How to De-Bone a Turkey for Stuffing

Video Transcript

"Hi, I am chef Donn and welcome back to Expert Village. We just took our turkey off the carcass. I am cleaning up. You will find you will have a lot of turkey juice when you doing this. You have to make sure you keep your area clean. All that juice, that's contamination. And you noticed in the earlier clips, I cut my vegetables and fruit first and saved the meat for last on the cutting board. You always want to do vegetables first, meat last on the board. Even if you?re cleaning the board in between steps, you want to do your meat last. So, I have my area clean and sanitized once again. And, when I am working with a knife, especially cutting meat, taking something off the bone, very important you don't want your cutting board to slip. So what I usually do, I have a damp towel underneath the board that way it?s stable. Without this, you will be going like that when you are cutting and if your board slips while you?re cutting, there is a very good possibility that you will cut yourself. So, safety tips as far as sanitation. Do the meat last, keep your area clean free of juice and stabilize your cutting board. Now what we are going to do is, I am going to make an incision here and here and I am going to work the meat away from the bone. I am going to try to take the meat off in one piece. We will see how I do. Okay, there is one, there is two. Now I am finding the bone with my thumbs. I am just working the meat off. You don't have to go crazy with the knife. The knife gets you started but you can actually do most of the work with your fingers. Okay, like so. Right here I will release like so. There's one. Now down here we will make these two meet counting around the joint. Now in the turkey, you have these tendons. We want to try to keep those with the bone. We will see how that works out. Again, I am cutting down around the joint releasing everything. With my fingers, I am going around the bone like so. I am going to cut this down. Now, I am going to make a cut all the way around the bone like so. Okay, hopefully it will release from the meat. You just work little by little. Don't go crazy with the knife. Be very careful. If you have to go to the emergency room for stitches, chances are that will delay your dinner. Okay, see here is the joint. We are coming away from the joint releasing, cut the tendon. Now all the way around and we can finish it off right here. You want to pull the tendons out with it if you can. Okay and there we have it. Now the leg and thigh meat is release. We have most of the tendons still with the leg. Here they are. We will set this aside and we are going to do it again with the other leg."