire half chicken. By taking all the bones out, it allows you to slice the entire thing, and get slices that contain white and dark meat in the same slice which I think is absolutely stunning.
If you want to learn more about butchery join us for our Hands-On Fish Butchery and Cookery class on Monday, April 28th at 6pm at Lincoln Square. Register now
We cover fish, meat and poultry butchery in Culinary Boot Camp. This five-day class is our ultimate deep dive into all of the major techniques of cooking. In our class, each student gets their own whole fish, whole beef tenderloin and whole round fish to butcher themselves!
