To save money, cut up whole chicken

January 12, 2011 at 12:00a.m.

By Anne Brockhoff

McClatchy Newspapers

KANSAS CITY, Mo.

Chef John McClure grew up eating fresh chicken. Really fresh chicken.

McClure’s mom often helped farmers near their hometown of Tescott, Kan., butcher chickens and was paid in poultry. She’d bring whole birds home, cut them up and fill the frying pan.

“I never saw a Styrofoam package of chicken until I was grown up,” McClure says. So, he naturally sought locally raised, whole chickens when he took over as chef and owner of Starker’s Restaurant on the Country Club Plaza.

Campo Lindo Farms of Lathrop, Mo., delivers whole chickens each Thursday, and McClure and his staff quickly joint the birds into familiar portions.

Why bother with whole when what you want is parts? Because a whole chicken is more than the sum of those parts.

Whole birds are versatile. They can be roasted in their entirety or cut to culinary whimsy. McClure likes the flavor and freshness of local chickens, and whole is usually the only choice when buying local. Whole is also better value.

“This is the opposite of elitism,” says Samin Nosrat, a writer and self-described “teacher of grandmotherly skills” who cooks part time at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif. “It’s cheaper to buy the whole animal.”

BEYOND THE BREAST

That epitome of easy 1990s cooking — the boneless, skinless chicken breast — costs about 60 percent more per pound than a whole chicken. A recent glance through Kansas City supermarket meat cases showed whole birds selling for $1.69 a pound, compared to $4.29 a pound for denuded breasts. Even local, free-range chickens were less, at $3.29 a pound.

You also get more from whole chickens than just the marquee pieces. At PotPie in Westport, a single whole chicken yields two breast portions for pan-roasting, dark meat for pot pies, bones and other trimmings for stock and fat, skimmed from the stock and used to make gravy for the pot pies. Giblets are frozen until enough have accumulated to make liver pate or other special dishes.

“We use every bit of the chicken,” says John Williams, PotPie’s chef and owner. “The only thing we throw away is the package it comes in.”

Chefs get a lot of practice jointing chickens, but what if you’re not a chef?

The first stop is a good cookbook. Most offer at least a general guide, and I especially like the step-by-step instructions and color photos in “The River Cottage Meat Book” (Hodder and Stoughton, 2004). You can find online video demonstrations from the likes of Gourmet Sleuth (www.gourmetsleuth.com/Articles/Cooking-Tips--Techniques-642/cut-up-a-chicken.aspx) and Chow.com (www.chow.com/stories/10080).

Still, the best way is to watch someone do it. I got that chance last October, when Nosrat was in Kansas City for a backyard chicken seminar. Nosrat placed the chicken breast side up on a cutting board, and then used the tip of her knife to cut the skin between the breast and thigh on both sides. She picked up the chicken and, with a thrust of her thumbs, popped the thighs out of their sockets to make it easier to cut through the joints.

Next, Nosrat felt for the oysters, tender nuggets of dark meat you get only if you start with a whole bird. There is one oyster on each side, a soft fleshy spot about the size of a large olive above the hip joint. I usually make a 1-inch cut between the oyster and the backbone, push my thumb under the oyster and pry it loose before cutting around the leg.

Nosrat is more practiced, though. She deftly slipped her knife between oyster and bone, freeing it before sliding the blade around the body and through the hip joint to remove the leg quarter.

Once Nosrat had the legs off, she turned the bird breast side up again. If there are crucial decisions to be made in cutting up a chicken, what to do with the breast is surely one of them. You can keep the meat on the bone by separating breast from back, and then splitting the breastbone.

JUST DO IT

For a boneless breast, Nosrat smoothed the skin over the meat and then made a straight cut on either side of the breastbone, keeping the knife as close as possible to the bone. Then, she placed her blade against the rib cage and followed its curve, using just a few long strokes, until she came to the wing.

At that point, you can either cut around the joint for an entirely boneless breast or through it to include the wing. Williams always leaves the first section of the wing on the breast and then slowly pan roasts it skin-side down in a cast iron skillet.

“You’ve got a little bit of bone, and that gives it better flavor,” Williams says of the classic French presentation, sometimes called a supreme or an airline cut.

“It doesn’t shrink up as much, and it looks a little nicer.”

Either way, you get to keep the tender, a strip of muscle on the underside of the breast that supermarkets often remove and sell separately for about $4 a pound. Any parts you don’t use immediately can be frozen for the next meal. The bones, wing tips, neck and other bits can go into the stockpot.

All this is much easier when you use the right knife, Nosrat says. She prefers a six-inch boning knife, with a thin, flexible blade. Use kitchen shears for cutting through small bones and a heavy chef’s knife or cleaver for splitting the breast or chopping bones.

There are other things to keep in mind, too, like honing your knife before each use and washing everything with hot, soapy water when you’re done. But the main thing?

“Just do it,” McClure says. “The first chicken I cut up wasn’t the most beautiful chicken, but don’t give up.”