How to Quarter a Whole Chicken Cooking Tips

Series Summary

Chicken might just qualify as the ideal meat for any dish. It can be breaded, deep fried, and eaten off the bone as a greasy finger food; it can serve as a healthy alternative to red meat… once it has been skinned, de-boned, and grilled; it can be shredded and used as filler for tortillas and pitas; it can be cooked, cut, and used for skillet recipes; chicken can even be deli sliced and put between two pieces of bread. No matter what it’s used for, chicken lends its flavor and texture naturally to just about any recipe.

In this free cooking video series, learn how to properly quarter a whole chicken, separating the chicken breast from the bone. Also get step by step instructions for making a homemade chicken broth, great for soups and sauces. Learn tips on how to truss a chicken for even heating during baking. And finally, get a fried chicken recipe you can make using your newly acquired cooking skills. Enjoy.

Video Transcript

" Hi! I’m Louis Ortiz on behalf of Expert Village and today I’m going to show you how to break down a chicken. First and for most I’ve unwrapped this guy obviously and taken all of the plastic off and taken all of the entrails that were provided for stock and such and I rinse the chick out with tap water and I also dried it off with some paper towels I just patted off the moisture so it’ll be a little easier to work with. So we’re ready to go, obviously these are the wings and the legs or drumsticks connected to the thigh obviously and this bone here is the keel bone which is like a sternum in a human essentially and as we know we got a chicken breast on each side. Depending on what kind of preparation you’re going to do for the chicken, if you’re so incline you can just serve the whole breast with the keel bone attached, most people though and for today’s intense and purposes I’m going to go ahead and break down the whole thing. I like using culinary shears, now you can use a knife from start to finish it’s a little more dangerous if you haven’t used a knife for a lot of years as some people have, so I tend how to show people how to do this first with culinary shears just because it’s a little easier to guide and it’s a little safer in that sense. So I’m going to go ahead and start on the center with the keel bone there and I’m going to get as close to the center as I can, make a cut there it makes it a little easier to cut through these bones as well because you have leverage with the handles on the scissors vs. the knife where you may be cutting this way or trying to apply more pressure to get through that keel bone so it’s a little bit easier with the scissors, a lot easier actually. So we’ll cut through the wishbone and separate that, so we’ve gone through the keel bone here as you can see, okay so we got a breast on each side. I’m going to go ahead and make a cut here with the scissors of course along the edge of the breast here and I’m going to separate this into the common pieces that people usually cut chicken with, so we’ll have a good point of reference it’ll be pieces that are familiar because they are familiar with most people. So essentially I just separated the breast and went through the rib bones there with the scissors, so I got a breast and wing attached I’m going to keep going down this direction. If you’ll notice there’s a bone where this is attached and there’s a joint in there and I usually just break this with my hand so that it’ll facilitate cutting with the scissors, so I’ll cut a little bit more skin off so you can see what direction we’re going with this. Okay and that was the small bone that’s attached there I can pop the wing out with the joint I’ll show you how to do that in a minute and I’m just going to cut the skin like that, so we got a breast and a wing attached. This excess skin I’m going to go ahead and cut that off…into the next side it’s the same song second verse, then I’m going to cut this excess skin and then we go through the ribs again and you see how that just separates from there. So now I’m going to go around the drumstick, I’ve already cut the ribs to the chicken breast that was attached there, so it makes this cut easier. Okay and the same bone that we cut through we do that one more time…so then we have another breast and wing there, we’ll go ahead and separate the wing from the breast here cause most people don’t cook those attached. If you noticed if you heard that it just pops right out sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t today I did and there’s a wing there, here’s a chicken breast not boneless because we still have the keel bone in there and I can show you how to take that bone out of you want to do a boneless chicken breast on another video. So again I’m going to pop this wing from the breast and there’s another wing and there’s another chicken breast there, now we have a chicken carcass that’s left. This chicken carcass we can use for stocks for soups and I’ll be showing you that later on, so the leg and the thigh I usually just put this down and then you just pull up a little bit this way and that joint is going to pop out and you’ll be able to see that here in just a second as I cut it, it makes it a lot easier to cut through and this of course is the dark meat. Okay so there’s a leg and thigh there and again I’ll pop this out as well and it was much easier obviously because I had the insides of this facing down if you noticed and I pulled straight up this way just to pop that leg and do that on both sides of course and there are the leg and the thigh pieces and that’s how you break down a chicken into quarters."