Taking Apart a Chicken

I'll post the finished dinner later, but first I have to brag. I can now make a whole chicken look like this in under two minutes. I think that kind of time is Julia Child worthy!

It's really not hard to take a chicken apart if you know what you're doing. Here are some simple steps:

• a sharp knife helps, but it doesn't even need to be razor sharp.
• a small chicken or a cornish game hen would be a good first bird to practice on.
• slice along the fold that connects the top of the thigh to the body. When you hit bone, stop and put your knife down. Hold the body with one hand and the leg with the other hand. Bend the bone the wrong way until it snaps. You do not need to be very strong to accomplish this. You'll see the knobby part of the thigh bone sticking out. Pick your knife back up and slice along the knobby bone where you've created a gap between the thigh bone and body bones. See? You don't even need to cut through bone.
• Do the same with the other leg, and the two wings.
• Cut through the breast and open up the chicken. The breast bones are very brittle. If you put your knife on the chicken and press down firmly, the rib cage will crack. There's absolutely no reason to lift your knife high in the air and come crashing down on the chicken.
• Open up the chicken so that the ribs and neck bone are exposed to you. Place your knife along one side of the neck bone and cut through it using your free hand to press down firmly on the knife. Don't bother trying to cut through the neck bone itself.
• Cut along the other side of the neck bone. Decide if you want to keep the neck bone or toss it. I usually have reason to keep it.

You now have two legs, two wings, and two halves of the body/breast. You might be done, or you might need to cut further.

• To cut the breast meat into pieces, put the piece bone side down on your cutting board. Slice through the skin and meat, then press firmly on the back of your knife with your free hand to break the bones. When you hear the bones snap, you can remove your free hand and wiggle the knife around to ease it through the crack you've created. The point is to never saw through bone. Sawing is ineffective and hard on your knife.
• To cut the wings, slice through the joints until you hit bone, then snap the bones back the wrong way. Slice through the cracks you've created. Do the same to separate the thigh from the drumstick.
• Cutting the drumsticks themselves requires the most strength and hand-eye coordination. You need to slice through the skin and meat and expose a little bit of bone. Then take the heel of the blade of your knife (where there's a sharp 90 degree angle) and use it to break the bone. If you only manage to crack the bone, you can snap the rest of the bone with your hands. Then, as before, slice through the cracks in the bones to separate the two pieces of meat.

It's incredible how much longer it took me to describe what I did than it took me to actually cut up the chicken.