Buying a whole chicken, it’s very easy to make not just one meal, but enough meals to help you get through at least half of the week.
If you want to make sure that you’re not being wasteful with your food, or you just want to learn the best ways to use the different cuts of a whole chicken, then you should read on.
The chicken breasts
The breasts are, of course, going to be where you get the most of your chicken meat without any bones to worry about. However, when not cooked right, they can be rather tasteless.
The best way to bring some flavor to this white meat without getting rid of its health benefits is to make it part of a delicious stirfry, adding a little honey garlic while you’re at it.
The drumsticks
The legs of the chicken are pretty hard to deny and if you roast the whole thing, you might find some members of the family fighting over them.
If you buy a chicken every week or two, you should consider freezing the drumsticks, saving them up until you have enough for a faux KFC bucket for the family to dip into. A lot of recipes out there are getting fairly close to the colonel’s recipe.
The thighs
The other darker portion of the meat from the chicken might not seem quite as versatile as the much-beloved drumstick. You don’t see as many people fighting over the thighs, but that might change once you learn how to properly cook chicken thighs on smoker.
A nice spice rub added to it, just enough time to get the fat sizzling within the skin, and a lovely BBQ glaze over them and they can easily become one of your favorite parts of the bird.
The scraps
Even when you take off the wings, the drumsticks, the breasts, and so on, you are still going to have plenty of meat on that carcass.
Take your time shredding the rest of the meat off of it and you can still make meals like these crispy chicken cakes, a nice and light air-fried bite that can make for a perfect lunch or dinner, making sure that you get as much flavor as you can from all that white meat.
The bones
Yes, even after you have seemingly picked the carcass clean, there’s still plenty of flavor to be wrenched out of that chicken.
The simplest way to do it is to make a chicken soup stock, which can make for a delicious gravy in the future. Don’t throw out any of the chicken, especially not the cartilage, until you’ve tried making a decent stock from them. It can really improve the flavor of roasts and soups in future.
A whole chicken is one of the most versatile ingredients you can buy and, as you might have guessed, the tips above are far from the only ways to make some meals out of it. A little research on your own and you can find plenty of alternatives.
