How to Break Down Chicken

Joint by joint.

As part of the class offerings at the Chicago Meat Collective I offer a class on chicken butchery. It never sells as well as I hope it will or think it should. I think people perceive chicken breakdown as easy or basic, but in my experience, teaching chicken butchery is tough - the bird is small and slippery, your hands are necessarily close to the knife as it attempts to find the exact space between two bones. The margin of error is small, and to truly master the technique takes many chickens worth of practice. When people see chicken butchery on our schedule, they might think, there’s plenty of youtube videos on that, I don’t need to go to a class. And maybe they’re right. So here’s my entry in the vast sea of chicken breakdown videos on the internet. When people do come to class, this is the method I teach them. There are almost infinite ways to breakdown a chicken, but this one has you work through each joint, which is a helpful way to grasp the anatomy and practice your knife skills. This breakdown can easily be achieved with a basic chef’s knife, but I do like the control and precision you get from using a boning knife.