How to Process a Whole Chicken for Yakitori

Processing your own whole chicken has the distinct advantage of getting all the delicious pieces you would not get when buying a bulk pack of one part of the chicken. It’s so easy to do, I timed myself doing this and the basic process takes about 5 minutes and another 7 minutes to extract the Yakitori parts.

Everybody this is beat the bush today we’re going to butcher a chicken because butchering a chicken yourself is a lot cheaper than buying them in individual pieces for example the chicken breast is like four to six dollars a pound and chicken wings chicken leg they’re like two dollars a pound however if you buy the whole chicken it’s about one dollar a pound and you

Can buy the whole thing for about six or seven dollars so i have a whole chicken here i bought this for $0.99 a pound the whole chicken here is six dollars and 79 cents now doing this is fairly easy just chop off the leg with a thighs the wings and then the brass but then i’m gonna do something a bit different at the end because i’m gonna process this some more so

That i can pull out the cartilage pieces for yakitori so first you just stick it out of the bag and then you just cut the leg off right here and you gotta make sure you cut it around where the joint is how do you find the joint you just pull it apart a little bit give it a little pressure and just kind of work your way in there and then until you find the bone and

Just cut all the way through that we got one leg same thing here you just kind of you know blindly cut in there until you can see the bones pull it apart a little bit you can see it’s right there so just cut it in between the two bones makes it a lot easier because if you happen to cut it right on the bone you’re never gonna be able to cut through with a knife so

You got to really cut it in between the joints same thing with the wings so here’s a joint cut it right there the joint is somewhere right here in the middle you gotta feel the little nub and then you cut right in see how easy that is i’m eventually gonna eat these four hot wings so i like to cut them into separate pieces and same thing right here it’s a little

Further down for the wingtip here you just cut the other wing you hold the big side here before you cut it in like that it takes a little practice sometimes you might cut into the bone right so but after you do it for a while you’re gonna be able to cut in between the joint and they’ll come off in pieces pretty easily so to get out the breast piece you just put

Your knife right in the center and move over to the left about three millimeters and then you cut straight down and just kind of run your knife along and then you’re gonna hit some bone and then so you just kind of work your way around the rib cage now we do the same thing on the other side you just gently pull the breast meat out and then you just kind of work

Your knife along the rib cage be very careful here i mean you’re working with a knife so it’s sharp generally there’s some fat here just cut that off and there will be some kind of weird oddly colored skin here just cut that off i wouldn’t want to eat that and here you see i saved the bag so i can put all the chicken crap inside its own bag right here cut that off

There’s this ligament right here i’m gonna cut that off and you cut around this is good for yakitori same thing on this other side if you look at the bone here where the soft cartilage starts you just cut right in between there to extract the soft cartilage and that would be for yakitori too and over here in the front there’s all this chicken breast meat you can

Cut down right here there’s a wishbone right here you just kind of follow along the rib cage and then you can cut in front of the wishbone to get at all this breast meat here there so i’ve got the chicken carcass and two pieces now and i’m gonna extract a chicken back meat this is pretty good for yakitori too because it’s quite fatty and there’s some meat on it

So you just slide your knife along the back against the bone and then you can just cut it all off like just like that there’s just some miscellaneous meat along the side here along this side and i do the same thing for the lower back i put my wrist right here while pulling this upwards be careful not to cut yourself and you’ve got your back meat here that this

Is the tail right here and this is the chicken thigh a little above this there would be these two little two little knobs you can cut these off for a jacket or e as well and then these uh chicken thigh meat or just get what’s left on there you don’t have to be too clean about cleaning the carcass because we can take these and make chicken soup with it later and

I have a recipe on how to make shark fin soup with the chicken carcass like this what i like to do is just kind of split this up so that it stores a bit better so that it doesn’t take up so much room when i when i put it in a bag and freeze it so i just stack them on top put this in a bag and i just freeze this later to make chicken soup yakitori is kind of like

Bits and pieces of the chicken but they’re all really good this is our chicken cartilage from the center and i want to extract this piece of cartilage and also the center cartilage from this chicken thigh and drumstick the easiest way to do to extract this end piece is just to cut around you just kind of cut up off 1/3 to halfway along this and you’re not gonna

Be able to cut all the ligaments so i’m gonna take a pair of scissors and cut all the ligaments with my scissors and then here i’m gonna cut the ligament through blind like that cut the box cut it blind that way and then you can pull this away then cut along here and the whole thing comes off really easily like that and then i just flip them back and then there’s

These little yellow things you just kind of try to remove them a bit if you can what i’d like to do to turn this drumstick and thigh boneless is you just cut along the inside back area of this drumstick here like this and then as soon as you can get your knife underneath the two bones and just cut across and then you just slide your knife out until the bone comes

Off like that chicken cartilage is right here so i can just cut that off put this along with this yakitori pile here so here i have a deboned chicken thigh and drumstick right here and i can take this bone and put it along with my chicken soup so here i got the two chicken thigh and legs deboned the two chicken breasts bunch of wings that i’ll save with a bunch