Yesterday, I went to the grocery store and whole chickens were sold at incredibly low prices. Whole chickens, locally, are always cheaper to buy than buying individual parts, especially if you're talking about parts like chicken breasts and thighs, which are some of the most expensive parts per pound locally. (If you want to check out what works out cheapest per pound of actual meat, check out
my table where I figured out what percentage of each cut of chicken is actual meat, so that you can plug in your prices and figure out how much you're paying per pound of meat for each different cut.)
I almost never cook my chickens whole. There are a few reasons for this.
1) I try to only cook as much chicken as my family will eat for one meal, enough for one portion per person. Cooking too much chicken means people eat more chicken than necessary, which costs more from a financial perspective, and that means I can serve fewer meals of chicken. I try to portion out meat in my freezer into exact meal sizes so I can cook as many as we need for one meal, and no more. A whole chicken is too much for us for one meal.
2) I used to hate white meat chicken. But that's because I was always served dry, overcooked white meat. White meat has a very different cooking time than the rest of the chicken, and if I'm going to be serving chicken, I'd rather make it in a way that tastes absolutely best, and not sub par chicken. Expensive foods should be made well, and not only tolerable. Why make dry as sawdust chicken when you can make succulent, tender, chicken breasts? When chickens are cooked whole, I find that in 95% of the time, the chicken breast gets dry and overcooked because it was ready before the rest of the meat. I cut up my chicken so that I can cook the dark meat and the light meat separate, and make each type of chicken in the way that it is most enjoyable to eat.
3) Chopped up chickens are easier to stretch. Firstly, because each side of the chicken breast, instead of serving one person, can be made into cutlets, so that you get between 6 and 10 cutlets/servings from each bird instead of two servings of white meat chicken. Secondly, you can chop up the white meat and stretch it with veggies in stir fries. Thirdly, you can grind the white meat chicken and stretch it with fillers in chicken meat balls, chicken loaf, burgers, etc... Fourth, because you can use the carcass to make a terrific, strongly flavored chicken soup (I usually use 1-2 carcasses and a bunch of veggies for a large pot of soup). While you can use
leftover chicken bones from pre-roasted chicken in your soup, I find the flavor isn't as strong as when you use a plain, raw, chicken carcass to make the soup. Fifth, once you make the chicken carcass into a soup, you can pick the meat off the carcass and either serve it in the soup, or as the meat in an additional meal, like a chicken pot pie or stir fry. Sixth, doing it this way allows me to remove the skin from the portions I prefer to eat without the skin, so that I can use the skin to make my
rendered chicken fat.
So, I chop up my chickens, using just my hands and a sharp knife, portion out the meat into meal size portions, and freeze them. (Usually I do this with a few chickens at a time, not just one. I elaborated more on why I do that in
this post here.)
People have asked me how to butcher/chop up a raw chicken. I made a little video showing how. Mike took the video.
With all the spring cleaning that people have been doing lately, our local second hand store is overflowing with donations. So much so that they have no room to put anything, and took an empty warehouse and used that to store all the clothing donations temporarily. The warehouse needs to be emptied as soon as possible, so they made a sale- instead of some things being 50 cents and some things being 25 cents like they usually are, they made everything be 25 cents, and opened the warehouse for set hours that they aren't usually open.
