Deboning a chicken is an essential skill not only for professional chefs but also for home cooks and amateur chefs. So if you are reading this, then you are either the second or the latter and you want to know how to debone a chicken – the proper and the easiest way!
How to debone a chicken?
There are various dishes you can make with deboned chicken, and knowing how to do this is essential for making your dish great. But first, make sure you have the right type of knife to use to make the deboning process seamless.
Next, learn the different parts of the chicken so you know what to hold and where to pop when taking out bones. Once you are good, go ahead and follow these easy steps to get that clean, deboned chicken!
1. Lay down the chicken and pop out the wingette’s bones
To make deboning the whole chicken easier, it is best that you take out the wingette’s bone first before anything else. To do this, grab the wingette and wing tip with each of your hands, then use the joint as a guide and pop out the wingette’s bone.
Once the bone is out, pull it gently and make sure to save as much meat as possible. You should also cut off the tips as you won’t be needing them, but if you do, feel free to save them.
Note: This step is fairly easy to do. No need to use a knife to cut the joint between the parts as the skin is soft enough for the bones to rip through.
2. Cut the breast and take the carcass
Next, you need to place the chicken flat on the chopping board and break the wishbone with your knife. You then cut the chicken breast from the top to the bottom. Make sure that you do this with one, swift cut because cutting it back and forth will ruin the flesh.
Once you cut the breast open, remove the carcass by gently parting the breast meat from it using a sharp knife. Go around the carcass and make sure the chicken is intact and you don’t accidentally cut the meat all the way to the skin.
Note: Do not remove the carcass completely. Leave half of its body connected to the meat.
3. Pop out the legs and remove the bone
Taking out the leg bone is harder than the wingette’s so you will need to use your knife for this one. Cut the leg with a straight line in the middle, pop out the bone, and remove it. The same goes for the thigh bone, just cut and pop.
Do this for both legs and thighs, and you should also remove the cartilage close to the leg.
4. Go and cut off the oyster
Once the leg and thigh bones are gone, hold the carcass and go through the oyster. And from the oyster, carefully do necessary cuts to remove the carcass from the remaining flesh and skin. Be as gentle and thorough as possible so you don’t ruin or waste too much meat.
5. Remove the wishbone
Once the carcass is removed, time to get the wishbone and pull it out nicely from the flesh. Make sure to only do tiny cuts to avoid wasting too much meat.
6. Take the drumette’s bone
After the fifth step, time to get the drumette’s bone out. To do this, hold the chicken’s drumette, pop out the joint, trim it, and then pull the bone out. You might need to use a little force on this one and the skin might stick to the bone so you will need your knife to trim it.
7. Remove the cartilage from the two knees
Next, go down the knees and find the cartilage. Once you do, gently remove it with your knife. Then, go through the leg part and try to find a pin bone, a tiny bone hardly seen, and also remove it.
8. Do the necessary trimmings and make sure there is no bone left
After you are done with the major steps and successfully removed all the bones, it is now time to make necessary trimmings.
Your boneless chicken might have excess skin that needs to be trimmed off, or small bones left inside the flesh. Regardless, make sure the chicken is free from these two and do your best to keep it chicken intact after trimming.
Now that you are done, you have now a beautiful chicken ready to be served. You can either stuff this and roast it, or cut it to different parts and cook it using different recipes.
Summary
Every cook should know how to handle a chicken, and knowing the proper way how to debone a chicken will make cooking easier. And knowing this will also expand your knowledge and help you create more recipes worthy of appreciation.
