How To: Carve a Chicken
If you roast a chicken, you best know how to carve a chicken and if you know how to carve a chicken, you know how to carve a turkey. Conclusion? It’s a useful skill to have and it’s not a hard one to learn.
When roasting a chicken and carving a chicken, you do so with the chicken breast facing up. It’s usually pretty obvious which side of a raw chicken is which but if you can’t figure it out, here is my trick: pretend you’re a chicken, doing the funky chicken dance and your arms are the wings. Your hands are the wing tips, your elbows are the bend in the chicken wing. Your elbows should be pointing back, now compare your arm wings to your chicken wings. Have you figured out which side of your chicken is the back and which is the front? If you haven’t, apologies for making you do the chicken dance for no reason.
To carve a chicken, you will need the following: a cutting board with a groove around the edges, a carving knife and fork (or just a regular fork) and a cooked chicken.
After you roast a chicken, move your chicken to your cutting board and let it rest for 5 minutes.
1 - Begin by removing the breasts. Use the breast bone as your guide and make your first cut right along the bone.
2 - Cut until you hit the rib cage, then turn your knife to run parallel to the rib cage and cut along the rib cage to remove the breast.
3 - Repeat with the other breast.
4 - Next remove the thigh and drumstick in one piece. Do so by slicing the skin between the thigh and the body, which should reveal a gap. There you should be able to see the joint connecting the thigh to the body. Position your knife against the joint and cut through. From there, the thigh and drumstick can be easily removed.
5 - Separate the thigh from the drumstick by locating the joint between the thigh and drumstick and slicing through it. It can be easier to locate the joint by looking at the other side of the thigh/drumstick. Repeat with the other thigh/drumstick.
6 - You can use a knife and fork to remove the wing but I prefer just to hold the breast bone in one hand and the wing in the other. A few twists and the wing should pop off the body. Repeat on the opposite side.
Plate, serve and enjoy!
Images by Kirsten Valentini