Americans spend a lot of money to pay a butcher to slice and package meats – especially chickens. Why not save some of that money and slice and butcher the meat yourself?
Case in point.
I felt like barbequing some chicken and thought that a couple leg quarters would be perfect for the two of us – plus, I like dark meat best when push comes to shove. The butchers at Kroger’s were not very accommodating. In fact, there really are no longer any butchers at Kroger’s. Meats are sliced and packaged off premises according to the demands of their computers, not the wishes of customers. C’est la vie.
So there were no chicken leg quarters to be had – not even any of those 10 pound bags you sometimes see for 79 cents a pound.
Then I saw two leg quarters, except they were attached to the whole chicken. I have a knife, I can do this, so I bought it – the whole chicken was less than five bucks. I got out one of my sharpest knives and in 30 seconds, I cut off the 2 leg quarters I needed and split the breast. I started to freeze the two breast sections, then decided to put them on the grill along with the leg quarters. I had a plan. The next day, I pulled all the meat off the two breasts quarters, doused them with my Charlie Mill’s BBQ sauce, and put them in the fridge in order to have a pulled chicken BBQ sandwich the next day for lunch.
It’s also easy to separate the leg quarters into drumsticks and thighs. And we often pay a premium for skinless breasts and thighs. It’s really easy to pull the entire skin off a chicken and in less than a minute. De-boning a chicken is a little trickier, but with a sharp knife, it’s really no problem. And why de-bone? All meat is better with bone-in. The bone adds flavor and helps retain juice. So leave the bone in on chicken, pork and beef. A bone-in rib-eye is dee-lish!
So slice and butcher meats yourself and save lots of money.
