Woznation

If you missed Part I of Woznation Chicken check it out here.  Part III on its way next.

Now that we have our roasted chicken, you may be wondering ‘How do I eat this thing?’.  Often one hears of buying a ‘8 piece chicken.’  That is generally a term used for a raw chicken broken down into 8 serving sizes.  But I guarantee you that one little chicken isnt going to serve 8 people.  So I will be demonstrating how to break down the chicken Woznation style which is 4 pieces, with 2 wings to boot.  So here is our chicken:

It has been resting at least 20 minutes to cool down.  If you try to break it down too early, it will be way too hot to man handle.  We are going to start with the 2 leg/thigh servings.  Begin by cutting into the skin between the body and the leg, angling as close to the back of the bird as possible.  You can flip the bird oven if youd like, to make sure you are getting as much of the thigh meat as possible.  Is should be pretty easy to cut through the skin and meat – but then your knife will stop when you reach bone / hip socket.  Thats ok.  Dont try to actually cut through the bone, just cut through the meat part for now.

So like I said, you will stop once you have cut through all the meat and skin, and now the thigh piece is hanging on by the bone/hip socket.   Since you have already roasted the bird, this should be a pretty weak connection.  You should be able to see the bone at this point and you can most often separate the thigh by a few twists back and forth, perhaps with a little encouragment from the point of your knife right at the socket.   There is a bit of a learner’s curve on this, so dont fret if you cant jimmy-off the leg on your first try.

So now that you have one thigh off, do the same with the other (and yes, the juice of the thigh meat is a little pink indicating that I slightly undercooked the dark meat of this bird. You have to cook the breast until 170 and the dark meat until 180.  So you can pick between an overcooked breast or an undercooked thigh.  Since I usually throw the meat into something else Im cooking later that week – I always go the ‘undercooked’ route.  If you are planning on serving the thigh meat immediately -you could pop the dark meat pieces back in the oven for 10 more minutes, or nuke ’em for 30 seconds?  I havent actually tried that though – so let me know how it turns out….).

K.  Now you have 2 thigh/leg pieces.  Lets get to the wings. This really doesnt count as a ‘piece’ or a serving.  Its more like a snack for the cook.  Its usually the first thing I take off a eat right over the stock pot and then toss in the bones/skin.  You can use your knife to cut through the skin by the elbow socket, but really the tendons are so weak at this point, you dont really need a knife and the wing will most likely fall part as you are twisting it off.  In fact, bonus points for you if you can get the little wing off in one piece.

Wooo.  Bonus points for me.

Lastly, we need to break down the breast.  This is slightly easier than the legs since we arent going to be dealing with any bones.  But the breast bone is curved, so it can be a little bit of work to get as most meat as possible off in one piece.  Start on one side of the breast bone and cut down curving outward when you reach resistance, following the breast bone.

Once you have that top cut done,  I move to the end of the bird and cut under and back up towards the top, staying as close to the rib cage as possible. This is a lot of hands work as well.  I use the knife to get me going, but a lot of work is done by the hands pulling the meat away from the bones.

I included pictures from both sides, hopefully you get the idea.  Like I said earlier – There is a learners curve to this.  I definitely mangled a few chickens before I got the pieces to come off in nice whole pieces.  But the good news is, the chicken will be delicious no matter how you get it off the bone.  So just start tearing pieces off if its not cooperating with you.  After roasting about 50 chickens, itll become second nature and you’ll have 4 decent sized servings (plus some wings, if you havent eaten them already).  Yaaaay Chicken.

Interesting fact about chicken blood (from phil): Back in the 1950s doctor George Gey was trying to grow human cells in a petri dish outside the body for the first time. Doctors wanted to do this so they could experiment on live human cells without having to experiment on a live human, the IRB would be proud. Doctor Gey was trying to find the optimal environment in which to grow the cells. He tried several substances ranging from chicken blood to goat semen. His first successful ‘immortal’ line was grown in a mixture of human placenta blood, beef embryo extract, and plasma from chicken blood. The successful cell line was grown from a smaple of cervical cancer taken from Henrietta Lacks and are known as HeLa cells. These cells are still used today for all kinds of medical research, aided in the creation of the polio vaccine, and have led to all kinds of advancements in the field of oncology.

If you found the above paragraph as exciting as I found it to write I recommend “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” by Rebecca Skloot. It is riveting, I would read it directly through if I were you.