Bird is the word
For some, carving up a whole chicken is a labor of love... and it can also yield some tasty dishes.
You could go your whole life without cutting up a whole raw chicken. But if it's one of your favored proteins — and America eats more chicken per person than any other nation on Earth — learning how to do so is a smack-your-forehead, nobrainer endeavor. It's even a little empowering.
We have gotten awfully used to the convenience of buying cut-up chicken parts, which found a place in retail markets more than five decades ago. Today, twothirds of the chicken we consume has been dismantled by someone else, and we are paying dearly for the service. Some peg the parts' rise to our penchant for lean breast meat, while others say it's because we shudder at the thought of carving up a pink, fleshy body.
"We are a white-meat, boneless-skinless country," says Tom Super, senior vice president of communications for the National Chicken Council, a lobbying group with such serious intentions that it has relegated poultry recipes to its allied websites. His assessment is accurate and data- driven: We go for the wings and breasts. That means more of our dark-meat and other chicken parts are shipped abroad where they are prized, rightly so, for their flavor. One out of every five pounds of commercially raised meat chickens is exported. Sustainably savvy, but sad.
Nobody taught you. It seems intimidating.
Well, you can call up one of dozens of how-to videos online, narrated by the precise language of Martha Stewart or the folksy patter of a Kraft Foods kitcheneer. Play a few in succession, and you will find the same technique, give or take an airline breast here and an order-of-business there. The moving hands use big chef's knives or poultry shears. Step by step, one side and then the other. Still, we are not motivated. What will it take?
"We would love to know the same thing," says Daniel Salatin. "The average American family could save thousands if they bought whole chickens and cut 'em up themselves."
He is operations manager for Polyface Farms in Swoope, Virginia, where his family and famous firebrand farmer father, Joel Salatin, run a sustainable "clean meat" enterprise.
They say they sell 8,000 to 12,000 pastured chickens a year, with an eight-piece package priced at $4.65 per pound — a buck more per pound than their whole birds. But Polyface's boneless, skinless chicken breast halves cost $14 per pound. That price was calculated to offset any loss of sales on less-popular parts and to achieve the same revenue that the farm's whole birds generated. Still, breasts are their top seller.
"We didn't start cutting up birds until the early 2000s," Salatin says. There was a kind of perfect storm, as he sees it: Older, thriftier generations were doing less cooking. Families decreased in size. People lost the art and had the money to have someone else do the cutting. Plus, they were told that lean chicken was a more healthful meat option than beef.
The almighty factor is, of course, convenience. But when that is compared with the combined benefits of menu versatility, stretching food dollars and the surprising ease of the divvying itself, though, DIY butchery deserves consideration. "A home cook with a family can make three meals from one whole chicken," Salatin says. "But you'd have to know what you're doing."
Brian Patterson knows what he's doing. He has broken down thousands of whole chickens. Start to finish, it takes him about two minutes, working at a smooth and steady pace. Washington-area cooks know him as the "Knife Skills Guy" at L'Academie de Cuisine, where the former restaurant chef taught culinary cuts on onions, carrots, tomatoes and mangoes in recreational classes at the school's suburban Maryland locations. A whole chicken, typically a 21/ 2- pounder, was the pièce de résistance.
When his instruction moved to the school's professional culinary program, he found that his students had no more experience cutting up whole birds than the home cooks. Teaching them that skill has almost become a mission for him. The chef is all for removing some of the distance between people and processes of modern food: "It was a critter. You get to understand the structure, which is valuable for someone who's carving a roasted bird as well," Patterson says.
More of his pro-cutting logic: The bird stays fresher longer when it is whole. Super of the chicken council is not so sure about that, but he does say that the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service set standards for, and began sampling, raw chicken parts for pathogens such as campylobacter and salmonella only in the past few years (as of February 2016); similar standards had been in place for whole birds since 1996.
Americans eat an average of 91 pounds of chicken per person per year, according to the NCC's Super. Even if we embraced the DIY bird breakdown, would we know what to do with all of it? Isn't just buying the bits we eat more economical in the long run than creating waste?
Again, a little education can do wonders, and looking into the chicken habits of other cultures is a fine place to start.
"As a Filipino of a certain age, I learned how to kill the chicken, bleed it and cut it up when I was growing up," says Annie Cabayan Wilderman. As an assistant manager at Capitol Hill Poultry in Eastern Market, she sees people buying more parts than whole chickens, and she cringes at the thought of all those backs and necks going to waste: "There is no focus on how to mitigate it in this country."
BBQ Chicken Skewers 9 Servings
The marinade/basting sauce turns bland chicken breast into something quite flavorful. These can be cooked on an outdoor grill as well (medium-high heat).
You'll need to soak 8-inch bamboo skewers in water for 30 minutes before grilling.
Calamansi (calamondin) is a type of tart orange, and its juice or extract is typically available in bottled and frozen form at Filipino markets such as Filipino Global Supermarket in Falls Church.
MAKE AHEAD: The chicken needs to marinate for at least 3 hours and up to overnight.
Adapted from Patrick and Helen Healy, owners of Pinoy Kitchens catering (pinoykitchens.com), which sells on weekends at Eastern Market in Washington, D.C.
Ingredients
1 cup low-sodium soy sauce 3 tablespoons light brown sugar
1/ cup frozen calamansi juice 4 (see headnote; may substitute a 50-50 mix of fresh lime juice and fresh orange juice)
1/ cup minced garlic (cloves 4 from 1 head)
1/ teaspoon freshly ground 4 black pepper
1/ cup ketchup 2 2 tablespoons vegetable oil 3 pounds boneless, skinless chicken breast halves (no tenderloins), cut into large chunks
Steps
Combine the soy sauce and brown sugar in a mixing bowl, stirring until the sugar has dissolved. Stir in the calamansi juice, garlic, pepper and ketchup until well incorporated. Reserve 1/ cup of the 4 marinade, separately, for basting; stir the oil into the 1/ 4 cup of reserved marinade.
Add the chicken to the mixing bowl and toss to coat. Cover and refrigerate for at least 3 hours and up to overnight.
Heat a grill pan over medium-high heat. Once it's quite hot, skewer the marinated chicken pieces close together. Discard any remaining marinade in the bowl.
Place them on the grill pan and cook for 8 to 12 minutes total, turning them and basting with the reserved marinade-oil mixture every few minutes. You're looking to achieve a rich mahogany brown and an internal temperature of 165 degrees.
Serve warm.
Ingredients are too variable for a meaningful analysis.
Annie's Chicken Chayote Soup (Tinola) 4 to 6 servings
The less-meaty parts and odd pieces from a whole cutup chicken make for a surprisingly flavorful soup here, in the Filipino tradition of use-it-all cooking.
If you are game, you can add chicken feet; see the VARIATION, below.
The recipe calls for fresh pepper leaves, like those from a Thai chile pepper plant, which are a little bitter; fresh spinach or watercress are suitable substitutes. It also uses a small amount of a powdered soup base mix for tinola, which is available at Filipino Global Supermarket in Falls Church and via Amazon.com. To make your own (without MSG), see the NOTE, below.
MAKE AHEAD: The gizzard/heart and livers can be cooked a day or two in advance and refrigerated.
From Washington resident Annie Cabayan Wilderman.
Ingredients
1 tablespoon vegetable oil 1/2 small onion, cut into slivers 12 to 16 ounces skin-on chicken parts, such as wingettes, drumettes, neck, back, gizzard, heart, livers (see VARIATION) 21/ cups water 2 One 11/ 2- inch piece peeled fresh ginger root, cut into small matchsticks (julienne) 1 to 2 teaspoons powdered tinola ginger soup base, such as Mama Sita's brand (see headnote and NOTE)
1/ green papaya, seeded and 2 cut into 1/2- inch-thick halfmoon slices 2 chayote, peeled, cored and cut into 1/2- inch half-moon slices (about 9 ounces each) 2 baby bok choy 2 handfuls fresh pepper leaves (may substitute baby spinach or watercress; see headnote) Fish sauce, for serving (optional)
Steps
Combine the oil and the onion in a deep saute pan over medium heat. Cook for about 5 minutes, until the onion has softened, then add the chicken parts. Cook for about 10 minutes, stirring a few times, to pick up a little color.
Add 1 cup of the water and ginger. Increase the heat to medium-high; cook for about 30 minutes. (During this time, you can skim any foam off the surface, but it's not necessary.)
Taste the broth; it should be chicken-y. Stir in a teaspoon of the powdered soup base (to taste) and reduce the heat to medium. Add the papaya and 1 cup water; cook for 10 minutes, then add the chayote and cook for 10 minutes or until it is just crisptender. Taste the broth; add more of the soup base, as needed.
While the soup is cooking, trim the ends of the baby bok choy and cut lengthwise. Rinse well to remove any grit. Rinse the pepper leaves well.
Add the remaining 1/ cup 2 water, the baby bok choy and pepper leaves; increase the heat to medium-high and cook for 5 minutes, or just until the greens have wilted.
Serve hot, with fish sauce for passing at the table.
NOTE: To make your own spice blend for this soup, combine 1/ teaspoon pow2 dered ginger, 1/ teaspoon 2 onion powder, 1/ teaspoon 2 salt and 1/ teaspoon cane 2 sugar in a small bowl.
VARIATION: To keep impurities out of the soup, boil the gizzard, heart and the livers separately. Place the gizzard and heart in one deep saucepan and the livers in a separate one. Fill each with 6 cups of water and add 1 teaspoon of salt in each one. Bring to a boil over mediumhigh heat; cook the gizzard for 1 hour and the livers for 25 minutes. Drain and rinse before adding to the soup. (Cook 4 to 8 chicken feet the same way.)
Nutrition | Per serving (based on 6, using DIY soup mix and spinach leaves): 220 calories, 12 g protein, 8 g carbohydrates, 16 g fat, 4 g saturated fat, 115 mg cholesterol, 250 mg sodium, 2 g dietary fiber, 4 g sugar