Day seventy six

Varieties of birds from quail to capon
(there is hand in the picture, this is not bird:-)

Chicken, how many way to cut it do you know?

So we have moved to chicken. It looks like an easy bird, but it depends on the intended use, what are you going to do and how to cook it. Indeed a chicken is the most versatile protein. You may simply roast it whole. You can roast it spatchcock (kind of butterfly). You can cook it in pieces. And so on, the list will be endless.

We trussed our three chickens (what each of us got) first to show techniques. Then we fabricated these chickens. We removed plates (or wing flaps - middle part of wing). Then we removed carcasses and got two halves with legs and breast with wing attached. We separated legs from breast - it was easy there was only skin connecting these two by that time. Breast was fabricated to an airline breast (funny name), which means skin on, tender removed, wing attached. The leg was separated for thigh and drumstick. Thigh was debones and skinned. As for the time, we had 5 minutes to truss three chickens and may be 45 minutes to fabricate three chickens.

Let's try to count traditional
chicken cuts:
1. whole - no cut!
2. split in halves - left and right
3. cut in quarters - two top parts (breast with wings) and two bottom parts (leg with a part of spine)
4. eight pieces cut - drumsticks, thighs, wings, breast
5. ten pieces cut - as eight pieces, in addition cut each breast in half.

Trussed chicken

Fabricated chicken

So you see there are so many classical cuts and each part of chicken may be cooked differently. Indeed the number of combinations are very high.

Today there was no tasting menu, probably tomorrow we will taste different birds. But we were shown these birds today from quail to capon (castrated roaster).